Focus Triggers and Focus Types from a Corpus Perspective

The article discusses several issues relevant for the annotation of written and spoken corpus data with information structure. We discuss ways to identify focus top-down (via questions under discussion) or bottom-up (starting from pitch accents). We introduce a two-dimensional labelling scheme for information status and propose a way to distinguish between contrastive and non-contrastive information. Moreover, we take side in a current debate, claiming that focus is triggered by two sources: newness and elicited alternatives (contrast). This may lead to a high number of semantic-pragmatic foci in a single sentence. In each prosodic phrase there can be one primary focus (marked by a nuclear pitch accent) and several secondary foci (marked by weaker prosodic prominence). Second occurrence focus is one instance of secondary focus

Focus Triggers and Focus Types from a Corpus Perspective

The article discusses several issues relevant for the annotation of written and spoken corpus data with information structure. We discuss ways to identify focus top-down (via questions under discussion) or bottom-up (starting from pitch accents). We introduce a two-dimensional labelling scheme for information status and propose a way to distinguish between contrastive and non-contrastive information. Moreover, we take side in a current debate, claiming that focus is triggered by two sources: newness and elicited alternatives (contrast). This may lead to a high number of semantic-pragmatic foci in a single sentence. In each prosodic phrase there can be one primary focus (marked by a nuclear pitch accent) and several secondary foci (marked by weaker prosodic prominence). Second occurrence focus is one instance of secondary focus

Information structure in linguistic theory and in speech production : validation of a cross-linguistic data set

The aim of this paper is to validate a dataset collected by means of production experiments which are part of the Questionnaire on Information Structure. The experiments generate a range of information structure contexts that have been observed in the literature to induce specific constructions. This paper compares the speech production results from a subset of these experiments with specific claims about the reflexes of information structure in four different languages. The results allow us to evaluate and in most cases validate the efficacy of our elicitation paradigms, to identify potentially fruitful avenues of future research, and to highlight issues involved in interpreting speech production data of this kind

Focus asymmetries in Bura

This article presents the central aspects of the focus system of Bura (Chadic), which exhibits a number of asymmetries: Grammatical focus marking is obligatory only with focused subjects, where focus is marked by the particle án following the subject. Focused subjects remain in situ and the complement of án is a regular VP. With nonsubject foci, án appears in a cleft-structure between the fronted focus constituent and a relative clause. We present a semantically unified analysis of focus marking in Bura that treats the particle as a focusmarking copula in T that takes a property-denoting expression (the background) and an individual-denoting expression (the focus) as arguments. The article also investigates the realization of predicate and polarity focus, which are almost never marked. The upshot of the discussion is that Bura shares many characteristic traits of focus marking with other Chadic languages, but it crucially differs in exhibiting a structural difference in the marking of focus on subjects and non-subject constituents

Ethical Challenges in Data-Driven Dialogue Systems

The use of dialogue systems as a medium for human-machine interaction is an increasingly prevalent paradigm. A growing number of dialogue systems use conversation strategies that are learned from large datasets. There are well documented instances where interactions with these system have resulted in biased or even offensive conversations due to the data-driven training process. Here, we highlight potential ethical issues that arise in dialogue systems research, including: implicit biases in data-driven systems, the rise of adversarial examples, potential sources of privacy violations, safety concerns, special considerations for reinforcement learning systems, and reproducibility concerns. We also suggest areas stemming from these issues that deserve further investigation. Through this initial survey, we hope to spur research leading to robust, safe, and ethically sound dialogue systems.Comment: In Submission to the AAAI/ACM conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Societ

Theticity

The subject matter of this chapter is the semantic, syntactic and discoursepragmatic background as well as the cross-linguistic behavior of types of utterance exemplified by the following English sentences […]: (1) My NECK hurts. […] (2) The PHONE's ringing. [...] Sentences such as […] are usually held to stand in opposition to sentences with a topical subject. The difference is said to be formally marked, for example, by VS order vs. topical SV order (as in Albanian po bie telefoni 'the PHONE is ringing' vs. telefoni po bie 'the PHONE is RINGING'), or by accent on the subject only vs. accent on both the subject and the verb (as in the English translations). The term theticity will be used in the following to label the specific phenomenological domain to which the sentences in (1) and (2) belong. It has long been commonplace that these and similar expressions occur at particular points in the discourse where "a new situation is presented as a whole". We will try to depict and classify the various discourse situations in which these expressions have been found in the different languages, and we will try to trace out areas of cross-linguistic comparability. Finally, we will raise the question whether or not there is a common denominator which would justify a unified treatment of all these expressions in functional/semantic terms

A discourse-based approach to verb placement in early West-Germanic

The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization