Related papers: What makes an entity salient in discourse?
In recent years, deep saliency models have made significant progress in predicting human visual attention. However, the mechanisms behind their success remain largely unexplained due to the opaque nature of deep neural networks. In this…
Professionalism is a crucial yet underexplored dimension of expert communication, particularly in high-stakes domains like finance. This paper investigates how linguistic features can be leveraged to model and evaluate professionalism in…
Detecting persuasion in argumentative text is a challenging task with important implications for understanding human communication. This work investigates the role of persuasion strategies - such as Attack on reputation, Distraction, and…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
Structured sentences are important expressions in human writings and dialogues. Previous works on neural text generation fused semantic and structural information by encoding the entire sentence into a mixed hidden representation. However,…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers tend to distribute information evenly across linguistic units to achieve efficient communication. Of course, information rate in texts and discourses is not perfectly…
Dialogue summarization task involves summarizing long conversations while preserving the most salient information. Real-life dialogues often involve naturally occurring variations (e.g., repetitions, hesitations) and existing dialogue…
Explanations are central to everyday life, and are a topic of growing interest in the AI community. To investigate the process of providing natural language explanations, we leverage the dynamics of the /r/ChangeMyView subreddit to build a…
Time pressure and topic negotiation may impose constraints on how people leverage discourse relations (DRs) in spontaneous conversational contexts. In this work, we adapt a system of DRs for written language to spontaneous dialogue using…
Factual consistency is one of important summary evaluation dimensions, especially as summary generation becomes more fluent and coherent. The ESTIME measure, recently proposed specifically for factual consistency, achieves high correlations…
To answer a question, language models often need to integrate prior knowledge learned during pretraining and new information presented in context. We hypothesize that models perform this integration in a predictable way across different…
We propose a computational framework for identifying linguistic aspects of politeness. Our starting point is a new corpus of requests annotated for politeness, which we use to evaluate aspects of politeness theory and to uncover new…
This paper examines gender and age salience and (stereo)typicality in British English talk with the aim to predict gender and age categories based on lexical, phrasal and turn-taking features. We examine the SpokenBNC, a corpus of around…
Tables provide valuable knowledge that can be used to verify textual statements. While a number of works have considered table-based fact verification, direct alignments of tabular data with tokens in textual statements are rarely…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used as conversational agents, exploiting their capabilities in various sectors such as education, law, medicine, and more. However, LLMs are often subjected to context-shifting behaviour, resulting…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
Scalar adjectives pertain to various domain scales and vary in intensity within each scale (e.g. certain is more intense than likely on the likelihood scale). Scalar implicatures arise from the consideration of alternative statements which…
This paper addresses the problem of dialogue reasoning with contextualized commonsense inference. We curate CICERO, a dataset of dyadic conversations with five types of utterance-level reasoning-based inferences: cause, subsequent event,…
Grammatical features such as number and gender serve two central functions in human languages. While they encode salient semantic attributes like numerosity and animacy, they also offload sentence processing cost by predictably linking…