Wei-Ling Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have in recent years spurred research across various sectors, owing to their remarkable zero-shot or few-shot performance. This capability has become indispensable for individuals seeking to integrate these language models into their workflows effectively. In this paper, based on in-depth linguistic analyses, we explore the application of an LLM, specifically GPT-4, in generating Chinese language textbooks tailored for grade school students. This encompasses the creation of main lesson texts alongside accompanying Chinese character exercises. Experimental results suggest that the LLM-generated textbook lessons are a viable research direction. The initial outcomes demonstrate the ability of LLM to generate texts of satisfactory quality appropriate for a specified grade level. The contributions of this work include pioneering the quantitative analysis of Chinese language textbooks for native speakers in Taiwan and leveraging an LLM to automatically generate textbook content and accompanying Chinese character exercises targeted at native Chinese speakers, which is a novel approach facilitated by the development of prompts tailored to different language learning levels. The study also conducts quantitative and qualitative comparisons between machine-generated lessons and those developed by educational professionals in Taiwan.

Contextualized embeddings have proven to be powerful tools in various NLP tasks. However, their interpretability and how they encode lexical semantics remain challenging issues. In this paper, we tackle this problem by using definition modeling, a technique that aims to generate human-readable definitions for words, as a means to evaluate and understand high-dimensional semantic vectors. We introduce the Vec2Gloss model, which generates glosses from the contextualized embeddings of target words. The systematic gloss patterns provided by Chinese Wordnet enable us to examine the mechanism behind the model’s gloss generation. To delve deeper into this mechanism, we devise two dependency indices to measure the semantic and contextual dependencies of the generated glosses. These indices allow us to analyze the generated texts at both the gloss and token levels. Our results demonstrate that the proposed Vec2Gloss model enhances our understanding of lexical semantics in contextualized embeddings.