Related papers: Algorithms for Analysing the Temporal Structure of…
We discuss the usual account of causal structure that relies on the temporal precedence constraint between cause-effect pairs. In particular, we consider the subtle interplay between local and global characters of time and causality encoded…
We describe an implementation in Carpenter's typed feature formalism, ALE, of a discourse grammar of the kind proposed by Scha, Polanyi, et al. We examine their method for resolving parallelism-dependent anaphora and show that there is a…
Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies show that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop differentiated…
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…
In a spoken dialogue system, dialogue state tracker (DST) components track the state of the conversation by updating a distribution of values associated with each of the slots being tracked for the current user turn, using the interactions…
Pretrained language models based on the transformer architecture have shown great success in NLP. Textual training data often comes from the web and is thus tagged with time-specific information, but most language models ignore this…
We present a unified framework for the declarative analysis of structured communications. By relying on a (timed) concurrent constraint programming language, we show that in addition to the usual operational techniques from process calculi,…
We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with…
Discourse structures are beneficial for various NLP tasks such as dialogue understanding, question answering, sentiment analysis, and so on. This paper presents a deep sequential model for parsing discourse dependency structures of…
The compositionality of meaning extends beyond the single sentence. Just as words combine to form the meaning of sentences, so do sentences combine to form the meaning of paragraphs, dialogues and general discourse. We introduce both a…
Temporal information conveyed by language describes how the world around us changes through time. Events, durations and times are all temporal elements that can be viewed as intervals. These intervals are sometimes temporally related in…
With a growing number of BERTology work analyzing different components of pre-trained language models, we extend this line of research through an in-depth analysis of discourse information in pre-trained and fine-tuned language models. We…
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
Although temporal tagging is still dominated by rule-based systems, there have been recent attempts at neural temporal taggers. However, all of them focus on monolingual settings. In this paper, we explore multilingual methods for the…
Despite the number of NLP studies dedicated to thematic fit estimation, little attention has been paid to the related task of composing and updating verb argument expectations. The few exceptions have mostly modeled this phenomenon with…
Besides temporal information explicitly available in verbs and adjuncts, the temporal interpretation of a text also depends on general world knowledge and default assumptions. We will present a theory for describing the relation between, on…
We introduce a temporal model for reasoning on disjunctive metric constraints on intervals and time points in temporal contexts. This temporal model is composed of a labeled temporal algebra and its reasoning algorithms. The labeled…
We propose an efficient neural framework for sentence-level discourse analysis in accordance with Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Our framework comprises a discourse segmenter to identify the elementary discourse units (EDU) in a text,…
In this paper we present RTMML, a markup language for the tenses of verbs and temporal relations between verbs. There is a richness to tense in language that is not fully captured by existing temporal annotation schemata. Following…
We present work in progress on the temporal progression of compositionality in noun-noun compounds. Previous work has proposed computational methods for determining the compositionality of compounds. These methods try to automatically…