# Does Incomplete Syntax Influence Korean Language Model? Focusing on Word Order and Case Markers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09184 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09184/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [GPT3Mix: Leveraging Large-scale Language Models for Text Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08826/) (2021)
- [Masked Language Modeling and the Distributional Hypothesis: Order Word Matters Pre-training for Little](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06644/) (2021)
- [KLUE: Korean Language Understanding Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09680/) (2021)
- [ESimCSE: Enhanced Sample Building Method for Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04380/) (2021)
- [Out of Order: How Important Is The Sequential Order of Words in a Sentence in Natural Language Understanding Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15180/) (2020)
- [UnNatural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00010/) (2020)
- [AEDA: An Easier Data Augmentation Technique for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13230/) (2021)
- [Word Order Does Matter (And Shuffled Language Models Know It)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10995/) (2022)
- [Learning from Perturbations: Diverse and Informative Dialogue Generation with Inverse Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15171/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [KatFishNet: Detecting LLM-Generated Korean Text through Linguistic Feature Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00032/) (2025)
- [Redefining Evaluation Standards: A Unified Framework for Evaluating the Korean Capabilities of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22968/) (2025)
- [The Grammar of Transformers: A Systematic Review of Interpretability Research on Syntactic Knowledge in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19926/) (2026)
- [PAD: Towards Efficient Data Generation for Transfer Learning Using Phrase Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18250/) (2025)
- [Making Sense of Korean Sentences: A Comprehensive Evaluation of LLMs through KoSEnd Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03378/) (2025)
- [Linguistics-Aware Non-Distortionary LLM Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00613/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Syntactic elements, such as word order and case markers, are fundamental in natural language processing. Recent studies show that syntactic information boosts language model performance and offers clues for people to understand their learning mechanisms. Unlike languages with a fixed word order such as English, Korean allows for varied word sequences, despite its canonical structure, due to case markers that indicate the functions of sentence components. This study explores whether Korean language models can accurately capture this flexibility. We note that incomplete word orders and omitted case markers frequently appear in ordinary Korean communication. To investigate this further, we introduce the Syntactically Incomplete Korean (SIKO) dataset. Through SIKO, we assessed Korean language models' flexibility with incomplete syntax and confirmed the dataset's training value. Results indicate these models reflect Korean's inherent flexibility, accurately handling incomplete inputs. Moreover, fine-tuning with SIKO enhances the ability to handle common incomplete Korean syntactic forms. The dataset's simple construction process, coupled with significant performance enhancements, solidifies its standing as an effective data augmentation technique.