arXiv Computation and Language

The Impact of Synthetic Data Augmentation on Discourse-Pragmatic Function Classification

arXiv AI
Aug 18

Enhancing Science Classroom Discourse Analysis through Joint Multi-Task Learning for Reasoning-Component Classification

arXiv:2604. 21137v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Analyzing the reasoning patterns of students in science classrooms is critical for understanding knowledge construction mechanism and improving instructional practice to maximize cognitive engagement, yet manual coding of classroom discourse at scale remains prohibitively labor-intensive.

By Jiho Noh, Mukhesh Raghava Katragadda, Raymond Carl, Soon Lee
arXiv AI
Jul 9

DiaLLM: An Investigation into the Robustness-Generation Gap in English Dialect Adaptation

arXiv:2607. 07669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly \emph{understand} dialectal English, yet still \emph{produce} only standard, US-leaning English, leaving dialectal generation, the harder half of the problem, largely unaddressed.

By Jordan Painter, Dipankar Srirag, Adarsh Kappiyath, Diptesh Kanojia, Aditya Joshi, Lu Yin
arXiv AI
2d ago

PolERo: Studying Political Evasion in Romanian

PolERo presents a new dataset of 3,574 Romanian question‑answer pairs from presidential transcripts, annotated for political evasion using a two‑level taxonomy of response clarity and fine‑grained evasion strategies. The study evaluates various classification methods—including TF‑IDF baselines, fine‑tuned encoders, a sliding‑window encoder, and zero/few‑shot LLM prompting—under matched conditions. Cross‑lingual transfer experiments via joint bilingual training and machine‑translation augmentation reveal that fine‑tuned encoders perform competitively, transfer is asymmetric, and ambivalent evasion categories with pragmatic cues remain the most challenging across all models.

By Gabriel Stefan, Sergiu Nisioi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

The Dialect Tax: Dialectal Biases Persist throughout the Language Modeling Pipeline

The study investigates why language models exhibit systematic performance gaps across English dialects, a phenomenon termed the "dialect tax." Using parallel dialect corpora that preserve meaning while altering surface form, the authors confirm that models treat Standard American English and dialectal texts as semantically equivalent, yet find representational disparities that persist through tokenization, pre‑training, post‑training, and inference. Even a character‑level tokenizer does not eliminate input/output asymmetries or accuracy gaps, and dialect pairs produce more divergent gradient updates than unrelated Standard texts, indicating that dialectal content is harder for models to learn.

By Elle
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

UNMASK: Discovering and Causally Verifying Spurious Shortcuts in Text Classifiers

arXiv:2608. 09209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural language models trained on large crowdsourced corpora frequently exploit spurious surface patterns tied to target labels without true linguistic or causal relevance, boosting benchmark performance while failing on adversarial or out-of-distribution inputs.

By Chidaksh Ravuru, Shashank Srivastava