Symbolic sentence meaning representations, such as AMR (Abstract Meaning Representation) provide expressive and structured semantic graphs that act as intermediates that simplify downstream NLP tasks. However, the instruction-following capability of large language models (LLMs) offers a shortcut to effectively solve NLP tasks, questioning the utility of semantic graphs. Meanwhile, recent work has also shown the difficulty of using meaning representations merely as a helpful auxiliary for LLMs. We revisit the position of semantic graphs in syntactic simplification, the task of simplifying sentence structures while preserving their meaning, which requires semantic understanding, and evaluate it on a new complex and natural dataset. The AMR-based method that we propose, AMRS³, demonstrates that state-of-the-art meaning representations can lead to easy-to-implement simplification methods with competitive performance and unique advantages in cost, interpretability, and generalization. With AMRS³ as an anchor, we discover that syntactic simplification is a task where semantic graphs are helpful in LLM prompting. We propose AMRCoC prompting that guides LLMs to emulate graph algorithms for explicit symbolic reasoning on AMR graphs, and show its potential for improving LLM on semantic-centered tasks like syntactic simplification.

Open-domain question answering (Open-QA) is a common task for evaluating large language models (LLMs). However, current Open-QA evaluations are criticized for the ambiguity in questions and the lack of semantic understanding in evaluators. Complex evaluators, powered by foundation models or LLMs and pertaining to semantic equivalence, still deviate from human judgments by a large margin. We propose to study the entailment relations of answers to identify more informative and more general system answers, offering a much closer evaluation to human judgment on both NaturalQuestions and TriviaQA while being learning-free. The entailment-based evaluation we propose allows the assignment of bonus or partial marks by quantifying the inference gap between answers, enabling a nuanced ranking of answer correctness that has higher AUC than current methods.

The digital humanities (DH) community fundamentally embraces the use of computerized tools for the study and creation of knowledge related to language, history, culture, and human values, in which natural language plays a prominent role. Many successful DH tools rely heavily on Natural Language Processing methods, and several efforts exist within the DH community to promote the use of newer and better tools. Nevertheless, most NLP research is driven by web corpora that are noticeably different from texts commonly found in DH artifacts, which tend to use richer language and refer to rarer entities. Thus, the near-human performance achieved by state-of-the-art NLP tools on web texts might not be achievable on DH texts. We introduce a dataset carefully created by computer scientists and digital humanists intended to serve as a reference point for the development and evaluation of NLP tools. The dataset is a subset of a born-digital textbase resulting from a prominent and ongoing experiment in digital literary history, containing thousands of multi-sentence excerpts that are suited for information extraction tasks. We fully describe the dataset and show that its language is demonstrably different than the corpora normally used in training language resources in the NLP community.

NLP Workbench is a web-based platform for text mining that allows non-expert users to obtain semantic understanding of large-scale corpora using state-of-the-art text mining models. The platform is built upon latest pre-trained models and open source systems from academia that provide semantic analysis functionalities, including but not limited to entity linking, sentiment analysis, semantic parsing, and relation extraction. Its extensible design enables researchers and developers to smoothly replace an existing model or integrate a new one. To improve efficiency, we employ a microservice architecture that facilitates allocation of acceleration hardware and parallelization of computation. This paper presents the architecture of NLP Workbench and discusses the challenges we faced in designing it. We also discuss diverse use cases of NLP Work- bench and the benefits of using it over other approaches. The platform is under active devel- opment, with its source code released under the MIT license. A website and a short video demonstrating our platform are also available.

Word associations are widely used in psychology to provide insights on how humans perceive and understand concepts. Comparing word associations in language models (LMs) to those generated by human subjects can serve as a proxy to uncover embedded lexical and commonsense knowledge in language models. While much helpful work has been done applying direct metrics, such as cosine similarity, to help understand latent spaces, these metrics are symmetric, while human word associativity is asymmetric. We propose WordTies, an algorithm based on constrained sampling from LMs, which allows an asymmetric measurement of associated words, given a cue word as the input. Comparing to existing methods, word associations found by this method share more overlap with associations provided by humans, and observe the asymmetric property of human associations. To examine possible reasons behind associations, we analyze the knowledge and reasoning behind the word pairings as they are linked to lexical and commonsense knowledge graphs.When the knowledge about the nature of the word pairings is combined with a probability that the LM has learned that information, we have a new way to examine what information is captured in LMs.