SlowGuess/ACL_2020_OCR huggingface dataset:
Sean Trott
sttrott@ucsd.edu
Nancy Chang
ncchang@google.com
Tiago Timponi Torrent
Federal University of Juiz de Fora
tiagotorrent@ufjf.edu.br
Nathan Schneider
nathan.schneider@georgetown.edu
Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding—namely, that the way something is expressed reflects different ways of conceptualizing or construing the information being conveyed. We first define this phenomenon more precisely, drawing on considerable prior work in theoretical cognitive semantics and psycholinguistics. We then survey some dimensions of construed meaning and show how insights from construal could inform theoretical and practical work in NLP.
Natural language is a versatile tool for allowing humans to express all manner of communicative intents, from simple descriptions of the entities and situations in their direct experience to elaborate rhetorical flights of fancy. Many NLP applications, such as information extraction, question answering, summarization, and dialogue systems, have restricted their scope to what one might call objective information content—relatively uncontroversial facts that systems can infer from an utterance, store in a database and reason about.
While it is tempting to equate such information with the meaning of an utterance, a large body of literature in linguistics and psycholinguistics argues that an utterance conveys much more than a simple set of facts: it carries with it a halo of intimations arising from the speaker's choices, including considerations of perspective, emphasis, and framing. That is, linguistic choices subtly color meaning; far from merely conveying objective facts, they reflect how speakers conceptualize meaning and affect listeners' interpretations in predictable ways.
Take, for example, this metaphor-rich portrayal of a newborn as a tyrant over her parental subjects:
(1) Nora's arrival brought a regime change. Life under her adorable tyranny was filled with squawking, swaddling and ceaseless sleep-input-output cycles. We were relieved when she relaxed her tiny iron grip.
This report of new parenthood describes a major life change along with everyday caregiver routines, but its emphasis is on the parents' experience of being suppressed (under) and controlled (grip) by a creature who is cast, variously, as a tyrant (regime), a bird (squawk), and a relentless machine (sleep-input-output cycles, iron grip)—albeit a (subjectively) adorable one.
The power of linguistic choices to shape understanding is also evident in more mundane (and well-studied) examples:
(2) a. Chuck bought a car from Jerry.  
Jerry sold a car to Chuck.  
Jerry paid Chuck for the car.
b. I work at Microsoft.
I work for Microsoft.
c. The statue stands in the plaza.
The statue is standing in the plaza.
Each set includes sentences that convey roughly the same facts—i.e. they could describe the same scenario—but nonetheless differ in various respects. The familiar framing differences between buy/sell/ pay (2a) focus attention on different participants and subevents in a commercial transaction. (2b) involves a subtler difference in emphasis, where the choice of at highlights the location of the work, while for evokes how that work benefits the employer. Grammatical marking can also shift event connotations, as illustrated by the stative vs. temporary contrast in (2c).
Such distinctions illustrate the general phenomenon of construal, which we claim has been neglected in NLP. We believe that a proper recog-
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5170-5184
nition of construal would provide a unified framework for addressing a wide range of issues involving meaning and linguistic variation, opening the way to systems that more closely approximate (actually) natural language.
This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical landscape related to construal phenomena and makes the case for its relevance to NLP. After clarifying the terms adopted here ( $\S 2$ ), we lay out a few key dimensions of construed meaning ( $\S 3$ ) and then elaborate on some mechanisms of construal ( $\S 4$ ). A trio of case studies illustrate how different types of construal can challenge NLP systems ( $\S 5$ ). We end with some conclusions and suggestions for how to begin addressing these challenges ( $\S 6$ ).
2 Meaning and construal
Our view of construal and its close companion meaning is rooted in both frame-based and cognitive semantic traditions. The notion that words and other linguistic units evoke background scenes along with specific perspectives on those scenes is captured by Fillmore's (1977) slogan, MEANINGS ARE RELATIVIZED TO SCENES. This idea has deeper consequences than merely assigning different semantic roles to examples like (2a). As Langacker (1993, p. 460) observes, "any given situation can be viewed in multiple if not infinitely many ways. Starting from the same basic conceptual content... we can form an endless variety of specific conceptions by making alternate choices in regard to the many dimensions of construal."
