Related papers: What makes an entity salient in discourse?
In recommender systems, the presentation of explanations plays a crucial role in supporting users' decision-making processes. Although numerous existing studies have focused on the effects (transparency or persuasiveness) of explanation…
Pro-drop is commonly seen in many languages, but its discourse motivations have not been well characterized. Inspired by the topic chain theory in Chinese, this study shows how character-verb usage continuity distinguishes dropped pronouns…
Forecasting tasks surrounding the dynamics of low-level human behavior are of significance to multiple research domains. In such settings, methods for explaining specific forecasts can enable domain experts to gain insights into the…
Modeling discourse -- the linguistic phenomena that go beyond individual sentences, is a fundamental yet challenging aspect of natural language processing (NLP). However, existing evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on the evaluation of…
Discourse relations bind smaller linguistic elements into coherent texts. However, automatically identifying discourse relations is difficult, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked sentences. A more subtle challenge…
The wide use of black-box models in natural language processing brings great challenges to the understanding of the decision basis, the trustworthiness of the prediction results, and the improvement of the model performance. The words in…
We conducted an empirical analysis into the relation between control and discourse structure. We applied control criteria to four dialogues and identified 3 levels of discourse structure. We investigated the mechanism for changing control…
While there is an abundance of popular writing targeted to podcast creators on how to speak in ways that engage their listeners, there has been little data-driven analysis of podcasts that relates linguistic style with listener engagement.…
Despite a long tradition of work on extractive summarization, which by nature aims to recover the most important propositions in a text, little work has been done on operationalizing graded proposition salience in naturally occurring data.…
Opinion formation and persuasion in argumentation are affected by three major factors: the argument itself, the source of the argument, and the properties of the audience. Understanding the role of each and the interplay between them is…
Recent research in psycholinguistics has provided increasing evidence that humans predict upcoming content. Prediction also affects perception and might be a key to robustness in human language processing. In this paper, we investigate the…
Salience Estimation aims to predict term importance in documents. Due to few existing human-annotated datasets and the subjective notion of salience, previous studies typically generate pseudo-ground truth for evaluation. However, our…
High-dimensional distributed semantic spaces have proven useful and effective for aggregating and processing visual, auditory, and lexical information for many tasks related to human-generated data. Human language makes use of a large and…
Identity spans multiple dimensions; however, the relative salience of a dimension of identity can vary markedly from person to person. Furthermore, there is often a difference between one's internal identity (how salient different aspects…
Word-level saliency explanations ("heat maps over words") are often used to communicate feature-attribution in text-based models. Recent studies found that superficial factors such as word length can distort human interpretation of the…
Generating a long, coherent text such as a paragraph requires a high-level control of different levels of relations between sentences (e.g., tense, coreference). We call such a logical connection between sentences as a (paragraph) flow. In…
We advance a novel explanation of similarity-based interference effects in subject-verb and reflexive pronoun agreement processing, grounded in surprisal values computed from a pretrained large-scale Transformer model, GPT-2. Specifically,…
We analyze the extent to which internal representations of language models (LMs) identify and distinguish mentions of named entities, focusing on the many-to-many correspondence between entities and their mentions. We first formulate two…
The nouns of our language refer to either concrete entities (like a table) or abstract concepts (like justice or love), and cognitive psychology has established that concreteness influences how words are processed. Accordingly,…
While there has been significant progress towards modelling coherence in written discourse, the work in modelling spoken discourse coherence has been quite limited. Unlike the coherence in text, coherence in spoken discourse is also…