ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring Span Representations in Neural Coreference Resolution (2020)

In coreference resolution, span representations play a key role to predict coreference links accurately. We present a thorough examination of the span representation derived by applying BERT on coreference resolution (Joshi et al., 2019) using a probing model. Our results show that the span representation is able to encode a significant amount of coreference information. In addition, we find that the head-finding attention mechanism involved in creating the spans is crucial in encoding coreference knowledge. Last, our analysis shows that the span representation cannot capture non-local coreference as efficiently as local coreference.
Supporting Comedy Writers: Predicting Audience`s Response from Sketch Comedy and Crosstalk Scripts (2020)

Sketch comedy and crosstalk are two popular types of comedy. They can relieve people`s stress and thus benefit their mental health, especially when performances and scripts are high-quality. However, writing a script is time-consuming and its quality is difficult to achieve. In order to minimise the time and effort needed for producing an excellent script, we explore ways of predicting the audience`s response from the comedy scripts. For this task, we present a corpus of annotated scripts from popular television entertainment programmes in recent years. Annotations include a) text classification labels, indicating which actor`s lines made the studio audience laugh; b) information extraction labels, i.e. the text spans that made the audience laughed immediately after the performers said them. The corpus will also be useful for dialogue systems and discourse analysis, since our annotations are based on entire scripts. In addition, we evaluate different baseline algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that BERT models can achieve the best predictions among all the baseline methods. Furthermore, we conduct an error analysis and investigate predictions across scripts with different styles.
Exploring Coreference Features in Heterogeneous Data (2020)

The present paper focuses on variation phenomena in coreference chains. We address the hypothesis that the degree of structural variation between chain elements depends on language-specific constraints and preferences and, even more, on the communicative situation of language production. We define coreference features that also include reference to abstract entities and events. These features are inspired through several sources {--} cognitive parameters, pragmatic factors and typological status. We pay attention to the distributions of these features in a dataset containing English and German texts of spoken and written discourse mode, which can be classified into seven different registers. We apply text classification and feature selection to find out how these variational dimensions (language, mode and register) impact on coreference features. Knowledge on the variation under analysis is valuable for contrastive linguistics, translation studies and multilingual natural language processing (NLP), e.g. machine translation or cross-lingual coreference resolution.
Contextualized Embeddings for Connective Disambiguation in Shallow Discourse Parsing (2020)

This paper studies a novel model that simplifies the disambiguation of connectives for explicit discourse relations. We use a neural approach that integrates contextualized word embeddings and predicts whether a connective candidate is part of a discourse relation or not. We study the influence of those context-specific embeddings. Further, we show the benefit of training the tasks of connective disambiguation and sense classification together at the same time. The success of our approach is supported by state-of-the-art results.
DSNDM: Deep Siamese Neural Discourse Model with Attention for Text Pairs Categorization and Ranking (2020)

In this paper, the utility and advantages of the discourse analysis for text pairs categorization and ranking are investigated. We consider two tasks in which discourse structure seems useful and important: automatic verification of political statements, and ranking in question answering systems. We propose a neural network based approach to learn the match between pairs of discourse tree structures. To this end, the neural TreeLSTM model is modified to effectively encode discourse trees and DSNDM model based on it is suggested to analyze pairs of texts. In addition, the integration of the attention mechanism in the model is proposed. Moreover, different ranking approaches are investigated for the second task. In the paper, the comparison with state-of-the-art methods is given. Experiments illustrate that combination of neural networks and discourse structure in DSNDM is effective since it reaches top results in the assigned tasks. The evaluation also demonstrates that discourse analysis improves quality for the processing of longer texts.
Do sentence embeddings capture discourse properties of sentences from Scientific Abstracts ? (2020)

We introduce four tasks designed to determine which sentence encoders best capture discourse properties of sentences from scientific abstracts, namely coherence and cohesion between clauses of a sentence, and discourse relations within sentences. We show that even if contextual encoders such as BERT or SciBERT encodes the coherence in discourse units, they do not help to predict three discourse relations commonly used in scientific abstracts. We discuss what these results underline, namely that these discourse relations are based on particular phrasing that allow non-contextual encoders to perform well.
Joint Modeling of Arguments for Event Understanding (2020)

We recognize the task of event argument linking in documents as similar to that of intent slot resolution in dialogue, providing a Transformer-based model that extends from a recently proposed solution to resolve references to slots. The approach allows for joint consideration of argument candidates given a detected event, which we illustrate leads to state-of-the-art performance in multi-sentence argument linking.
Analyzing Neural Discourse Coherence Models (2020)