This view of linguistic meaning—which we might call inherently multivalent—is more flexible than in many theoretical and computational treatments, particularly truth-conditional approaches that liken meanings to facts in a database. The visual domain offers a more informative analog: a photographic or artistic rendering of a scene can vary in vantage point, viewing distance, objects in sight or in focus, color and lighting choices, etc. (Langacker, 1993; Talmy, 1988). Context matters, too: a painting hanging on a preschool wall may be received differently if displayed in a museum. Just as there is no one objective, context-independent depiction of a scene, there are many valid ways to present an idea through language.
We thus extend Fillmore's slogan to include all kinds of conceptual content (beyond scenes); the broader communicative context; and the effect of choices made as part of the construal process:
MEANINGS ARE RELATIVIZED TO CONTENT, CONTEXT AND CONSTRUAL.
Below we elaborate on how each of these interrelated factors affects construed meaning.
Conceptual content. We assume that linguistic units can evoke and combine all kinds of conceptual content, including open-ended world knowledge (entities, actions, events, relations, etc.) as well as more schematic structures often associated with grammar and function words. Crucially, concepts must also be amenable to certain kinds of transformation (e.g., shifts in perspective or granularity) as part of construal; see below.
Communicative context. We take meaning to encompass scene-level entities and events, discourse-level information about the interlocutors and their communicative intents, and other phenomena straddling the (fuzzy) semantic-pragmatic boundary, related to attention (e.g., profiling and perspective) and conditions of usage falling under what Fillmore (1985) dubbed "U-Semantics" (in contrast to truth-oriented "T-Semantics").<sup>2</sup>
Contextual factors (e.g., the interlocutors' identity, beliefs, goals, conceptual repertoire, cultural backgrounds) can radically alter construed meaning. On this view, meaning is not arbitrarily subjective, or merely intersubjective; it is also constrained by all aspects of the communicative context.
Construal. We define construal as a dynamic process of meaning construction, in which speakers and hearers encode and decode, respectively, some intended meaning in a given communicative context. To do so, they draw on their repertoire of linguistic and conceptual structures, composing and transforming them to build coherent interpretations consistent with the speaker's lexical, grammatical, and other expressive choices.<sup>3</sup>
We take construal to be fundamental to all language use, though how much construal and what
<sup>1</sup>We are not here concerned with precisely how concepts are represented or learned, since we believe the insights related to construal apply broadly across theoretical frameworks.
2For example, only U-Semantics can explain why "the children are on the bus" is preferred over "the children are in the bus" if the bus is in transit, despite referring to the same spatial relationship.
3Both speakers and hearers engage in construal: speakers, in choosing how to present the idea, experience or other content they wish to convey; hearers, in reconstructing that intended meaning. Words like 'analysis' and 'interpretation' should thus be understood as applying to meaning construction by either interlocutor. (We do not focus here on the many differences between comprehension and production.)
kinds of construal vary across interpretations.4 In the simplest cases, the relevant components fit neatly together (à la compositional semantics). But many (or even most) utterances involve a myriad of disparate structures—conceptual, linguistic, and contextual—that may need to be transformed, (re)categorized, or otherwise massaged to be integrated into a single coherent whole.
This conceptual flexibility is not arbitrary: the space of combinatorial options is delimited by **construal operations** defined with respect to certain privileged **construal dimensions**. A number of dimensions and operations have been proposed, many motivated by general cognitive processes; we will review some of these in §3, and illustrate how they are engaged during language use in §4.
This inclusive, flexible view of meaning has broad implications for a wide variety of linguistic phenomena, and many parallels in prior work—far too many to address exhaustively here. We restrict our current scope in several ways: (1) While some aspects of context will be mentioned below, we do not address many phenomena related to pragmatic inference (e.g. politeness, indirect requests). (2) Though many construal dimensions are relevant cross-linguistically, we will not address typological patterns in the lexical, grammatical, and cultural conventions that influence construal. (3) We highlight construal phenomena that are psycholinguistically attested and/or relevant to NLP research.
