Discourse-sensitive automatic identification of generic expressions

This paper describes a novel sequence labeling method for identifying generic expressions, which refer to kinds or arbitrary members of a class, in discourse context. The automatic recognition of such expressions is important for any natural language processing task that requires text understanding. Prior work has focused on identifying generic noun phrases; we present a new corpus in which not only subjects but also clauses are annotated for genericity according to an annotation scheme motivated by semantic theory. Our contextaware approach for automatically identifying generic expressions uses conditional random fields and outperforms previous work based on local decisions when evaluated on this corpus and on related data sets (ACE-2 and ACE-2005)

Situation entity annotation

This paper presents an annotation scheme for a new semantic annotation task with relevance for analysis and computation at both the clause level and the discourse level. More specifically, we label the finite clauses of texts with the type of situation entity (e.g., eventualities, statements about kinds, or statements of belief) they introduce to the discourse, following and extending work by Smith (2003). We take a feature-driven approach to annotation, with the result that each clause is also annotated with fundamental aspectual class, whether the main NP referent is specific or generic, and whether the situation evoked is episodic or habitual. This annotation is performed (so far) on three sections of the MASC corpus, with each clause labeled by at least two annotators. In this paper we present the annotation scheme, statistics of the corpus in its current version, and analyses of both inter-annotator agreement and intra-annotator consistency

Thirty Musts for Meaning Banking

Meaning banking--creating a semantically annotated corpus for the purpose of semantic parsing or generation--is a challenging task. It is quite simple to come up with a complex meaning representation, but it is hard to design a simple meaning representation that captures many nuances of meaning. This paper lists some lessons learned in nearly ten years of meaning annotation during the development of the Groningen Meaning Bank (Bos et al., 2017) and the Parallel Meaning Bank (Abzianidze et al., 2017). The paper's format is rather unconventional: there is no explicit related work, no methodology section, no results, and no discussion (and the current snippet is not an abstract but actually an introductory preface). Instead, its structure is inspired by work of Traum (2000) and Bender (2013). The list starts with a brief overview of the existing meaning banks (Section 1) and the rest of the items are roughly divided into three groups: corpus collection (Section 2 and 3, annotation methods (Section 4-11), and design of meaning representations (Section 12-30). We hope this overview will give inspiration and guidance in creating improved meaning banks in the future.Comment: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-3302

On abstraction: decoupling conceptual concreteness and categorical specificity

Conceptual concreteness and categorical specificity are two continuous variables that allow distinguishing, for example, justice (low concreteness) from banana (high concreteness) and furniture (low specificity) from rocking chair (high specificity). The relation between these two variables is unclear, with some scholars suggesting that they might be highly correlated. In this study, we operationalize both variables and conduct a series of analyses on a sample of > 13,000 nouns, to investigate the relationship between them. Concreteness is operationalized by means of concreteness ratings, and specificity is operationalized as the relative position of the words in the WordNet taxonomy, which proxies this variable in the hypernym semantic relation. Findings from our studies show only a moderate correlation between concreteness and specificity. Moreover, the intersection of the two variables generates four groups of words that seem to denote qualitatively different types of concepts, which are, respectively, highly specific and highly concrete (typical concrete concepts denoting individual nouns), highly specific and highly abstract (among them many words denoting human-born creation and concepts within the social reality domains), highly generic and highly concrete (among which many mass nouns, or uncountable nouns), and highly generic and highly abstract (typical abstract concepts which are likely to be loaded with affective information, as suggested by previous literature). These results suggest that future studies should consider concreteness and specificity as two distinct dimensions of the general phenomenon called abstraction

The psycholinguistics of propaganda: mechanisms of subjugation and how to challenge them

This paper reviews current research on the oppressive and dehumanizing use of language by those in political power to promote essentialist thought about oppositional groups, including during the war in Ukraine. Essentialism is the implicit belief that categories of people–those of certain ethnicities or nationalities, for example–have intrinsic, immutable properties, driven by some deep, unobservable, and often deterministic causal essence. There is robust evidence that cross-culturally, both young children and adults sometimes employ an essentialist heuristic when reasoning about cultural traits, and that they see others’ traits as being less mutable than their own. Strikingly, though, cultures vary drastically in the particulars and extent of this cultural essentialism. Thus, it seems clear that cultural input can to some degree either exploit or overwrite a tendency toward cultural essentialism, with language being an especially powerful mechanism. In this paper, I demonstrate ways that language is intentionally used by those with political power to promote essentialist thought and to justify violence. In particular, I highlight use of generic language, ascriptive definitions, and the language of opposites within propaganda. I end with consideration of ways to be responsive to instances of propaganda within our own communities and as global citizens, such as through pro-social repurposing of the linguistic tools that have been used destructively, promoting nuance through the use of differentiated language, and by capitalizing on an intuitive human belief in essential goodness and desire for truth. Acknowledgements Deepest gratitude to Alexander Barhavin for translating the abstract from English into Ukrainian

Talking and Thinking about Animal and Artifact Kinds Via Different Types of Generics

Generic statements are expressions that talk about kinds or categories and there are several forms. Through the use of surveys, this study examined the way native English speakers talk and think about novel animal kinds and artifacts using two forms: the definite singular form and the bare plural form