In this work, we systematically investigate how well current models of coherence can capture aspects of text implicated in discourse organisation. We devise two datasets of various linguistic alterations that undermine coherence and test model sensitivity to changes in syntax and semantics. We furthermore probe discourse embedding space and examine the knowledge that is encoded in representations of coherence. We hope this study shall provide further insight into how to frame the task and improve models of coherence assessment further. Finally, we make our datasets publicly available as a resource for researchers to use to test discourse coherence models.
Computational Interpretations of Recency for the Choice of Referring Expressions in Discourse (2020)

First, we discuss the most common linguistic perspectives on the concept of recency and propose a taxonomy of recency metrics employed in Machine Learning studies for choosing the form of referring expressions in discourse context. We then report on a Multi-Layer Perceptron study and a Sequential Forward Search experiment, followed by Bayes Factor analysis of the outcomes. The results suggest that recency metrics counting paragraphs and sentences contribute to referential choice prediction more than other recency-related metrics. Based on the results of our analysis, we argue that, sensitivity to discourse structure is important for recency metrics used in determining referring expression forms.
Do We Really Need That Many Parameters In Transformer For Extractive Summarization? Discourse Can Help ! (2020)

The multi-head self-attention of popular transformer models is widely used within Natural Language Processing (NLP), including for the task of extractive summarization. With the goal of analyzing and pruning the parameter-heavy self-attention mechanism, there are multiple approaches proposing more parameter-light self-attention alternatives. In this paper, we present a novel parameter-lean self-attention mechanism using discourse priors. Our new tree self-attention is based on document-level discourse information, extending the recently proposed {\textquotedblleft}Synthesizer{\textquotedblright} framework with another lightweight alternative. We show empirical results that our tree self-attention approach achieves competitive ROUGE-scores on the task of extractive summarization. When compared to the original single-head transformer model, the tree attention approach reaches similar performance on both, EDU and sentence level, despite the significant reduction of parameters in the attention component. We further significantly outperform the 8-head transformer model on sentence level when applying a more balanced hyper-parameter setting, requiring an order of magnitude less parameters.
Extending Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition to the PDTB-3 (2020)

The PDTB-3 contains many more Implicit discourse relations than the previous PDTB-2. This is in part because implicit relations have now been annotated within sentences as well as between them. In addition, some now co-occur with explicit discourse relations, instead of standing on their own. Here we show that while this can complicate the problem of identifying the location of implicit discourse relations, it can in turn simplify the problem of identifying their senses. We present data to support this claim, as well as methods that can serve as a non-trivial baseline for future state-of-the-art recognizers for implicit discourse relations.
TED-MDB Lexicons: Tr-EnConnLex, Pt-EnConnLex (2020)

In this work, we present two new bilingual discourse connective lexicons, namely, for Turkish-English and European Portuguese-English created automatically using the existing discourse relation-aligned TED-MDB corpus. In their current form, the Pt-En lexicon includes 95 entries, whereas the Tr-En lexicon contains 133 entries. The lexicons constitute the first step of a larger project of developing a multilingual discourse connective lexicon.
Evaluation of Coreference Resolution Systems Under Adversarial Attacks (2020)

A substantial overlap of coreferent mentions in the CoNLL dataset magnifies the recent progress on coreference resolution. This is because the CoNLL benchmark fails to evaluate the ability of coreference resolvers that requires linking novel mentions unseen at train time. In this work, we create a new dataset based on CoNLL, which largely decreases mention overlaps in the entire dataset and exposes the limitations of published resolvers on two aspects{---}lexical inference ability and understanding of low-level orthographic noise. Our findings show (1) the requirements for embeddings, used in resolvers, and for coreference resolutions are, by design, in conflict and (2) adversarial approaches are sometimes not legitimate to mitigate the obstacles, as they may falsely introduce mention overlaps in adversarial training and test sets, thus giving an inflated impression for the improvements.
Coreference for Discourse Parsing: A Neural Approach (2020)

We present preliminary results on investigating the benefits of coreference resolution features for neural RST discourse parsing by considering different levels of coupling of the discourse parser with the coreference resolver. In particular, starting with a strong baseline neural parser unaware of any coreference information, we compare a parser which utilizes only the output of a neural coreference resolver, with a more sophisticated model, where discourse parsing and coreference resolution are jointly learned in a neural multitask fashion. Results indicate that these initial attempts to incorporate coreference information do not boost the performance of discourse parsing in a statistically significant way.
Addressing Cha(lle)nges in Long-Term Archiving of Large Corpora (2020)

This paper addresses long-term archival for large corpora. Three aspects specific to language resources are focused, namely (1) the removal of resources for legal reasons, (2) versioning of (unchanged) objects in constantly growing resources, especially where objects can be part of multiple releases but also part of different collections, and (3) the conversion of data to new formats for digital preservation. It is motivated why language resources may have to be changed, and why formats may need to be converted. As a solution, the use of an intermediate proxy object called a signpost is suggested. The approach will be exemplified with respect to the corpora of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, namely the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) and the Archive for Spoken German (AGD).
Evaluating a Dependency Parser on DeReKo (2020)

We evaluate a graph-based dependency parser on DeReKo, a large corpus of contemporary German. The dependency parser is trained on the German dataset from the SPMRL 2014 Shared Task which contains text from the news domain, whereas DeReKo also covers other domains including fiction, science, and technology. To avoid the need for costly manual annotation of the corpus, we use the parser`s probability estimates for unlabeled and labeled attachment as main evaluation criterion. We show that these probability estimates are highly correlated with the actual attachment scores on a manually annotated test set. On this basis, we compare estimated parsing scores for the individual domains in DeReKo, and show that the scores decrease with increasing distance of a domain to the training corpus.
French Contextualized Word-Embeddings with a sip of CaBeRnet: a New French Balanced Reference Corpus (2020)

This paper investigates the impact of different types and size of training corpora on language models. By asking the fundamental question of quality versus quantity, we compare four French corpora by pre-training four different ELMos and evaluating them on dependency parsing, POS-tagging and Named Entities Recognition downstream tasks. We present and asses the relevance of a new balanced French corpus, CaBeRnet, that features a representative range of language usage, including a balanced variety of genres (oral transcriptions, newspapers, popular magazines, technical reports, fiction, academic texts), in oral and written styles. We hypothesize that a linguistically representative corpus will allow the language models to be more efficient, and therefore yield better evaluation scores on different evaluation sets and tasks. This paper offers three main contributions: (1) two newly built corpora: (a) CaBeRnet, a French Balanced Reference Corpus and (b) CBT-fr a domain-specific corpus having both oral and written style in youth literature, (2) five versions of ELMo pre-trained on differently built corpora, and (3) a whole array of computational results on downstream tasks that deepen our understanding of the effects of corpus balance and register in NLP evaluation.
Geoparsing the historical Gazetteers of Scotland: accurately computing location in mass digitised texts (2020)

This paper describes work in progress on devising automatic and parallel methods for geoparsing large digital historical textual data by combining the strengths of three natural language processing (NLP) tools, the Edinburgh Geoparser, spaCy and defoe, and employing different tokenisation and named entity recognition (NER) techniques. We apply these tools to a large collection of nineteenth century Scottish geographical dictionaries, and describe preliminary results obtained when processing this data.
The Corpus Query Middleware of Tomorrow -- A Proposal for a Hybrid Corpus Query Architecture (2020)

Development of dozens of specialized corpus query systems and languages over the past decades has let to a diverse but also fragmented landscape. Today we are faced with a plethora of query tools that each provide unique features, but which are also not interoperable and often rely on very specific database back-ends or formats for storage. This severely hampers usability both for end users that want to query different corpora and also for corpus designers that wish to provide users with an interface for querying and exploration. We propose a hybrid corpus query architecture as a first step to overcoming this issue. It takes the form of a middleware system between user front-ends and optional database or text indexing solutions as back-ends. At its core is a custom query evaluation engine for index-less processing of corpus queries. With a flexible JSON-LD query protocol the approach allows communication with back-end systems to partially solve queries and offset some of the performance penalties imposed by the custom evaluation engine. This paper outlines the details of our first draft of aforementioned architecture.
Using full text indices for querying spoken language data (2020)

As a part of the ZuMult-project, we are currently modelling a backend architecture that should provide query access to corpora from the Archive of Spoken German (AGD) at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS). We are exploring how to reuse existing search engine frameworks providing full text indices and allowing to query corpora by one of the corpus query languages (QLs) established and actively used in the corpus research community. For this purpose, we tested MTAS - an open source Lucene-based search engine for querying on text with multilevel annotations. We applied MTAS on three oral corpora stored in the TEI-based ISO standard for transcriptions of spoken language (ISO 24624:2016). These corpora differ from the corpus data that MTAS was developed for, because they include interactions with two and more speakers and are enriched, inter alia, with timeline-based annotations. In this contribution, we report our test results and address issues that arise when search frameworks originally developed for querying written corpora are being transferred into the field of spoken language.
Challenges for Making Use of a Large Text Corpus such as the \textquoteleftAAC -- Austrian Academy Corpus' for Digital Literary Studies (2020)

The challenges for making use of a large text corpus such as the {\textquoteleft}AAC {--} Austrian Academy Corpus' for the purposes of digital literary studies will be addressed in this presentation. The research question of how to use a digital text corpus of considerable size for such a specific research purpose is of interest for corpus research in general as it is of interest for digital literary text studies which rely to a large extent on large digital text corpora. The observations of the usage of lexical entities such as words, word forms, multi word units and many other linguistic units determine the way in which texts are being studied and explored. Larger entities have to be taken into account as well, which is why questions of semantic analysis and larger structures come into play. The texts of the AAC {--} Austrian Academy Corpus which was founded in 2001 are German language texts of historical and cultural significance from the time between 1848 and 1989. The aim of this study is to present possible research questions for corpus-based methodological approaches for the digital study of literary texts and to give examples of early experiments and experiences with making use of a large text corpus for these research purposes.
Czech National Corpus in 2020: Recent Developments and Future Outlook (2020)

The paper overviews the state of implementation of the Czech National Corpus (CNC) in all the main areas of its operation: corpus compilation, annotation, application development and user services. As the focus is on the recent development, some of the areas are described in more detail than the others. Close attention is paid to the data collection and, in particular, to the description of web application development. This is not only because CNC has recently seen a significant progress in this area, but also because we believe that end-user web applications shape the way linguists and other scholars think about the language data and about the range of possibilities they offer. This consideration is even more important given the variability of the CNC corpora.
Adding a Syntactic Annotation Level to the Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (2020)

In this paper we present an experiment of augmenting the Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (CoRoLa) with the syntactic level of annotations, which would allow users to address queries about the syntax of Romanian sentences, in the Universal Dependency model. After a short introduction of CoRoLa, we describe the treebanks used to train the dependency parser, we show the evaluation results and the process of upgrading CoRoLa with the new level of annotations. The parser displaying the best accuracy with respect to recognition of heads and relations, out of three variants trained on manually built treebanks, was chosen. Keywords: Syntactic annotation, treebank, corpus, maltparser
What Determines the Order of Verbal Dependents in Hindi? Effects of Efficiency in Comprehension and Production (2020)

Word order flexibility is one of the distinctive features of SOV languages. In this work, we investigate whether the order and relative distance of preverbal dependents in Hindi, an SOV language, is affected by factors motivated by efficiency considerations during comprehension/production. We investigate the influence of Head{--}Dependent Mutual Information (HDMI), similarity-based interference, accessibility and case-marking. Results show that preverbal dependents remain close to the verbal head when the HDMI between the verb and its dependent is high. This demonstrates the influence of locality constraints on dependency distance and word order in an SOV language. Additionally, dependency distance were found to be longer when the dependent was animate, when it was case-marked and when it was semantically similar to other preverbal dependents. Together the results highlight the crosslinguistic generalizability of these factors and provide evidence for a functionally motivated account of word order in SOV languages such as Hindi.
Images and Imagination: Automated Analysis of Priming Effects Related to Autism Spectrum Disorder and Developmental Language Disorder (2020)

Different aspects of language processing have been shown to be sensitive to priming but the findings of studies examining priming effects in adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have been inconclusive. We present a study analysing visual and implicit semantic priming in adolescents with ASD and DLD. Based on a dataset of fictional and script-like narratives, we evaluate how often and how extensively, content of two different priming sources is used by the participants. The first priming source was visual, consisting of images shown to the participants to assist them with their storytelling. The second priming source originated from commonsense knowledge, using crowdsourced data containing prototypical script elements. Our results show that individuals with ASD are less sensitive to both types of priming, but show typical usage of primed cues when they use them at all. In contrast, children with DLD show mostly average priming sensitivity, but exhibit an over-proportional use of the priming cues.
Production-based Cognitive Models as a Test Suite for Reinforcement Learning Algorithms (2020)

We introduce a framework in which production-rule based computational cognitive modeling and Reinforcement Learning can systematically interact and inform each other. We focus on linguistic applications because the sophisticated rule-based cognitive models needed to capture linguistic behavioral data promise to provide a stringent test suite for RL algorithms, connecting RL algorithms to both accuracy and reaction-time experimental data. Thus, we open a path towards assembling an experimentally rigorous and cognitively realistic benchmark for RL algorithms. We extend our previous work on lexical decision tasks and tabular RL algorithms (Brasoveanu and Dotla{\v{c}}il, 2020b) with a discussion of neural-network based approaches, and a discussion of how parsing can be formalized as an RL problem.