3 Dimensions of construed meaning
Several (partial) taxonomies of construal dimensions have been proposed in the cognitive linguistics literature (Langacker, 1993; Talmy, 1988; Croft and Wood, 2000; Taylor, 1995; Casad, 1995); see Croft and Cruse (2004) for an overview. We will not attempt to reconcile their many differences in terminology and organization, but instead present selected dimensions most relevant for NLP.
3.1 Perspective
Languages have many ways of describing scenes from a specific PERSPECTIVE (or vantage point). The spatial domain provides clear examples: a cup might be described as being left or right of some other object, depending on whose perspective is adopted; or explicitly marked as being on my/your/
her/Sue's left. Likewise, the same motion event can be described relative to differing deictic centers (e.g., the arrival in (1) can also be viewed as a departure from the hospital).
Perspective can extend beyond the spatial domain. The use of past tense in (1) indicates the speaker's retrospective viewpoint. Differences in opinion, belief state or background have also been treated as perspective shifting.
Talmy's (1988) taxonomy defines a broader version of PERSPECTIVE that includes distribution of attention. Descriptions of a static scene can adopt a dynamic perspective, evoking the experience of moving through the scene ("There is a house every now and then through the valley"); these descriptions can be even more explicit, as with fictive motion ("The road runs through the valley") (Talmy, 1996; Matlock, 2004b).
Psycholinguistic evidence. Grammatical person can affect which perspective a comprehender adopts when reading about an event (Brunyé et al., 2009) and which actions they are most likely to remember (Ditman et al., 2010). Fictive motion can also influence the way comprehenders conceptualize a static scene (Matlock, 2004a,b).
Relevant NLP research. Perspective is crucial for understanding spatial language, e.g. for robotics (§5.2) and other kinds of situated language. Work on grounding referents from natural language descriptions has incorporated visual perspective as another source of information about the intended referent (Devin and Alami, 2016; Ros et al., 2010; Trafton et al., 2005).
3.2 Prominence
PROMINENCE (or salience) refers to the relative attention focused on different elements in a scene (Langacker, 1993; Talmy, 1988). Languages have various devices for highlighting, or profiling, some elements over others (or leaving them implicit). For example, verbs like those in (2a) differ in which elements in a larger scene are preferentially expressed. Similarly, many spatial and temporal adpositions involve an asymmetric profiling of one entity relative to another; thus "the painting is above the piano" and "the piano is below the painting" describe the same situation but differ in focus.
Verbal and constructional alternations also manipulate prominence: The active/passive pair "Microsoft employs me" and "I am employed by Microsoft" differ in profiling the employer and
4 Conventionality plays an important role here: initially creative expressions may require less construal as they become entrenched and their meanings more efficiently accessed.
speaker, respectively. Similarly, transitive "I rolled the ball" vs. intransitive "The ball rolled" differ in whether the ball-roller is even mentioned.
Languages also differ systematically in how motion events are most idiomatically expressed, in particular in whether the main verb encodes (and foregrounds) the manner (English run) or path (Spanishentrar) of motion.
Psycholinguistic evidence. A speaker's decisions about which features to encode in the main verb versus a satellite can influence which events comprehenders find most similar (Billman and Krych, 1998) and which features they tend to remember (Gennari et al., 2002).
In other work, Fausey and Boroditsky (2010) found that descriptions of an accidental event using a transitive construction ("She had ignited the napkin") led participants to assign more blame to the actor involved, and even demand higher financial penalties, than descriptions using non-agentive constructions ("The napkin had ignited").
In language production, there are a number of factors influencing which construction a speaker chooses (e.g., current items in discourse focus (Bresnan et al., 2007), lexical and syntactic priming (Pickering and Ferreira, 2008)).
Relevant NLP research. Recovering implicit information is widely studied in NLP, and deciding which information to express is key to NLG and summarization. We mention three examples exploring how choices of form lend prominence to certain facets of meaning in ways that strongly resonate with our claims about construal.
