Spain

This paper introduces a representation and annotation scheme for argument structure constructions that are used metaphorically with verbs in different semantic domains. We aim to contribute to the study of constructional metaphors which has received little attention in theoretical and computational linguistics. The proposed representation consists of a systematic mapping between the constructional and verbal event structures in two domains. It reveals the semantic motivations that lead to constructions being metaphorically extended. We demonstrate this representation on argument structure constructions with Transfer of Possession verbs and test the viability of this scheme with an annotation exercise.

COLING 2020

Representing constructional metaphors

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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

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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.

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a simple, expressive semantic framework whose emphasis on predicate-argument structure is effective for many tasks. Nevertheless, AMR lacks a systematic treatment of projection phenomena, making its translation into logical form problematic. We present a translation function from AMR to first order logic using continuation semantics, which allows us to capture the semantic context of an expression in the form of an argument. This is a natural extension of AMR’s original design principles, allowing us to easily model basic projection phenomena such as quantification and negation as well as complex phenomena such as bound variables and donkey anaphora.

A Continuation Semantics for Abstract Meaning
Representation

This paper examines how Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) can be utilized for finding answers to research questions in medical scientific documents, in particular, to advance the study of UV (ultraviolet) inactivation of the novel coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19. We describe the development of a proof-of-concept prototype tool, InfoForager, which uses AMR to conduct a semantic search, targeting the meaning of the user question, and matching this to
sentences in medical documents that may contain information to answer that question. This work was conducted as a sprint over a period of six weeks, and reveals both promising results and challenges in reducing the user search time relating to COVID-19 research, and in general, domain adaption of AMR for this task.

InfoForager: Leveraging Semantic Search with AMR for COVID-19 Research

This paper presents a “road map” for the annotation of semantic categories in typologically diverse languages, with potentially few linguistic resources, and often no existing computational resources. Past semantic annotation efforts have focused largely on high-resource languages, or relatively low-resource languages with a large number of native speakers. However, there are certain typological traits, namely the synthesis of multiple concepts into a single word, that are more common in languages with a smaller speech community. For example, what is expressed as a sentence in a more analytic language like English, may be expressed as a single word in a more synthetic language like Arapaho. This paper proposes solutions for annotating analytic and synthetic languages in a comparable way based on existing typological research, and introduces a road map for the annotation of languages with a dearth of resources.

Cross-lingual annotation: a road map for low- and no-resource languages

To explore the potential sembanking in Korean and ways to represent the meaning of Korean sentences, this paper reports on the process of applying Abstract Meaning Representation to Korean, a semantic representation framework that has been studied in a wide range of languages, and its output: the Korean AMR corpus. The corpus which is constructed so far is a size of 1,253 sentences and its raw texts are from ExoBrain Corpus, a state-led R&D project on language AI. This paper also analyzes the result in both qualitative and quantitative manners, proposing discussions for further development.

Leveraging Visual Question Answering to Improve Text-to-Image Synthesis

Despite recent achievements in natural language understanding, reasoning over commonsense knowledge still represents a big challenge to AI systems. As the name suggests, common sense is related to perception and as such, humans derive it from experience rather than from literary education. Recent works in the NLP and the computer vision field have made the effort of making such knowledge explicit using written language and visual inputs, respectively. Our premise is that the latter source fits better with the characteristics of commonsense acquisition. In this work, we explore to what extent the descriptions of real-world scenes are sufficient to learn common sense about different daily situations, drawing upon visual information to answer script knowledge questions.

Seeing the world through text: Evaluating image descriptions for commonsense reasoning in machine reading comprehension

Evaluations of image description systems are typically domain-general: generated descriptions for the held-out test images are either compared to a set of reference descriptions (using automated metrics), or rated by human judges on one or more Likert scales (for fluency, overall quality, and other quality criteria). While useful, these evaluations do not tell us anything about the kinds of image descriptions that systems are able to produce. Or, phrased differently, these evaluations do not tell us anything about the cognitive capabilities of image description systems. This paper proposes a different kind of assessment, that is able to quantify the extent to which these systems are able to describe humans. This assessment is based on a manual characterization (a context-free grammar) of English entity labels in the PEOPLE domain, to determine the range of possible outputs. We examined 9 systems to see what kinds of labels they actually use. We found that these systems only use a small subset of at most 13 different kinds of modifiers (e.g. tall and short modify HEIGHT, sad and happy modify MOOD), but 27 kinds of modifiers are never used. Future research could study these semantic dimensions in more detail.

How do image description systems describe people? A targeted assessment of system competence in the PEOPLE-domain

Fine-tuning the multilingual BERT model on the multilingual emoji prediction task. The emojis are mapped to the basic emotions of Plutchik, and a case study is presented on tweets collected on the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Multilingual Emoticon Prediction of Tweets about COVID-19

News editorials aim to shape the opinions of their readership and the general public on timely controversial issues. The impact of an editorial on the reader’s opinion does not only depend on its content and style, but also on the reader’s profile. Previous work has studied the effect of editorial style depending on general political ideologies (liberals vs. conservatives). In our work, we dig deeper into the persuasiveness of both content and style, exploring the role of the intensity of an ideology (lean vs. extreme) and the reader’s personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness). Concretely, we train content- and style-based models on New York Times editorials for different ideology- and personality-specific groups. Our results suggest that particularly readers with extreme ideology and non “role model” personalities are impacted by style. We further analyze the importance of various text features with respect to the editorials’ impact, the readers’ profile, and the editorials’ geographical scope.

Persuasiveness of News Editorials depending on Ideology and Personality

As a contribution to personality detection in languages other than English, we rely on distant supervision to create Personal-ITY, a novel corpus of YouTube comments in Italian, where authors are labelled with personality traits. The traits are derived from one of the mainstream personality theories in psychology research, named MBTI. Using personality prediction experiments, we (i) study the task of personality prediction in itself on our corpus as well as on TWISTY, a Twitter dataset also annotated with MBTI labels; (ii) carry out an extensive, in-depth analysis of the features used by the classifier, and view them specifically under the light of the original theory that we used to create the corpus in the first place. We observe that no single model is best at personality detection, and that while some traits are easier than others to detect, and also to match back to theory, for other, less frequent traits the picture is much more blurred.

Matching Theory and Data with Personal-ITY: What a Corpus of Italian YouTube Comments Reveals About Personality

In the last decade, the field of Neural Language Modelling has witnessed enormous changes, with the development of novel models through the use of Transformer architectures. However, even these models struggle to model long sequences due to memory constraints and increasing computational complexity. Coreference annotations over the training data can provide context far beyond the modelling limitations of such language models. In this paper we present an extension over the Transformer-block architecture used in neural language models, specifically in GPT2, in order to incorporate entity annotations during training. Our model, GPT2E, extends the Transformer layers architecture of GPT2 to Entity-Transformers, an architecture designed to handle coreference information when present. To that end, we achieve richer representations for entity mentions, with insignificant training cost. We show the comparative model performance between GPT2 and GPT2E in terms of Perplexity on the CoNLL 2012 and LAMBADA datasets as well as the key differences in the entity representations and their effects in downstream tasks such as Named Entity Recognition. Furthermore, our approach can be adopted by the majority of Transformer-based language models.

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