Spain

This talk is about analysing the style of argumentative texts based on rhetorical devices. The talk describes how we developed and evaluated a grammar-based approach for identifying 26 syntax-based devices., and how we employed that approach to distinguish various patterns of style in selected sets of argumentative articles and presidential debates. The patterns reveal several insights into the style used there, while being adequate for integration in text synthesis systems.

COLING 2020

Style Analysis of Argumentative Texts by Mining Rhetorical Devices

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

technical paper

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Computational models of argument quality (AQ) have focused primarily on assessing the overall quality or one specific characteristic of an argument, such as its convincingness or its clarity. However, previous work has claimed that assessment based on theoretical dimensions of argumentation could benefit writers, but developing such models has been limited by the lack of annotated data. In this work, we describe GAQCorpus, the first large, domain-diverse annotated corpus of theory-based AQ. We discuss how we designed the annotation task to reliably collect a large number of judgments with crowdsourcing, formulating theory-based guidelines that helped make subjective judgments of AQ more objective. 
We demonstrate how to identify arguments and adapt the annotation task for three diverse domains. Our work will inform research on theory-based argumentation annotation and enable the creation of more diverse corpora to support computational AQ assessment.

Creating a Domain-diverse Corpus for Theory-based Argument Quality Assessment

The corpus, from which a predictive language model is trained, can be considered the experience of a semantic system. We recorded everyday reading of two participants for two months on a tablet, generating individual corpus samples of 300/500K tokens. Then we trained word2vec models from individual corpora and a 70 million-sentence newspaper corpus to obtain individual and norm-based long-term memory structure. To test whether individual corpora can make better predictions for a cognitive task of long-term memory retrieval, we generated stimulus materials consisting of 134 sentences with uncorrelated individual and norm-based word probabilities. For the subsequent eye tracking study 1-2 months later, our regression analyses revealed that individual, but not norm-corpus-based word probabilities can account for first-fixation duration and first-pass gaze duration. Word length additionally affected gaze duration and total viewing duration. The results suggest that corpora representative for an individual’s long-term memory structure can better explain reading performance than a norm corpus, and that recently acquired information is lexically accessed rapidly.

Individual corpora predict fast memory retrieval during reading

Language users process utterances by segmenting them into many cognitive units, which vary in their sizes and linguistic levels. Although we can do such unitization/segmentation easily, its cognitive mechanism is still not clear. This paper proposes an unsupervised model, Less-is-Better (LiB), to simulate the human cognitive process with respect to language unitization/segmentation. LiB follows the principle of least effort and aims to build a lexicon which minimizes the number of unit tokens (alleviating the effort of analysis) and number of unit types (alleviating the effort of storage) at the same time on any given corpus. LiB's workflow is inspired by empirical cognitive phenomena. The design makes the mechanism of LiB cognitively plausible and the computational requirement light-weight. The lexicon generated by LiB performs the best among different types of lexicons (e.g. ground-truth words) both from an information-theoretical view and a cognitive view, which suggests that the LiB lexicon may be a plausible proxy of the mental lexicon.

Less is Better: A cognitively inspired unsupervised model for language segmentation

Cross-linguistic studies of concepts provide valuable insights for the investigation of the mental lexicon. Recent developments of cross-linguistic databases facilitate an exploration of a diverse set of languages on the basis of comparative concepts. These databases make use of a well-established reference catalog, the Concepticon, which is built from concept lists published in linguistics. A recently released feature of the Concepticon includes data on norms, ratings, and relations for words and concepts. The present study used data on word frequencies to test two hypotheses. First, I examined the assumption that related languages (i.e., English and German) share concepts with more similar frequencies than non-related languages (i.e., English and Chinese). Second, the variation of frequencies across both language pairs was explored to answer the question of whether the related languages share fewer concepts with a large difference between the frequency than the non-related languages. The findings indicate that related languages experience less variation in their frequencies. If there is variation, it seems to be due to cultural and structural differences. The implications of this study are far-reaching in that it exemplifies the use of cross-linguistic data for the study of the mental lexicon.

General patterns and language variation: Word frequencies across English, German, and Chinese

How do people understand concepts such as olive oil, baby oil, or lamp oil? Embodied approaches to knowledge representation suggest that words are represented as a set of features that are the basic components of meaning. In particular, Binder et al. (2009) grounded this idea by mapping semantic features (attributes) to different brain systems in their Concept Attribute Representations (CAR) theory. fMRI experiments demonstrate that when humans listen or read sentences they use different brain systems to simulate seeing the scenes and performing the actions that are described. An intriguing challenge to this theory is that concepts are dynamic, i.e. word meaning depends on context. This work addresses such challenge through the Context-dEpendent meaning REpresentations in the BRAin (CEREBRA) neural network model. Based on changes in the fMRI patterns, CEREBRA quantified how word meanings change in the context of a sentence. CEREBRA is evaluated through different computational experiments and a behavioral analysis. The experiments demonstrated that words in different contexts have different representations, the changes observed in the concept attributes revealed unique conceptual combinations, and that the new representations were more similar to the other words in the sentence than to the original representations. The behavioral analysis confirmed that the changes produced by CEREBRA are actionable knowledge that can be used to predict human responses. Together, these experiments constitute a comprehensive evaluation of CEREBRA’s context-based representations as well as the soundness of CAR theory. Thus, CEREBRA is a useful tool for understanding how semantic knowledge is represented in the brain, and for providing a human-like context-based representations for NLP applications.

