Related papers: Integrating Gricean and Attentional Constraints
Political discourse datasets are important for gaining political insights, analyzing communication strategies or social science phenomena. Although numerous political discourse corpora exist, comprehensive, high-quality, annotated datasets…
Commonsense inference to understand and explain human language is a fundamental research problem in natural language processing. Explaining human conversations poses a great challenge as it requires contextual understanding, planning,…
Anaphoric expressions, such as pronouns and referential descriptions, are situated with respect to the linguistic context of prior turns, as well as, the immediate visual environment. However, a speaker's referential descriptions do not…
There are several major proposals for treating donkey anaphora such as discourse representation theory and the likes, or E-Type theories and the likes. Every one of them works well for a set of specific examples that they use to demonstrate…
We describe and experimentally evaluate a method for automatically clustering words according to their distribution in particular syntactic contexts. Deterministic annealing is used to find lowest distortion sets of clusters. As the…
This work presents a novel approach for speaker diarization to leverage lexical information provided by automatic speech recognition. We propose a speaker diarization system that can incorporate word-level speaker turn probabilities with…
In this thesis, we present a statistical language model for resolving speech repairs, intonational boundaries and discourse markers. Rather than finding the best word interpretation for an acoustic signal, we redefine the speech recognition…
Standard machine translation systems process sentences in isolation and hence ignore extra-sentential information, even though extended context can both prevent mistakes in ambiguous cases and improve translation coherence. We introduce a…
We propose an interpretable, graph-based framework for analyzing semantic shift in diachronic corpora. For each target word and time slice, we induce a word-centered semantic network that integrates distributional similarity from diachronic…
A key challenge of dialog systems research is to effectively and efficiently adapt to new domains. A scalable paradigm for adaptation necessitates the development of generalizable models that perform well in few-shot settings. In this…
Centering theory (CT; Grosz et al., 1995) provides a linguistic analysis of the structure of discourse. According to the theory, local coherence of discourse arises from the manner and extent to which successive utterances make reference to…
Anaphora and ellipses are two common phenomena in dialogues. Without resolving referring expressions and information omission, dialogue systems may fail to generate consistent and coherent responses. Traditionally, anaphora is resolved by…
Automatic classification of disordered speech can provide an objective tool for identifying the presence and severity of speech impairment. Classification approaches can also help identify hard-to-recognize speech samples to teach ASR…
Introducing attentional mechanism in neural network is a powerful concept, and has achieved impressive results in many natural language processing tasks. However, most of the existing models impose attentional distribution on a flat…
Dialogue discourse parsing aims to identify and analyze discourse relations between the utterances within dialogues. However, linguistic features in dialogues, such as omission and idiom, frequently introduce ambiguities that obscure the…
Novel metaphor comprehension involves complex semantic processes and linguistic creativity, making it an interesting task for studying language models (LMs). This study investigates whether surprisal, a probabilistic measure of…
When reading a text, it is common to become stuck on unfamiliar words and phrases, such as polysemous words with novel senses, rarely used idioms, internet slang, or emerging entities. If we humans cannot figure out the meaning of those…
We rely on the strength of linguistic and philosophical perspectives in constructing a framework that offers a unified explanation for presuppositions and existential commitment. We use a rich ontology and a set of methodological principles…
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…
We describe a data-driven approach for automatically explaining new, non-standard English expressions in a given sentence, building on a large dataset that includes 15 years of crowdsourced examples from UrbanDictionary.com. Unlike prior…