Related papers: Exophoric Pronoun Resolution in Dialogues with Top…

Across many data domains, co-occurrence statistics about the joint appearance of objects are powerfully informative. By transforming unsupervised learning problems into decompositions of co-occurrence statistics, spectral algorithms provide…

Pronouns are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages, such as Chinese, generally leading to significant challenges with respect to the production of complete translations. Recently, Wang et al. (2018) proposed a novel reconstruction-based…

Most current approaches to metaphor identification use restricted linguistic contexts, e.g. by considering only a verb's arguments or the sentence containing a phrase. Inspired by pragmatic accounts of metaphor, we argue that broader…

Pragmatics is core to natural language, enabling speakers to communicate efficiently with structures like ellipsis and anaphora that can shorten utterances without loss of meaning. These structures require a listener to interpret an…

Exactly solving first-order constraints (i.e., first-order formulas over a certain predefined structure) can be a very hard, or even undecidable problem. In continuous structures like the real numbers it is promising to compute approximate…

Entity coreference resolution is an important research problem with many applications, including information extraction and question answering. Coreference resolution for English has been studied extensively. However, there is relatively…

Dialogue participants often refer to entities or situations repeatedly within a conversation, which contributes to its cohesiveness. Subsequent references exploit the common ground accumulated by the interlocutors and hence have several…

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) aim to elicit user preferences via natural dialogue to provide suitable item recommendations. However, current CRSs often deviate from realistic human interactions by rapidly recommending items in…

It is claimed that a variety of facts concerning ellipsis, event reference, and interclausal coherence can be explained by two features of the linguistic form in question: (1) whether the form leaves behind an empty constituent in the…

Event coreference resolution(ECR) is an important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and nearly all the existing approaches to this task rely on event argument information. However, these methods tend to suffer from error propagation…

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…

Conversation requires a substantial amount of coordination between dialogue participants, from managing turn taking to negotiating mutual understanding. Part of this coordination effort surfaces as the reuse of linguistic behaviour across…

We propose an importance sampling method for tractable and efficient estimation of counterfactual expressions in general settings, named Exogenous Matching. By minimizing a common upper bound of counterfactual estimators, we transform the…

Robust, faithful and harm-free pronoun use for individuals is an important goal for language model development as their use increases, but prior work tends to study only one or two of these characteristics at a time. To measure progress…

Acoustic-to-Word recognition provides a straightforward solution to end-to-end speech recognition without needing external decoding, language model re-scoring or lexicon. While character-based models offer a natural solution to the…

The recurring context in which objects appear holds valuable information that can be employed to predict their existence. This intuitive observation indeed led many researchers to endow appearance-based detectors with explicit reasoning…

The problem of representing the atomic elements of language in modern neural learning systems is one of the central challenges of the field of natural language processing. I present a survey of the distributional, compositional, and…

Providing natural language explanations for recommendations is particularly useful from the perspective of a non-expert user. Although several methods for providing such explanations have recently been proposed, we argue that an important…

This paper describes a system that leads us to believe in the feasibility of constructing natural spoken dialogue systems in task-oriented domains. It specifically addresses the issue of robust interpretation of speech in the presence of…

Endowing chatbots with a consistent persona is essential to an engaging conversation, yet it remains an unresolved challenge. In this work, we propose a new retrieval-enhanced approach for personalized response generation. Specifically, we…