Related papers: Discourse Coherence and Shifting Centers in Japane…

Throughout a conversation, participants make choices that can orient the flow of the interaction. Such choices are particularly salient in the consequential domain of crisis counseling, where a difficulty for counselors is balancing between…

When translating from speech, special consideration for conversational speech phenomena such as disfluencies is necessary. Most machine translation training data consists of well-formed written texts, causing issues when translating…

Despite the surging demands for multilingual task-oriented dialog systems (e.g., Alexa, Google Home), there has been less research done in multilingual or cross-lingual scenarios. Hence, we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-oriented…

Large Language Models produce sequences learned as statistical patterns from large corpora. In order not to reproduce corpus biases, after initial training models must be aligned with human values, preferencing certain continuations over…

We aim to develop a technology that makes the sound from earphones and headphones easier to hear without increasing the sound pressure or eliminating ambient noise. To this end, we focus on harnessing the phenomenon of binaural unmasking…

Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and…

In this study, we evaluated the performance of the state-of-the-art sequence tagging grammar error detection and correction model (SeqTagger) using Japanese university students' writing samples. With an automatic annotation toolkit, ERRANT,…

We describe an algorithm for automatic classification of idiomatic and literal expressions. Our starting point is that words in a given text segment, such as a paragraph, that are highranking representatives of a common topic of discussion…

Word reordering is one of the most difficult aspects of statistical machine translation (SMT), and an important factor of its quality and efficiency. Despite the vast amount of research published to date, the interest of the community in…

This paper shows the necessity of distinguishing different referential uses of noun phrases in machine translation. We argue that differentiating between the generic, referential and ascriptive uses of noun phrases is the minimum necessary…

Theoretical linguists have suggested that some languages (e.g., Chinese and Japanese) are "cooler" than other languages based on the observation that the intended meaning of phrases in these languages depends more on their contexts. As a…

Code-switching, the alternation of languages within a conversation or utterance, is a common communicative phenomenon that occurs in multilingual communities across the world. This survey reviews computational approaches for code-switched…

Ethics regarding social bias has recently thrown striking issues in natural language processing. Especially for gender-related topics, the need for a system that reduces the model bias has grown in areas such as image captioning, content…

Existing dialog datasets contain a sequence of utterances and responses without any explicit background knowledge associated with them. This has resulted in the development of models which treat conversation as a sequence-to-sequence…

This study analyzes the usage of Japanese gendered language on Twitter. Starting from a collection of 408 million Japanese tweets from 2015 till 2019 and an additional sample of 2355 manually classified Twitter accounts timelines into…

Condescending language use is caustic; it can bring dialogues to an end and bifurcate communities. Thus, systems for condescension detection could have a large positive impact. A challenge here is that condescension is often impossible to…

People in conversation entrain their linguistic behaviours through spontaneous alignment mechanisms [7] - both in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (CMC) [8]. In CMC, one of the mechanisms through which linguistic entrainment…

Entities in discourse vary in salience: main participants, objects and locations stay prominent, while others are quickly forgotten, raising questions about how humans signal and infer discourse-level salience. Using a graded…

Large language models (LLMs) produce responses rated as highly empathic in single-turn settings (Ayers et al., 2023; Lee et al., 2024), yet they are also known to be formulaic generators that reuse the same lexical patterns, syntactic…

Previous approaches to training syntax-based sentiment classification models required phrase-level annotated corpora, which are not readily available in many languages other than English. Thus, we propose the use of tree-structured Long…