Related papers: What makes an entity salient in discourse?

One precondition of effective oral communication is that words should be pronounced clearly, especially for non-native speakers. Word stress is the key to clear and correct English, and misplacement of syllable stress may lead to…

Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to…

Recent developments in machine learning have introduced models that approach human performance at the cost of increased architectural complexity. Efforts to make the rationales behind the models' predictions transparent have inspired an…

Detecting factual inconsistency for long document summarization remains challenging, given the complex structure of the source article and long summary length. In this work, we study factual inconsistency errors and connect them with a line…

Though English sentences are typically inflexible vis-\`a-vis word order, constituents often show far more variability in ordering. One prominent theory presents the notion that constituent ordering is directly correlated with constituent…

Research on metaphorical language has shown ties between abstractness and emotionality with regard to metaphoricity; prior work is however limited to the word and sentence levels, and up to date there is no empirical study establishing the…

This study investigates the acoustic features of sarcasm and disentangles the interplay between the propensity of an utterance being used sarcastically and the presence of prosodic cues signaling sarcasm. Using a dataset of sarcastic…

Visual highlighting can guide user attention in complex interfaces. However, its effectiveness under limited attentional capacities is underexplored. This paper examines the joint impact of visual highlighting (permanent and dynamic) and…

This paper investigates the capability of LLMs in storytelling, focusing on narrative development and plot progression. We introduce a novel computational framework to analyze narratives through three discourse-level aspects: i) story arcs,…

Events in a narrative differ in salience: some are more important to the story than others. Estimating event salience is useful for tasks such as story generation, and as a tool for text analysis in narratology and folkloristics. To compute…

Statistical spoken dialogue systems usually rely on a single- or multi-domain dialogue model that is restricted in its capabilities of modelling complex dialogue structures, e.g., relations. In this work, we propose a novel dialogue model…

Discourse relations bind smaller linguistic units into coherent texts. However, automatically identifying discourse relations is difficult, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked arguments. A more subtle challenge is…

Persistent language-model agents increasingly combine tool use, tiered memory, reflective prompting, and runtime adaptation. In such systems, behavior is shaped not only by current prompts but by mutable internal conditions that influence…

Human dialogue often contains utterances having meanings entirely different from the sentences used and are clearly understood by the interlocutors. But in human-computer interactions, the machine fails to understand the implicated meaning…

Speaker embedding has been a fundamental feature for speaker-related tasks such as verification, clustering, and diarization. Traditionally, speaker embeddings are represented as fixed vectors in high-dimensional space. This could lead to…

Language models are often used as the backbone of modern dialogue systems. These models are pre-trained on large amounts of written fluent language. Repetition is typically penalised when evaluating language model generations. However, it…

The substantial growth of online learning, in particular, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), supports research into the development of better models for effective learning. Learner 'confusion' is among one of the identified aspects…

Numerous online conversations are produced on a daily basis, resulting in a pressing need to conversation understanding. As a basis to structure a discussion, we identify the responding relations in the conversation discourse, which link…

One of the key communicative competencies is the ability to maintain fluency in monologic speech and the ability to produce sophisticated language to argue a position convincingly. In this paper we aim to predict TED talk-style affective…

The recent abundance of conversational data on the Web and elsewhere calls for effective NLP systems for dialog understanding. Complete utterance-level understanding often requires context understanding, defined by nearby utterances. In…