Related papers: What makes an entity salient in discourse?
Previous work examining the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis has shown that while information as measured by surprisal metrics is distributed more or less evenly across documents overall, local discrepancies can arise due to…
Identifying the salience (i.e. importance) of discourse units is an important task in language understanding. While events play important roles in text documents, little research exists on analyzing their saliency status. This paper…
Determining and ranking the most salient entities in a text is critical for user-facing systems, especially as users increasingly rely on models to interpret long documents they only partially read. Graded entity salience addresses this…
In text documents such as news articles, the content and key events usually revolve around a subset of all the entities mentioned in a document. These entities, often deemed as salient entities, provide useful cues of the aboutness of a…
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…
Speech rate has been shown to vary across social categories such as gender, age, and dialect, while also being conditioned by properties of speech planning. The effect of utterance length, where speech rate is faster and less variable for…
Entity aspect recommendation is an emerging task in semantic search that helps users discover serendipitous and prominent information with respect to an entity, of which salience (e.g., popularity) is the most important factor in previous…
Research in the social sciences and psychology has shown that the persuasiveness of an argument depends not only the language employed, but also on attributes of the source/communicator, the audience, and the appropriateness and strength of…
This paper presents a data-driven study focusing on analyzing and predicting sentence deletion -- a prevalent but understudied phenomenon in document simplification -- on a large English text simplification corpus. We inspect various…
Although text-based large language models exhibit human-level writing ability and remarkable intelligence, speech language models (SLMs) still struggle to generate semantically coherent outputs. There are several potential reasons for this…
We present a joint modeling approach to identify salient discussion points in spoken meetings as well as to label the discourse relations between speaker turns. A variation of our model is also discussed when discourse relations are treated…
We address the problem of inferring a speaker's level of certainty based on prosodic information in the speech signal, which has application in speech-based dialogue systems. We show that using phrase-level prosodic features centered around…
What makes a public talk resonate with large audiences? While prior research has emphasized speaker delivery or topic novelty, we reasoned that a core driver of engagement is linguistic clarity. This aligns with theories of processing…
In our world with full of uncertainty, debates and argumentation contribute to the progress of science and society. Despite of the increasing attention to characterize human arguments, most progress made so far focus on the debate outcome,…
The interpretation of the lexical aspect of verbs in English plays a crucial role for recognizing textual entailment and learning discourse-level inferences. We show that two elementary dimensions of aspectual class, states vs. events, and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at text summarization, a task that requires models to select content based on its importance. However, the exact notion of salience that LLMs have internalized remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we…
In linguistics, coherence can be achieved by different means, such as by maintaining reference to the same set of entities across sentences and by establishing discourse relations between them. However, most existing work on coherence…
As NLP models become increasingly capable of understanding documents in terms of coherent entities rather than strings, obtaining the most salient entities for each document is not only an important end task in itself but also vital for…
Debate and deliberation play essential roles in politics and government, but most models presume that debates are won mainly via superior style or agenda control. Ideally, however, debates would be won on the merits, as a function of which…
We describe a context-sensitive model of choice, in which the selection process is shaped not only by the attractiveness of items but also by their semantics ('salience'). All items are ranked according to a relation of salience, and a…