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Shu-Kai Hsieh

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Papers by Shu-Kai Hsieh

Skillex: a graph-based lexical score for measuring the semantic efficiency of used verbs by human subjects describing actions

Dictionaries are sociocultural objects that can be used as underlying structures of cognitive sci... more Dictionaries are sociocultural objects that can be used as underlying structures of cognitive science models. We first show that the lexical networks constructed from dictionaries, despite a surface disagreement at links level, share a common topological structure. We assume that this deep structure reflects the semantic organisation of the lexicon shared by the members of a linguistic community. We propose a model based on the exploration of this specific structure to analyse and compare the semantic efficiency of [Children/Adults] productions in action labelling tasks. We define a generic score of semantic efficiency, SKILLEX. Assigned to participants of the APPROX protocol, this score enables us to accurately classify them into Children and Adults categories. RÉSUMÉ. Les dictionnaires sont des objets socioculturels qui peuvent être utilisés comme structures sous-jacentes pour la modélisation en sciences cognitives. Nous montrons d'abord que les réseaux lexicaux construits à p...

UC Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Title Skillex, an action labelling efficiency score: the case for French and Mandarin Publication Date Skillex, an action labelling efficiency score: the case for French and Mandarin

We propose a model to compute two measurements of semantic efficiency of verbs as action labels. ... more We propose a model to compute two measurements of semantic efficiency of verbs as action labels. It is based on the exploration of the specific structure of synonymy networks of verbs. We use these measurements to analyse and compare the semantic efficiency of [Children/Adults] productions in action labelling tasks, in French and Mandarin. The combination of these two measurements leads to a generic score of semantic efficiency, Skillex. Assigned to participants of the Approx protocol experiment, this score enables us to accurately classify them into Children and Adults categories, be they French or Mandarin native speakers.

Skillex, an action labelling efficiency score: the case for French and Mandarin

We propose a model to compute two measurements of semantic efficiency of verbs as action labels. ... more We propose a model to compute two measurements of semantic efficiency of verbs as action labels. It is based on the exploration of the specific structure of synonymy networks of verbs. We use these measurements to analyse and compare the semantic efficiency of [Children/Adults] productions in action labelling tasks, in French and Mandarin. The combination of these two measurements leads to a generic score of semantic efficiency, Skillex. Assigned to participants of the Approx protocol experiment, this score enables us to accurately classify them into Children and Adults categories, be they French or Mandarin native speakers.

Why Chinese Web-as-Corpus is Wacky? Or: How Big Data is Killing Chinese Corpus Linguistics

International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 2014

This paper aims to examine and evaluate the current development of using Web-as-Corpus (WaC) para... more This paper aims to examine and evaluate the current development of using Web-as-Corpus (WaC) paradigm in Chinese corpus linguistics. I will argue that the unstable notion of wordhood in Chinese and the resulting diverse ideas of implementing word segmentation systems have posed great challenges for those who are keen on building web-scaled corpus data. Two lexical measures are proposed to illustrate the issues and methodological discussions are provided.

Qualia Modification in Noun-Noun Compounds: A Cross-Language Survey

Taiwan Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing, 2010

In analyzing the formation of a given compound, both its internal syntactic structure and semanti... more In analyzing the formation of a given compound, both its internal syntactic structure and semantic relations need to be considered. The Generative Lexicon Theory (GL Theory) provides us with an explanatory model of compounds that captures the qualia modification relations in the semantic composition within a compound, which can be applied to natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we primarily discuss the qualia structure of noun-noun compounds found in Chinese as well as a couple of other languages like German, Spanish, Japanese and Italian. We briefly review the construction of compounds and focus on the noun-noun construction. While analyzing the semantic relationship between the words that compose a compound, we use the GL Theory to demonstrate that the proposed qualia structure enables compositional interpretation within the compound. Besides, we attempt to examine whether or not for each semantic head, its modifier can fit in one of the four quales. Finally, our analysis reveals the potentials and limits of qualia-based treatment of composition of nominal compounds and suggests a path for future work.

Observing Features of PTT Neologisms: A Corpus-driven Study with N-gram Model

Taiwan Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing, 2013

PTT (批踢踢) is one of the largest web forums in Taiwan. In the last few years, its importance has b... more PTT (批踢踢) is one of the largest web forums in Taiwan. In the last few years, its importance has been growing rapidly because it has been widely mentioned by most of the mainstream media. It is observed that its influence reflects not only on the society but also on the language novel use in Taiwan. In this research, a pipeline processing system in Python was developed to collect the data from PTT, and the n-gram model with proposed linguistic filter are adopted with the attempt to capture two-character neologisms emerged in PTT. Evaluation task with 25 subjects was conducted against the system's performance with the calculation of Fleiss' kappa measure. Linguistic discussion as well as the comparison with time series analysis of frequency data are provided. It is hoped that the detection of neologisms in PTT can be improved by observing the features, which may even facilitate the prediction of the neologisms in the future.

KYOTO: A system for mining, structuring and distributing knowledge across languages and cultures

We outline work performed within the framework of a current EC project. The goal is to construct ... more We outline work performed within the framework of a current EC project. The goal is to construct a language-independent information system for a specific domain (environment/ecology/biodiversity) anchored in a language-independent ontology that is linked to wordnets in seven languages. For each language, information extraction and identification of lexicalized concepts with ontological entries is carried out by text miners ("Kybots"). The mapping of language-specific lexemes to the ontology allows for crosslinguistic identification and translation of equivalent terms. The infrastructure developed within this project enables long-range knowledge sharing and transfer across many languages and cultures, addressing the need for global and uniform transition of knowledge beyond the specific domains addressed here. 1

Computational Modeling of Affixoid Behavior in Chinese Morphology

Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

The morphological status of affixes in Chinese has long been a matter of debate. How one might ap... more The morphological status of affixes in Chinese has long been a matter of debate. How one might apply the conventional criteria of free/bound and content/function features to distinguish word-forming affixes from bound roots in Chinese is still far from clear. Issues involving polysemy and diachronic dynamics further blur the boundaries. In this paper, we propose three quantitative features in a computational model of affixoid behavior in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that, except for in a very few cases, there are no clear criteria that can be used to identify an affix's status in an isolating language like Chinese. A diachronic check using contextualized embeddings with the WordNet Sense Inventory also demonstrates the possible role of the polysemy of lexical roots across diachronic settings.

Entrenchment and Creativity in Chinese Quadrasyllabic Idiomatic Expressions

This paper aims to explore a special type of idiomatic expressions of even length called Quadrasy... more This paper aims to explore a special type of idiomatic expressions of even length called Quadrasyllabic Idiomatic Expressions (QIEs) in Chinese, and explain their variations with reference to semantic and structural constraints on the elements imposed by the construction of QIEs on the one hand, and its interplay with individual semantic elements in semantic space in the comprehension task of QIEs variants. Results of human ratings and behavioral experiment both show that semantic distance affects the speed of comprehension with the construction entrenchment. For those QIEs with idiomaticity, semantic distance leads to no major effect. We show that Chinese QIEs provide an ideal testing ground for the empirical investigation of the functional linguistic notion of entrenchment in processing multi-morphemic strings.

Computational Representation of Chinese Characters: Comparison Between Singular Value Decomposition and Variational Autoencoder

The Journal of Cognitive Science, 2020

Being a notoriously complex problem, writing is generally decomposed into a series of subtasks: i... more Being a notoriously complex problem, writing is generally decomposed into a series of subtasks: idea generation, expression, revision, etc. Given some goal, the author generates a set of ideas (brainstorming), which he integrates into some skeleton (outline, text plan, outline). This leads to a first draft which is submitted then for revision possibly yielding changes at various levels (content, structure, form). Having made a draft, authors usually revise, edit, and proofread their documents. We confine ourselves here only to academic writing, focusing on sentence production. While there has been quite some work on this topic, most writing assistance has mainly dealt with grammatical errors, editing and proofreading, the goal being the correction of surface-level problems such as typography, spelling, or grammatical errors. We broaden the scope by also including cases where the entire sentence needs to be rewritten in order to express properly all of the information planned. Hence,...

The Secret to Popular Chinese Web Novels: A Corpus-Driven Study

What is the secret to writing popular novels? The issue is an intriguing one among researchers fr... more What is the secret to writing popular novels? The issue is an intriguing one among researchers from various fields. The goal of this study is to identify the linguistic features of several popular web novels as well as how the textual features found within and the overall tone interact with the genre and themes of each novel. Apart from writing style, non-textual information may also reveal details behind the success of web novels. Since web fiction has become a major industry with top writers making millions of dollars and their stories adapted into published books, determining essential elements of “publishable” novels is of importance. The present study further examines how non-textual information, namely, the number of hits, shares, favorites, and comments, may contribute to several features of the most popular published and unpublished web novels. Findings reveal that keywords, function words, and lexical diversity of a novel are highly related to its genres and writing style w...

CogALex-V Shared Task: LOPE

Automatic discovery of semantically-related words is one of the most important NLP tasks, and has... more Automatic discovery of semantically-related words is one of the most important NLP tasks, and has great impact on the theoretical psycholinguistic modeling of the mental lexicon. In this shared task, we employ the word embeddings model to testify two thoughts explicitly or implicitly assumed by the NLP community: (1). Word embedding models can reflect syntagmatic similarities in usage between words to distances in projected vector space. (2). Word embedding models can reflect paradigmatic relationships between words.

Stance Classification on PTT Comments

With the development of social media and online forums, users have grown accustomed to expressing... more With the development of social media and online forums, users have grown accustomed to expressing their agreement and disagreement via short texts. Elements that reveal the user’s stance or subjectivity thus becomes an important resource in identifying the user’s position on a given topic. In the current study, we observe comments of an online bulletin board in Taiwan for how people express their stance when responding to other people’s post in Chinese. A lexicon is built based on linguistic analysis and annotation of the data. We performed binary classification task using these linguistic features and was able to reach an average of 71 percent accuracy. A linguistic analysis on the confusion caused in the classification task is done for future work on better accuracy for such task.

