Related papers: Stressed and Unstressed Pronouns: Complementary Pr…
An account of utterance interpretation in discourse needs to face the issue of how the discourse context controls the space of interacting preferences. Assuming a discourse processing architecture that distinguishes the grammar and…
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…
Despite their success in speech processing, neural networks often operate as black boxes, prompting the question: what informs their decisions, and how can we interpret them? This work examines this issue in the context of lexical stress. A…
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…
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…
In this paper, we study the effect of preferences in abstract argumentation under a claim-centric perspective. Recent work has revealed that semantical and computational properties can change when reasoning is performed on claim-level…
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 speech communication, how something is said (paralinguistic information) is as crucial as what is said (linguistic information). As a type of paralinguistic information, English speech uses sentence stress, the heaviest prominence within…
We present an extension-based approach for computing and verifying preferences in an abstract argumentation system. Although numerous argumentation semantics have been developed previously for identifying acceptable sets of arguments from…
In order to enrich dynamic semantic theories with a `pragmatic' capacity, we combine dynamic and nonmonotonic (preferential) logics in a modal logic setting. We extend a fragment of Van Benthem and De Rijke's dynamic modal logic with…
This paper presents a theory and a computational implementation for generating prosodically appropriate synthetic speech in response to database queries. Proper distinctions of contrast and emphasis are expressed in an intonation contour…
Selectional preference learning methods have usually focused on word-to-class relations, e.g., a verb selects as its subject a given nominal class. This paper extends previous statistical models to class-to-class preferences, and presents a…
This work investigates whether modern speech models are sensitive to prosodic emphasis - whether they encode emphasized and neutral words in systematically different ways. Prior work typically relies on isolated acoustic correlates (e.g.,…
Meaning of a word varies from one domain to another. Despite this important domain dependence in word semantics, existing word representation learning methods are bound to a single domain. Given a pair of \emph{source}-\emph{target}…
The paper presents a constraint based semantic formalism for HPSG. The syntax-semantics interface directly implements syntactic conditions on quantifier scoping and distributivity. The construction of semantic representations is guided by…
Surprisal theory links human processing effort to the predictability of an upcoming linguistic unit, but empirical work often leaves the notion of a unit underspecified. In practice, experimental stimuli are segmented into linguistically…
Concept-based explanation methods aim at making machine learning models more transparent by finding the most important semantic features of an input (e.g., colors, patterns, shapes) for a given prediction task. However, these methods…
Several recent studies have tested the use of transformer language model representations to infer prosodic features for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). While these studies have explored prosody in general, in this work, we look specifically…
In conversational speech, the acoustic signal provides cues that help listeners disambiguate difficult parses. For automatically parsing spoken utterances, we introduce a model that integrates transcribed text and acoustic-prosodic features…
We analyse preference inference, through consistency, for general preference languages based on lexicographic models. We identify a property, which we call strong compositionality, that applies for many natural kinds of preference…