Related papers: What makes an entity salient in discourse?

This paper investigates the use of word surprisal, a measure of the predictability of a word in a given context, as a feature to aid speech synthesis prosody. We explore how word surprisal extracted from large language models (LLMs)…

Attention mechanism plays a dominant role in the sequence generation models and has been used to improve the performance of machine translation and abstractive text summarization. Different from neural machine translation, in the task of…

Intimacy is a fundamental aspect of how we relate to others in social settings. Language encodes the social information of intimacy through both topics and other more subtle cues (such as linguistic hedging and swearing). Here, we introduce…

Americans spend about a third of their time online, with many participating in online conversations on social and political issues. We hypothesize that social media arguments on such issues may be more engaging and persuasive than…

Much of the success of modern language models depends on finding a suitable prompt to instruct the model. Until now, it has been largely unknown how variations in the linguistic expression of prompts affect these models. This study…

Annotation of discourse relations is a known difficult task, especially for non-expert annotators. In this paper, we investigate novice annotators' uncertainty on the annotation of discourse relations on spoken conversational data. We find…

Disfluencies (i.e. interruptions in the regular flow of speech), are ubiquitous to spoken discourse. Fillers ("uh", "um") are disfluencies that occur the most frequently compared to other kinds of disfluencies. Yet, to the best of our…

While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a…

Saliency detection has drawn a lot of attention of researchers in various fields over the past several years. Saliency is the perceptual quality that makes an object, person to draw the attention of humans at the very sight. Salient object…

Although much has been said about parallelism in discourse, a formal, computational theory of parallelism structure is still outstanding. In this paper, we present a theory which given two parallel utterances predicts which are the parallel…

Do speakers of different languages talk differently about what they see? Behavioural and cognitive studies report cultural effects on perception; however, these are mostly limited in scope and hard to replicate. In this work, we conduct the…

In this work, we systematically investigate how well current models of coherence can capture aspects of text implicated in discourse organisation. We devise two datasets of various linguistic alterations that undermine coherence and test…

How best to evaluate a saliency model's ability to predict where humans look in images is an open research question. The choice of evaluation metric depends on how saliency is defined and how the ground truth is represented. Metrics differ…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as scholar recommenders, shaping who is seen as an expert in academia. Existing audits remain English-centric, single discipline, and persona-agnostic, leaving the source of output…

As public discourse continues to move and grow online, conversations about divisive topics on social media platforms have also increased. These divisive topics prompt both contentious and non-contentious conversations. Although what…

Coherent discourse is distinguished from a mere collection of utterances by the satisfaction of a diverse set of constraints, for example choice of expression, logical relation between denoted events, and implicit compatibility with…

One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…

Humans quite frequently interact with conversational agents. The rapid advancement in generative language modeling through neural networks has helped advance the creation of intelligent conversational agents. Researchers typically evaluate…

Conversational information-seeking (CIS) is an emerging paradigm for knowledge acquisition and exploratory search. Traditional web search interfaces enable easy exploration of entities, but this is limited in conversational settings due to…

Classroom discussions in English Language Arts have a positive effect on students' reading, writing and reasoning skills. Although prior work has largely focused on teacher talk and student-teacher interactions, we focus on three…