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Cross-language entity linking grounds mentions in multiple languages to a single-language knowledge base. We propose a neural ranking architecture for this task that uses multilingual BERT representations of the mention and the context in a…
Performing event and entity coreference resolution across documents vastly increases the number of candidate mentions, making it intractable to do the full $n^2$ pairwise comparisons. Existing approaches simplify by considering coreference…
In this paper, I discuss machine translation of English text into Turkish, a relatively ``free'' word order language. I present algorithms that determine the topic and the focus of each target sentence (using salience (Centering Theory),…
Political polarization in public space can seriously hamper the function and the integrity of contemporary democratic societies. In this paper, we propose a novel measure of such polarization, which, by way of simple topic modelling,…
There are many discussions held during political meetings, and a large number of utterances for various topics is included in their transcripts. We need to read all of them if we want to follow speakers\' intentions or opinions about a…
Alignment of the language model with human preferences is a common approach to making a language model useful to end users. However, most alignment work is done in English, and human preference datasets are dominated by English, reflecting…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
In recent years, several high-performance conversational systems have been proposed based on the Transformer encoder-decoder model. Although previous studies analyzed the effects of the model parameters and the decoding method on subjective…
In this paper, I give an account of some phenomena of pronominalization in Italian in terms of centering theory. After a general introduction to the Italian pronominal system, I will review centering, and then show how the original rules…
Humans convey their intentions through the usage of both verbal and nonverbal behaviors during face-to-face communication. Speaker intentions often vary dynamically depending on different nonverbal contexts, such as vocal patterns and…
Discourse segmentation is a crucial step in building end-to-end discourse parsers. However, discourse segmenters only exist for a few languages and domains. Typically they only detect intra-sentential segment boundaries, assuming gold…
Zero pronouns (ZPs) are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages, but should be recalled in non-pro-drop languages. This discourse phenomenon poses a significant challenge for machine translation (MT) when translating texts from pro-drop to…
The topic of "negative end" of change is, contrary to the fields of innovation and emergence, largely under-researched. Yet, it has lately started to gain an increasing attention from language scholars worldwide. The main focus of this…
Human talkers often address listeners with language-comprehension challenges, such as hard-of-hearing or non-native adults, by globally slowing down their speech. However, it remains unclear whether this strategy actually makes speech more…
The intelligibility of speech relies on the ability of interlocutors to dynamically align their expectations about the rates at which informative changes in signals occur. Exactly how this is achieved remains an open question. We propose…
By strictest interpretation, theories of both centering and intonational meaning fail to predict the existence of pitch accented pronominals. Yet they occur felicitously in spoken discourse. To explain this, I emphasize the dual functions…
Large-scale open-domain dialogue systems such as PLATO-2 have achieved state-of-the-art scores in both English and Chinese. However, little work explores whether such dialogue systems also work well in the Japanese language. In this work,…
Dialogue topic segmentation is critical in several dialogue modeling problems. However, popular unsupervised approaches only exploit surface features in assessing topical coherence among utterances. In this work, we address this limitation…
In this work, we use language modeling to investigate the factors that influence insertional code-switching. Code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between one language variety (the primary language) and another (the secondary…
Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking can be relatively effortful. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate…