Syntax and Semantics Meet in the "Middle": Probing the Syntax-Semantics Interface of LMs Through Agentivity

Recent advances in large language models have prompted researchers to examine their abilities across a variety of linguistic tasks, but little has been done to investigate how models handle the interactions in meaning across words and larger syntactic forms -- i.e. phenomena at the intersection of syntax and semantics. We present the semantic notion of agentivity as a case study for probing such interactions. We created a novel evaluation dataset by utilitizing the unique linguistic properties of a subset of optionally transitive English verbs. This dataset was used to prompt varying sizes of three model classes to see if they are sensitive to agentivity at the lexical level, and if they can appropriately employ these word-level priors given a specific syntactic context. Overall, GPT-3 text-davinci-003 performs extremely well across all experiments, outperforming all other models tested by far. In fact, the results are even better correlated with human judgements than both syntactic and semantic corpus statistics. This suggests that LMs may potentially serve as more useful tools for linguistic annotation, theory testing, and discovery than select corpora for certain tasks

CMULAB: An Open-Source Framework for Training and Deployment of Natural Language Processing Models

Effectively using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools in under-resourced languages requires a thorough understanding of the language itself, familiarity with the latest models and training methodologies, and technical expertise to deploy these models. This could present a significant obstacle for language community members and linguists to use NLP tools. This paper introduces the CMU Linguistic Annotation Backend, an open-source framework that simplifies model deployment and continuous human-in-the-loop fine-tuning of NLP models. CMULAB enables users to leverage the power of multilingual models to quickly adapt and extend existing tools for speech recognition, OCR, translation, and syntactic analysis to new languages, even with limited training data. We describe various tools and APIs that are currently available and how developers can easily add new models/functionality to the framework. Code is available at https://github.com/neulab/cmulab along with a live demo at https://cmulab.devComment: Live demo at https://cmulab.de

Wav2Gloss: Generating Interlinear Glossed Text from Speech

Thousands of the world's languages are in danger of extinction--a tremendous threat to cultural identities and human language diversity. Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) is a form of linguistic annotation that can support documentation and resource creation for these languages' communities. IGT typically consists of (1) transcriptions, (2) morphological segmentation, (3) glosses, and (4) free translations to a majority language. We propose Wav2Gloss: a task in which these four annotation components are extracted automatically from speech, and introduce the first dataset to this end, Fieldwork: a corpus of speech with all these annotations, derived from the work of field linguists, covering 37 languages, with standard formatting, and train/dev/test splits. We provide various baselines to lay the groundwork for future research on IGT generation from speech, such as end-to-end versus cascaded, monolingual versus multilingual, and single-task versus multi-task approaches.Comment: ACL 2024 camera ready versio