Topic Independent Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue

Research on the structure of dialogue has been hampered for years because large dialogue corpora have not been available. This has impacted the dialogue research community's ability to develop better theories, as well as good off the shelf tools for dialogue processing. Happily, an increasing amount of information and opinion exchange occur in natural dialogue in online forums, where people share their opinions about a vast range of topics. In particular we are interested in rejection in dialogue, also called disagreement and denial, where the size of available dialogue corpora, for the first time, offers an opportunity to empirically test theoretical accounts of the expression and inference of rejection in dialogue. In this paper, we test whether topic-independent features motivated by theoretical predictions can be used to recognize rejection in online forums in a topic independent way. Our results show that our theoretically motivated features achieve 66% accuracy, an improvement over a unigram baseline of an absolute 6%.Comment: @inproceedings{Misra2013TopicII, title={Topic Independent Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue}, author={Amita Misra and Marilyn A. Walker}, booktitle={SIGDIAL Conference}, year={2013}

Information structure and the referential status of linguistic expression : workshop as part of the 23th annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig, Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2001

This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other

Functional differentiation and grammatical competition in the English Jespersen Cycle

Wallage argues for a model of the Middle English Jespersen Cycle in which each of its diachronic stages are functionally equivalent competitors in the sense proposed by Kroch. However, recent work on the Jespersen Cycle in various Romance languages by Schwenter, Hansen and Hansen & Visconti has argued that the forms in competition during the Jespersen Cycle are not simply diachronic stages, but perform diUerent pragmatic or discourse functions. Hansen and Hansen & Visconti suggest that functional change may therefore underpin the Jespersen Cycle in these languages. Hence this paper explores the interface between pragmatic or functional change, and change in the syntax of sentential negation. Analysis of data from the PPPCME? (Kroch & Taylor) show that ne (stage one) and ne. . . not(stage two) are similarly functionally diUerentiated during the ME Jespersen Cycle: ne. . . not is favoured in propositions that are discourse-old (given, or recoverable from the preceding discourse), whereas ne is favoured in propositions that are discourse-new. Frequency data appear to show the loss of these constraints over time. However, I argue that these frequency data are not conclusive evidence for a shift in the functions of ne or ne. . . not. Indeed, the results of a regression analysis indicate that these discourse constraints remain constant throughout Middle English, in spite of the overall spread of ne. . . not as the Jespersen Cycle progresses. Therefore, I conclude the spread of ne. . . not is independent of these particular discourse constraints on its use, rather than the result of changes in, or loss of, these constraints

A preliminary bibliography on focus

[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […] The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here

Influence of Information Structure on the Salience of Opinions

We study the influence of information structure on the salience of subjective expressions for human readers. Using an online survey tool, we conducted an experiment in which we asked users to rate main and relative clauses that contained either a single positive or negative or a neutral adjective. The statistical analysis of the data shows that subjective expressions are more prominent in main clauses where they are asserted than in relative clauses where they are presupposed. A corpus study suggests that speakers are sensitive to this differential salience in their production of subjective expressions