The paper investigates Mandarin Chinese reduplicative constructions that repeat two-character base words or their constituents, such as expressions meaning ‘in good health’ or ‘discuss a bit’. Using Tencent word embeddings, the study demonstrates that distributional semantics can recover known semantic and grammatical properties of these reduplications, revealing clear semantic and pragmatic differentiation between the two patterns. Procrustes analysis shows that the overall organization of the base-word space is largely preserved in the reduplication space, with local mismatches indicating discourse-pragmatic reorganization.
arXiv:2604.27846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How people narrate their experiences offers a window into how the mind organizes them. Computational approaches to therapeutic writing have evolved...
The neutral, or floating, tone of Mandarin Chinese is a tone with an enigmatic set of properties. It has been described as a reduced tone, or as a tone that sometimes is lexically fixed but that can also be toneless.
arXiv:2408.11827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how language models compose meaning from linguistic input remains a central problem in interpretability research. Mechanistic studies...
CNeo-Bench is a new benchmark comprising 4,759 Chinese neologisms, each with reference definitions and categorized by linguistic mechanisms such as phonetic substitution and visual character decomposition. The benchmark includes a two-tier evaluation framework that tests whether models can describe a neologism and whether they can manipulate its underlying mechanism. Evaluation of 18 large language models shows that most perform poorly on definition generation (below 40%) and exhibit a recognition‑manipulation gap, often paraphrasing rather than restoring the original form; few‑shot prompting helps but does not fully resolve the errors.
arXiv:2609.15991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard subword tokenizers either treat every orthographic variation of a word (such as hello, Hello, HELLO, and H\'ello) as unrelated vocabulary entr...
arXiv:2608. 03095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present VIVID (Vietnamese Idioms for Validation and Interpretation Depth), the first systematic benchmark for evaluating culturally grounded figurative language understanding in Vietnamese.
arXiv:2606.27228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Formal semantics has shown that sentence meanings arise by recursively composing lexical meanings, yet much of the literature on semantic universal...
arXiv:2507. 06506v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Translating wordplay across languages presents unique challenges that have long confounded both professional human translators and machine translation systems.
The paper argues that language operates with two parameters: amplitude, which measures how often words co‑occur, and phase, a signed relational factor that determines how co‑activated meanings combine and can reverse a meaning’s contribution. Unlike amplitude, phase is not captured by standard word embeddings or transformer attention weights and is indexed to individuals and dyadic interactions. The authors propose six empirical predictions to test phase’s role and suggest that future language models should incorporate agent‑indexed, phase‑bearing semantic states.
arXiv:2607. 23368v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are demonstrating significant capabilities in medical tasks like radiology analysis, yet providing faithful and interpretable explanations remains a key consideration for their responsible deployment in clinical settings.
arXiv:2608. 10810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion understanding in discourse requires reasoning beyond surface sentiment because speakers often convey affect through indirect, implicit, polite, ironic, or deliberately mismatched expressions.
arXiv:2601. 16217v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly mediate multilingual professional communication, where useful generation requires adapting to community conventions about which expressions are retained, translated, or mixed.