Universal dependencies (UD) is a framework for morphosyntactic annotation of human language, which to date has been used to create treebanks for more than 100 languages. In this article, we outline the linguistic theory of the UD framework, which draws on a long tradition of typologically oriented grammatical theories. Grammatical relations between words are centrally used to explain how predicate–argument structures are encoded morphosyntactically in different languages while morphological features and part-of-speech classes give the properties of words. We argue that this theory is a good basis for cross-linguistically consistent annotation of typologically diverse languages in a way that supports computational natural language understanding as well as broader linguistic studies.

With advances in neural language models, the focus of linguistic steganography has shifted from edit-based approaches to generationbased ones. While the latter's payload capacity is impressive, generating genuine-looking texts remains challenging. In this paper, we revisit edit-based linguistic steganography, with the idea that a masked language model offers an off-the-shelf solution. The proposed method eliminates painstaking rule construction and has a high payload capacity for an edit-based model. It is also shown to be more secure against automatic detection than a generation-based method while offering better control of the security/payload capacity tradeoff.

No abstract

For phylogenetic inference, linguistic typology is a promising alternative to lexical evidence because it allows us to compare an arbitrary pair of languages. A challenging problem with typology-based phylogenetic inference is that the changes of typological features over time are less intuitive than those of lexical features. In this paper, we work on reconstructing typologically natural ancestors To do this, we leverage dependencies among typological features. We first represent each language by continuous latent components that capture feature dependencies. We then combine them with a typology evaluator that distinguishes typologically natural languages from other possible combinations of features. We perform phylogenetic inference in the continuous space and use the evaluator to ensure the typological naturalness of inferred ancestors. We show that the proposed method reconstructs known language families more accurately than baseline methods. Lastly, assuming the monogenesis hypothesis, we attempt to reconstruct a common ancestor of the world's languages.

Typical event sequences are an important class of commonsense knowledge. Formalizing the task as the generation of a next event conditioned on a current event, previous work in event prediction employs sequence-tosequence (seq2seq) models. However, what can happen after a given event is usually diverse, a fact that can hardly be captured by deterministic models. In this paper, we propose to incorporate a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) into seq2seq for its ability to represent diverse next events as a probabilistic distribution. We further extend the CVAEbased seq2seq with a reconstruction mechanism to prevent the model from concentrating on highly typical events. To facilitate fair and systematic evaluation of the diversityaware models, we also extend existing evaluation datasets by tying each current event to multiple next events. Experiments show that the CVAE-based models drastically outperform deterministic models in terms of precision and that the reconstruction mechanism improves the recall of CVAE-based models without sacrificing precision. 1