Neural machine translation (NMT) has become the predominant approach for automated translation, yet conventional models trained on extensive bilingual datasets exhibit critical limitations, including quadratic scaling of training data, sensitivity to out-of-distribution inputs, and a lack of interpretability. Inspired by the classical “translation pyramid” concept, which advocates for translation via a semantic pivot (interlingua), this work explores the integration of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) as a structured semantic intermediary to decouple translation into comprehension (source-to-AMR) and generation (AMR-to-target) phases. We conduct a pilot study using a strong AMR parser to create a multilingual silver-standard AMR corpus from the United Nations Parallel Corpus, training modular semantic understanding and generation components for each language. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves an average improvement of 3% in robustness and over 15% in generalization compared to traditional Seq2Seq baselines. Analysis suggests that enhancing semantic parsing and generation accuracy could bridge the gap to conventional NMT systems. To our knowledge, this is the first work to integrate AMR as a semantic pivot in NMT, offering enhanced transparency, scalability, and robustness. This study underscores the potential of semantic-driven translation frameworks and provides a foundation for future research in interpretable, resource-efficient multilingual systems.

With the evolution of LLMs, they are endowed with impressive logical reasoning, or vertical thinking capabilities. But can they think out of the box? Do they possess proficient lateral thinking abilities? Following the setup of Lateral Thinking Puzzles, we propose a novel evaluation benchmark, LatEval, which assesses the model’s lateral thinking within an interactive framework. In our benchmark, we challenge LLMs with 2 aspects: (1) posing high-quality questions that break out of conventional norms but are beneficial for puzzle-solving. (2) integrating existing information to gradually deduce the truth through reasoning. We observe that it is hard for most LLMs to accomplish lateral thinking during interactions. Even the most powerful LLM, GPT-4, faces challenges in achieving satisfactory performance, and for most open-source models, simply completing this task is quite difficult. This evaluation benchmark provides LLMs with a highly challenging and differentiating task that is crucial to an effective AI assistant. Our dataset and source codes are available at https://github.com/THUKElab/LatEval.

Controllable Text Generation (CTG) has obtained great success due to its fine-grained generation ability obtained by focusing on multiple attributes. However, most existing CTG researches overlook how to utilize the attribute entanglement to enhance the diversity of the controlled generated texts. Facing this dilemma, we focus on a novel CTG scenario, i.e., blessing generation which is challenging because high-quality blessing texts require CTG models to comprehensively consider the entanglement between multiple attributes (e.g., objects and occasions). To promote the research on blessing generation, we present EBleT, a large-scale Entangled Blessing Text dataset containing 293K English sentences annotated with multiple attributes. Furthermore, we propose novel evaluation metrics to measure the quality of the blessing texts generated by the baseline models we designed. Our study opens a new research direction for controllable text generation and enables the development of attribute-entangled CTG models.

Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is both a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. Recently, many data-driven approaches are proposed for the development of CGEC research. However, there are two major limitations in the CGEC field: First, the lack of high-quality annotated training corpora prevents the performance of existing CGEC models from being significantly improved. Second, the grammatical errors in widely used test sets are not made by native Chinese speakers, resulting in a significant gap between the CGEC models and the real application. In this paper, we propose a linguistic rules-based approach to construct large-scale CGEC training corpora with automatically generated grammatical errors. Additionally, we present a challenging CGEC benchmark derived entirely from errors made by native Chinese speakers in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses not only demonstrate that the training data constructed by our method effectively improves the performance of CGEC models, but also reflect that our benchmark is an excellent resource for further development of the CGEC field.

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. Recent researches start from the pretrained knowledge of language models and take multimodal information into CSC models to improve the performance. However, they overlook the rich knowledge in the dictionary, the reference book where one can learn how one character should be pronounced, written, and used. In this paper, we propose the LEAD framework, which renders the CSC model to learn heterogeneous knowledge from the dictionary in terms of phonetics, vision, and meaning. LEAD first constructs positive and negative samples according to the knowledge of character phonetics, glyphs, and definitions in the dictionary. Then a unified contrastive learning-based training scheme is employed to refine the representations of the CSC models. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on the SIGHAN benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.