Characterizing Dynamic Word Meaning Representations in the Brain

Understanding context-dependent variation in word meanings is a key aspect of human language comprehension supported by the lexicon. Lexicographic resources (e.g., WordNet) capture only some of this context-dependent variation; for example, they often do not encode how closely senses, or discretized word meanings, are related to one another. Our work investigates whether recent advances in NLP, specifically contextualized word embeddings, capture human-like distinctions between English word senses, such as polysemy and homonymy. We collect data from a behavioral, web-based experiment, in which participants provide judgments of the relatedness of multiple WordNet senses of a word in a two-dimensional spatial arrangement task. We find that participants' judgments of the relatedness between senses are correlated with distances between senses in the BERT embedding space. Homonymous senses (e.g., bat as mammal vs. bat as sports equipment) are reliably more distant from one another in the embedding space than polysemous ones (e.g., chicken as animal vs. chicken as meat). Our findings point towards the potential utility of continuous-space representations of sense meanings.

Contextualized Word Embeddings Encode Aspects of Human-Like Word Sense Knowledge

Word Association Norms (WAN) are collections that present stimuli words and the set of their associated responses. The corpus is widely used in diverse areas of expertise. In order to reduce the effort to have a good quality resource that can be reproduced in many languages with minimum sources, a methodology to build AutomaticWord Association Norms is proposed (AWAN).
The methodology has an input of two simple elements: a) dictionary, and b) pre-processed Word Embeddings. This new kind of WAN is evaluated in two ways: i) learning word embeddings based on the node2vec algorithm and comparing them with human annotated benchmarks, and ii) performing a lexical search for a reverse dictionary. Both evaluations are done in a weighted graph with the AWAN lexical elements. The results showed that the methodology produces good quality AWANs.

AutomaticWord Association Norms (AWAN)

Knowledge graphs (KGs) of real-world facts about entities and their relationships are useful resources for a variety of natural language processing tasks. However, because knowledge graphs are typically incomplete, it is useful to perform knowledge graph completion or link prediction, i.e. predict whether a relationship not in the knowledge graph is likely to be true. This paper serves as a comprehensive survey of embedding models of entities and relationships for knowledge graph completion, summarizing up-to-date experimental results on standard benchmark datasets and pointing out potential future research directions.

A survey of embedding models of entities and relationships for knowledge graph completion

We propose the Graph2Graph Transformer architecture for conditioning on and predicting arbitrary graphs, and apply it to the challenging task of transition-based dependency parsing. After proposing two novel Transformer models of transition-based dependency parsing as strong baselines, we show that adding the proposed mechanisms for conditioning on and predicting graphs of Graph2Graph Transformer results in significant improvements, both with and without BERT pre-training. The novel baselines and their integration with Graph2Graph Transformer significantly outperform the state-of-the-art in traditional transition-based dependency parsing on both English Penn Treebank, and 13 languages of Universal Dependencies Treebanks. Graph2Graph Transformer can be integrated with many previous structured prediction methods, making it easy to apply to a wide range of NLP tasks.

Graph-to-Graph Transformer for Transition-based Dependency Parsing

Entity Resolution (ER) identifies records that refer to the same real-world entity. Deep learning approaches improved the generalization ability of entity matching models, but hardly overcame the impact of noisy or incomplete data sources. In real scenes, an entity usually consists of multiple semantic facets, called aspects. In this paper, we focus on entity augmentation, namely retrieving the values of missing aspects. The relationship between aspects is naturally suitable to be represented by a knowledge graph, where entity augmentation can be modeled as a link prediction problem. Our paper proposes a novel graph-based approach to solve entity augmentation. Specifically, we apply a dedicated random walk algorithm, which uses node types to limit the traversal length, and encodes graph structure into low-dimensional embeddings. Thus, the missing aspects could be retrieved by a link prediction model. Furthermore, the augmented aspects with fixed orders are served as the input of a deep Siamese BiLSTM network for entity matching. We compared our method with state-of-the-art methods through extensive experiments on downstream ER tasks. According to the experiment results, our model outperforms other methods on evaluation metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score) to a large extent, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.

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