Related papers: What makes an entity salient in discourse?
Certainty and uncertainty are fundamental to science communication. Hedges have widely been used as proxies for uncertainty. However, certainty is a complex construct, with authors expressing not only the degree but the type and aspects of…
While previous linguistic and psycholinguistic research on space has mainly analyzed spatial relations, the studies reported in this paper focus on how language distinguishes among spatial entities. Descriptive and experimental studies…
Large language models (LLMs) can reliably distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, but how grammatical knowledge is represented within the models remains an open question. We investigate whether different syntactic phenomena…
In this work, we propose to use linguistic annotations as a basis for a \textit{Discourse-Aware Semantic Self-Attention} encoder that we employ for reading comprehension on long narrative texts. We extract relations between discourse units,…
Discourse relations among arguments reveal logical structures of a debate conversation. However, no prior work has explicitly studied how the sequence of discourse relations influence a claim's impact. This paper empirically shows that the…
With the growing humanlike nature of dialog agents, people are now engaging in extended conversations that can stretch from brief moments to substantial periods of time. Understanding the factors that contribute to sustaining these…
Session types describe the structure of communications implemented by channels. In particular, they prescribe the sequence of communications, whether they are input or output actions, and the type of value exchanged. Crucial to any language…
When people converse about social or political topics, similar arguments are often paraphrased by different speakers, across many different conversations. Debate websites produce curated summaries of arguments on such topics; these…
Text documents are structured on multiple levels of detail: individual words are related by syntax, but larger units of text are related by discourse structure. Existing language models generally fail to account for discourse structure, but…
In meetings where important decisions get made, what items receive more attention may influence the outcome. We examine how different types of rhetorical (de-)emphasis -- including hedges, superlatives, and contrastive conjunctions --…
Understanding the ways in which information achieves widespread public awareness is a research question of significant interest. We consider whether, and how, the way in which the information is phrased --- the choice of words and sentence…
Discourse particles are crucial elements that subtly shape the meaning of text. These words, often polyfunctional, give rise to nuanced and often quite disparate semantic/discourse effects, as exemplified by the diverse uses of the particle…
Speakers of all human languages make use of grammatical devices to express attributional qualities, feelings, and opinions as well as to provide meta-commentary on topics in discourse. In general, linguists refer to this category as…
Social media datasets make it possible to rapidly quantify collective attention to emerging topics and breaking news, such as crisis events. Collective attention is typically measured by aggregate counts, such as the number of posts that…
Prompt engineering is widely used to shape large language model behavior, yet it is often treated as a practical heuristic rather than as a form of natural-language control. This paper develops a cognitive-semantic account in which prompts…
News articles typically mention numerous entities, a large fraction of which are tangential to the story. Detecting the salience of entities in articles is thus important to applications such as news search, analysis and summarization. In…
Second-order statistical methods show very good results for automatic speaker identification in controlled recording conditions. These approaches are generally used on the entire speech material available. In this paper, we study the…
Citations are a key indicator of research impact but are shaped by factors beyond intrinsic research quality, including prestige, social networks, and thematic similarity. While the Matthew Effect explains how prestige accumulates and…
The problem of understanding people's participation in real-world events has been a subject of active research and can offer valuable insights for human behavior analysis and event-related recommendation/advertisement. In this work, we…
Predicting the structure of a discourse is challenging because relations between discourse segments are often implicit and thus hard to distinguish computationally. I extend previous work to classify implicit discourse relations by…