Yet Another Resource to Sketch Word Behavior in Chinese Variation

Most corpus-based lexical studies require considerable efforts in manually annotating grammatical... more Most corpus-based lexical studies require considerable efforts in manually annotating grammatical relations in order to find the collocations of the target word in corpus data. In this paper, we claim that the current technique of natural language processing can facilitate lexical research by automating the annotation of these relations. We exploit the above technique and report an online open-resource for the comparison of lexical behaviors in cross-strait Chinese variations. The proposed resource is evaluated by juxtaposing the results with previous lexical research based on the same corpus data. The results show that our resource may provide more comprehensive and fine-grained grammatical collocation candidates in the case study.

Exploring Lavender Tongue from Social Media Texts[In Chinese]

Under the issue of gender and Natural Language Processing (NLP), most papers aim at gendernorm la... more Under the issue of gender and Natural Language Processing (NLP), most papers aim at gendernorm language that spoken by biologically males and females with opposite-sex desires. However, from the point of view of sexual orientation, this study presents the first work in the task of Chinese homosexual identification. Firstly, we collect homosexual texts from social media, and secondly examine linguistic behavior found in gay and lesbian texts. In addition, we also provide sets of linguistic features to automatically predict homosexual language with the adoption of 5-fold cross-validation Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naive Bayes (NB) models. Training procedure in the study resulted in promising f-score around 70% with the use 68 The 2017 Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing ROCLING 2017, pp. 68-80  The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing

Do You Believe It Happened? Assessing Chinese Readers’ Veridicality Judgments

This work collects and studies Chinese readers’ veridicality judgments to news events (whether an... more This work collects and studies Chinese readers’ veridicality judgments to news events (whether an event is viewed as happening or not). For instance, in “The FBI alleged in court documents that Zazi had admitted having a handwritten recipe for explosives on his computer”, do people believe that Zazi had a handwritten recipe for explosives? The goal is to observe the pragmatic behaviors of linguistic features under context which affects readers in making veridicality judgments. Exploring from the datasets, it is found that features such as event-selecting predicates (ESP), modality markers, adverbs, temporal information, and statistics have an impact on readers’ veridicality judgments. We further investigated that modality markers with high certainty do not necessarily trigger readers to have high confidence in believing an event happened. Additionally, the source of information introduced by an ESP presents low effects to veridicality judgments, even when an event is attributed to a...

Why Chinese Web-as-Corpus is Wacky? Or: How Big Data is Killing Chinese Corpus Linguistics

This paper aims to examine and evaluate the current development of using Web-as-Corpus (WaC) para... more This paper aims to examine and evaluate the current development of using Web-as-Corpus (WaC) paradigm in Chinese corpus linguistics. I will argue that the unstable notion of wordhood in Chinese and the resulting diverse ideas of implementing word segmentation systems have posed great challenges for those who are keen on building web-scaled corpus data. Two lexical measures are proposed to illustrate the issues and methodological discussions are provided.

ClassifierGuesser: A Context-based Classifier Prediction System for Chinese Language Learners

Classifiers are function words that are used to express quantities in Chinese and are especially ... more Classifiers are function words that are used to express quantities in Chinese and are especially difficult for language learners. In contrast to previous studies, we argue that the choice of classifiers is highly contextual and train context-aware machine learning models based on a novel publicly available dataset, outperforming previous baselines. We further present use cases for our database and models in an interactive demo system.

Word Dependency Sketch for Chinese Language Learning

Concentric： Studies in Linguistics, 2016

This article describes an approach to constructing a language resource through automatically sket... more This article describes an approach to constructing a language resource through automatically sketching grammatical relations of words in an untagged corpus based on dependency parses. Compared to the handcrafted, rule-based Word Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004), this approach provides more details about the different syntagmatic usages of each word such as various types of modification a given word can undergo and other grammatical functions it can fulfill. As a way to properly evaluate the approach, we attempt to evaluate the auto-generated result in terms of the distributional thesaurus function, and compare this with items in an existing thesaurus. Our results have been tailored for the purpose of Chinese learning and, to the best of our knowledge, the resulting resource is the first of its kind in Chinese. We believe it will have a great impact on both Chinese corpus linguistics and Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL).

Crowdsourcing Experiment Designs for Chinese Word Sense Annotation

This paper tries to demonstrate our exploratory efforts in tackling with the “high accuracy-low q... more This paper tries to demonstrate our exploratory efforts in tackling with the “high accuracy-low quantity” problem of human word sense annotation task in Chinese, and ultimately reach the goal of automatic word sense annotation. Our proposed annotation architecture consists of explicit and implicit aspects of of crowdsourcing approach. Explicit method focuses on the general issues of crowdsourcing and made adjustments on current MTurk framework. Implicit method concentrates on the idea of Game with a Purpose (GWAP) design, which originates from a well-known video game Super Mario.