Greene and Resnik (2009) show that syntactic framing—e.g. active (Prisoner murders guard) vs. passive (Guard is murdered)—is relevant to detecting speaker sentiment about violent events.
Hwang et al. (2017) present an annotation scheme for capturing adpositional meaning construal (as in (2b)). Rather than disambiguate the adposition with a single label, they separately annotate an adposition's role with respect to a scene (e.g. employment) and the aspect of meaning brought into prominence by the adposition itself (e.g., benefactive for vs. locative at). This more flexibly accounts for meaning extensions and resolves some annotator difficulties.
Rohde et al. (2018) studied the construction of discourse coherence by asking participants to insert a conjunction (and, or, but, so, because, before) where none was originally present, before an
explicit discourse adverbial (e.g. in other words). They found that some contexts licensed multiple alternative conjunctions, each expressing a different coherence relation—i.e., distinct implicit relations can be inferred from the same passage. This speaks to the challenge of fully annotating discourse coherence relations and underscores the role of both linguistic and contextual cues in coherence.
3.3 Resolution
Concepts can be described at many levels of RESOLU TION—from highly detailed to more schematic. We include here both specificity (e.g.,  $pug <   dog$ $<$  animal  $<$  being) and granularity (e.g., viewing a forest at the level of individual leaves vs. branches vs. trees). Lexical items and larger expressions can evoke and combine concepts at varying levels of detail ("The gymnast triumphantly landed upright" vs. "A person did something").
Psycholinguistic evidence. Resolution is related to basic-level categories (Rosch et al., 1976; Lakoff, 1987; Hajibayova, 2013), the most culturally and cognitively salient levels of a folk taxonomy. Speakers tend to use basic-level terms for reference (e.g., tree vs. entity/birch), and basic-level categories are more easily and quickly accessed by comprehenders (Mervis and Rosch, 1981; Rosch et al., 1976).
Importantly, however, what counts as basic-level depends on the speaker's domain expertise (Tanaka and Taylor, 1991). Speakers may deviate from basic-level terms under certain circumstances, e.g., when a more specific term is needed for disambiguation (Graf et al., 2016). Conceptualization is thus a flexible process that varies across both individual cognizers (e.g., as a function of their world knowledge) and specific communicative contexts.
Relevant NLP research. Resolution is already recognized as important for applications such as text summarization and dialogue generation (Louis and Nenkova, 2012; Li and Nenkova, 2015; Ko et al., 2019a; Li et al., 2016; Ko et al., 2019b), e.g., in improving human judgments of informativity and relevance (Ko et al., 2019b). Also relevant is work on knowledge representation in the form of inheritance-based ontologies and lexica (e.g., FrameNet (Fillmore and Baker, 2009), ConceptNet (Liu and Singh, 2004)).
3.4 Configuration
CONFIGURATION refers to internal-structural properties of entities, groups of entities, and events,
indicating their schematic "shape" and "texture": multiplicity (or plexity), homogeneity, boundedness, part-whole relations, etc. (Langacker, 1993; Talmy, 2000). To borrow an example from Croft (2012), a visitor to New England can describe stunning autumn leaves or foliage. Though both words indicate a multiplex perception, they exhibit a grammatical difference: the (plural) count noun leaves suggests articulated boundaries of multiple individuals, whereas the mass noun foliage suggests a more impressionistic, homogeneous rendering.
This dimension includes many distinctions and phenomena related to aspect (Vendler, 1967; Comrie, 1976), including whether an event is seen as discrete (sneeze) or continuous (read); involves a change of state (leave vs. have); has a defined endpoint (read vs. read a book); etc. Lexical and grammatical markers of configuration properties interact in complex ways; see discussion of count/ mass and aspectual coercion in  $\S 4$ .
Psycholinguistic evidence. Differences in grammatical aspect can modulate how events are conceptualized (Matlock, 2011). Stories written in imperfective aspect are remembered better; participants are also more likely to believe that the events in these stories are still happening (Magliano and Schleich, 2000) and build richer mental simulations of these events (Bergen and Wheeler, 2010). In turn, these differences in conceptualization have downstream consequences, ranging from judgments about an event's complexity (Wampler and Wittenberg, 2019) to predictions about the consequences of a political candidate's behavior on reelection (Fausey and Matlock, 2011).
