Related papers: Japanese Discourse and the Process of Centering
In languages such as Japanese, the use of {\it zeros}, unexpressed arguments of the verb, in utterances that shift the topic involves a risk that the meaning intended by the speaker may not be transparent to the hearer. However, this…
In this paper we propose a computational treatment of the resolution of zero pronouns in Japanese discourse, using an adaptation of the centering algorithm. We are able to factor language-specific dependencies into one parameter of the…
Particles fullfill several distinct central roles in the Japanese language. They can mark arguments as well as adjuncts, can be functional or have semantic funtions. There is, however, no straightforward matching from particles to…
Analyzing how human beings resolve syntactic ambiguity has long been an issue of interest in the field of linguistics. It is, at the same time, one of the most challenging issues for spoken language understanding (SLU) systems as well. As…
Sentence-final particles serve an essential role in spoken Japanese because they express the speaker's mental attitudes toward a proposition and/or an interlocutor. They are acquired at early ages and occur very frequently in everyday…
The important part of semantics of complex sentence is captured as relations among semantic roles in subordinate and main clause respectively. However if there can be relations between every pair of semantic roles, the amount of computation…
Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of…
The main aim of translation is an accurate transfer of meaning so that the result is not only grammatically and lexically correct but also communicatively adequate. This paper stresses the need for discourse analysis the aim of which is to…
We present CALLS, a Japanese speech corpus that considers phone calls in a customer center as a new domain of empathetic spoken dialogue. The existing STUDIES corpus covers only empathetic dialogue between a teacher and student in a school.…
Discourse signals are often implicit, leaving it up to the interpreter to draw the required inferences. At the same time, discourse is embedded in a social context, meaning that interpreters apply their own assumptions and beliefs when…
Centering theory posits a discourse center, a distinguished discourse entity that is the topic of a discourse. A simplified version of this theory is developed in a Dynamic Semantics framework. In the resulting system, the mechanism of…
In this paper, we present a method of estimating referents of demonstrative pronouns, personal pronouns, and zero pronouns in Japanese sentences using examples, surface expressions, topics and foci. Unlike conventional work which was…
One of the necessary extensions to the centering model is a mechanism to handle pronouns with intrasentential antecedents. Existing centering models deal only with discourses consisting of simple sentences. It leaves unclear how to delimit…
We present a multilingual, continuous backchannel prediction model for Japanese, English, and Chinese, and use it to investigate cross-linguistic timing behavior. The model is Transformer-based and operates at the frame level, jointly…
The summarization of conversation, that is, discourse over discourse, elevates pragmatic considerations as a pervasive limitation of both summarization and other applications of contemporary conversational AI. Building on impressive…
Speakers sometimes omit certain arguments of a predicate in a sentence; such omission is especially frequent in pro-drop languages. This study addresses a question about ellipsis -- what can explain the native speakers' ellipsis decisions?…
Maintaining information in context is essential in successful real-time language comprehension, but maintenance is cognitively costly and can slow processing. We hypothesize that rational language users selectively maintain information that…
In this paper we present a formalization of the centering approach to modeling attentional structure in discourse and use it as the basis for an algorithm to track discourse context and bind pronouns. As described in Grosz, Joshi and…
Contrastive learning is widely used for sentence representation learning. Despite this prevalence, most studies have focused exclusively on English and few concern domain adaptation for domain-specific downstream tasks, especially for…
Syntactic elements, such as word order and case markers, are fundamental in natural language processing. Recent studies show that syntactic information boosts language model performance and offers clues for people to understand their…