Correcting the Misuse: A Method for the C hinese Idiom Cloze Test (2020)

Abstract: The cloze test for Chinese idioms is a new challenge in machine reading comprehension: given a sentence with a blank, choosing a candidate Chinese idiom which matches the context. Chinese idiom is a type of Chinese idiomatic expression. The common misuse of Chinese idioms leads to error in corpus and causes error in the learned semantic representation of Chinese idioms. In this paper, we introduce the definition written by Chinese experts to correct the misuse. We propose a model for the Chinese idiom cloze test integrating various information effectively. We propose an attention mechanism called Attribute Attention to balance the weight of different attributes among different descriptions of the Chinese idiom. Besides the given candidates of every blank, we also try to choose the answer from all Chinese idioms that appear in the dataset as the extra loss due to the uniqueness and specificity of Chinese idioms. In experiments, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art model.

## introduction the chinese idiom comprehension requires the ability to understand chinese idioms. chinese idiom, which is called "成语" (chengyu) in chinese, consists of four characters. chinese idioms are mostly derived from stories in ancient literature from chinese history, and often reflect the moral behind the stories. to measure the ability of understanding chinese idioms, the chinese idiom cloze test dataset was proposed @xcite : given a sentence with a blank, an examinee is required to choose an idiom which best matches the context surrounding the blank. the misuse of chinese idioms is prevalent among chinese native speakers who did not receive a professional chinese education. due to the metaphorical meaning of chinese idioms, even chinese native speakers who do not major in chinese would use a chinese idiom with its literal meaning, which causes misuse. the misuse of chinese idiom appears in various social media and text such as weibo and zhihu. the chinese word embeddings and chinese language models are pretrained on these corpora that contain the misuse of chinese idioms and learn the incorrect meaning of chinese idioms. for example, in moreover, using the definition to correct the misuse does not mean that the non-misuse part would be dropped. take 七月流火 in in addition, chinese idioms are derived from stories in ancient literature and contain abundant information. chinese idioms contain more information so they are more likely to be used in a more specific context than common words. for example, 美 means "beautiful", 轮 means "wheel", sentence with a blank 他们希望能 再进一步 they hope that they can and achieve greater success. a candidate idiom 百尺竿头 literal translation: at the top of a hundred-foot pole. free translation: make still further progress. definition 比喻到了极高的境地，仍须继续努力，求更大的进步。 when one has achieved great success, one should continue to work hard to make greater progress. and 奂 means "magnificent". the chinese idiom 美轮美奂 means "a building is beautiful". 美轮 美奂 can be used only when describing a building, whereas those four characters are not related to building. when those four characters are combined, the meaning becomes narrow. it is more difficult to find two similar chinese idioms than normal words. in this paper, besides choosing the answer from the given candidates, our model tries to choose the answer from the whole vocabulary of candidate chinese idioms that appear in the dataset and calculate its loss as a part of the final loss. in this way, relationships between much more idioms can be captured every time. it costs very few extra computing resources but provides significant improvement. in experiments, our model outperforms the stateof-the-art model. our main contributions are summarized as follows: ## related work the cloze test is a classic task of reading comprehension and many methods were proposed @xcite @xcite @xcite . the chinese idiom cloze test is more challenging because chinese idioms convey the metaphorical meaning and are misused sometimes. most works related to idioms focused on english idioms identification @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite . some works have tried to use definitions: @xcite analyzed the sentiment of definitions; fathima @xcite used the similarity between different definitions. however, these methods introduced definitions but did not try to understand them. @xcite used charlstm to encode the meaning of idioms, which has a similar idea to @xcite . only a few works have been done with chinese idioms such as building chinese emotion lexicons @xcite and improving chinese word segmentation @xcite @xcite . chengyu reader (cr) @xcite initions and the attention mechanism of attentive reader (ar) @xcite . ## approach formally, the chinese idiom cloze test requires the model to choose the correct answer from a number of the candidate idioms given a sentence with a blank. the sentence is defined as a sequence of characters with a blank, which is also called context in the following. the candidate chinese idiom is defined as a sequence of four characters, which is called idiom in the following. the definition is defined as a sequence of characters interpreting the corresponding idiom. in this paper, the term "bert" refers to the bert-like models @xcite @xcite , because any one of them and even the new bert-like model in the future can be used in our model. figure 1 is an overview of our model. the following sections will introduce every part of our model one by one. ## conclusion in this paper, we propose a model for the chinese idiom cloze test. we introduce the definition and propose attribute attention to balance the importance of different representations of the chinese idiom. we add extra loss calculated by choosing the answer from the whole vocabulary of chinese idioms to improve the performance further, which costs very few computing resources. in experiments, our model outperforms state-of-the-art method.