The mass/count distinction has attested psychological implications, including differences in word recognition time (Gillon et al., 1999) (see Fieder et al. (2014) for a review).
Relevant NLP research. Configurational properties are closely linked to well-studied challenges at the syntax-semantic interface, in particular nominal and aspectual coercion effects (§4). Several approaches explicitly model coercion operations based on event structure representations (Moens and Steedman, 1988; Passonneau, 1988; Pulman, 1997; Chang et al., 1998), while others explore statistical learning of aspectual classes and features (Siegel and McKeown, 2000; Mathew and Katz, 2009; Friedrich and Palmer, 2014). Lexical resources have also been developed for aspectual annotation (Donatelli et al., 2018) and the count/
mass distinction (Schiehlen and Spranger, 2006; Kiss et al., 2017).
3.5 Metaphor
The dimension of METAPHOR is broadly concerned with cross-domain comparison, in which speakers "conceptualize two distinct structures in relation to one another" (Langacker, 1993, p. 450). Metaphors have been analyzed as structured mappings that allow a target domain to be conceptualized in terms of a source domain (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).
Metaphors pervade language use, and exhibit highly systematic, extensible structure. For example, in English, events are often construed either as locations in space or as objects moving through space. Our experience of time is thus often described in terms of either motion toward future events ("we're approaching the end of the year"), or the future moving toward us ("the deadline is barreling towards us") (Boroditsky, 2000, 2001; Hendricks and Boroditsky, 2017; Núñez and Sweetser, 2006). Metaphor plays a role in our linguistic characterization of many other domains as well (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).
Psycholinguistic evidence. Different metaphors can shape a comprehender's representation about the same event or concept in radically different ways. Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) found that describing a city's crime problem as a beast or as a virus elicited markedly different suggestions about how best to address the problem, e.g., whether participants tended to endorse enforcement- or reform-based solutions. Similar effects of metaphor on event conceptualization have been found across other domains, such as cancer (Hauser and Schwarz, 2015; Hendricks et al., 2018) and climate change (Flusberg et al., 2017) (see Thibodeau et al. (2017) for a thorough review).
Relevant NLP research. Considerable NLP work has addressed the challenge of metaphor detection and understanding (Narayanan, 1999; Shutova et al., 2010, 2013; Shutova, 2015). This work has made use of both statistical, bottom-up approaches to language modeling (Gutiérrez et al., 2016; Shutova et al., 2013), as well as knowledge bases such as MetaNet (Dodge et al., 2015; Stickles et al., 2014; David and Dancygier, 2017).
3.6 Summary
The selective review of construal dimensions presented here is intended to be illustrative, not exhaustive or definitive. Returning to the visual anal
ogy, we can see these dimensions as primarily concerned with how (and what part of) a conceptual "scene" is perceived (PERSPECTIVE, PROMINENCE); the choice or categorization of which schematic structures are present (CONFIGURATION and METAPHOR); or both (RESOLUTION).
We have omitted another high-level categorization dimension, SCHEMATIZATION, which includes concepts related to force dynamics, image schemas, and other experientially grounded schemas well discussed in the literature (Talmy, 2000). We have also not addressed pragmatic inference related to politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987), indirect requests (Clark, 1979), and other aspects of communicative intent. Additionally, some phenomena are challenging to categorize within the dimensions listed here; a more complete analysis would include evidentiality (Chafe and Nichols, 1986), modality (Mortelmans, 2007), light verb constructions (Wittenberg and Levy, 2017; Wittenberg et al., 2014), and more. Nonetheless, we hope this partial taxonomy provides a helpful entry point to relevant prior work and starting point for further alignment.
4 Construal in action
How might construal work in practice? We have emphasized so far the flexibility afforded by the dimensions in §3. But we must also explain why some words and concepts make easier bedfellows than others. This section presents a thumbnail sketch of how the construal process copes with apparent mismatches, where it is the collective constraints of the input structures that guide the search for coherence.