The past decade has witnessed the happy marriage between natural language processing (NLP) and the cognitive science of language. Moreover, given the historical relationship between biological and artificial neural networks, the advent of deep learning has re-sparked strong interests in the fusion of NLP and the neuroscience of language. Importantly, this inter-fertilization between NLP, on one hand, and the cognitive (neuro)science of language, on the other, has been driven by the language resources annotated with human language processing data. However, there remain several limitations with those language resources on annotations, genres, languages, etc. In this paper, we describe the design of a novel language resource called BCCWJ-EEG, the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ) experimentally annotated with human electroencephalography (EEG). Specifically, after extensively reviewing the language resources currently available in the literature with special focus on eye-tracking and EEG, we summarize the details concerning (i) participants, (ii) stimuli, (iii) procedure, (iv) data preprocessing, (v) corpus evaluation, (vi) resource release, and (vii) compilation schedule. In addition, potential applications of BCCWJ-EEG to neuroscience and NLP will also be discussed.

The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Japan (NINJAL, Japan), has developed several types of corpora. For each corpus NINJAL provided an online search environment, ‘Chunagon’, which is a morphological-information-annotation-based concordance system made publicly available in 2011. NINJAL has now provided a skewer-search system ‘Kotonoha’ based on the ‘Chunagon’ systems. This system enables querying of multiple corpora by certain categories, such as register type and period.

In this paper, we show how to use bilingual word embeddings (BWE) to automatically create a corresponding table of meaning tags from two dictionaries in one language and examine the effectiveness of the method. To do this, we had a problem: the meaning tags do not always correspond one-to-one because the granularities of the word senses and the concepts are different from each other. Therefore, we regarded the concept tag that corresponds to a word sense the most as the correct concept tag corresponding the word sense. We used two BWE methods, a linear transformation matrix and VecMap. We evaluated the most frequent sense (MFS) method and the corpus concatenation method for comparison. The accuracies of the proposed methods were higher than the accuracy of the random baseline but lower than those of the MFS and corpus concatenation methods. However, because our method utilized the embedding vectors of the word senses, the relations of the sense tags corresponding to concept tags could be examined by mapping the sense embeddings to the vector space of the concept tags. Also, our methods could be performed when we have only concept or word sense embeddings whereas the MFS method requires a parallel corpus and the corpus concatenation method needs two tagged corpora.

We apply small perturbations to word embeddings and minimize the resultant adversarial risk to regularize the model. We exploit a novel combination of two different approaches to estimate these perturbations: 1) using the true label and 2) using the model prediction. Without relying on any human-crafted features, knowledge bases, or additional datasets other than the target datasets, our model boosts the fine-tuning performance of RoBERTa, achieving competitive results on multiple reading comprehension datasets that require commonsense inference.