20,026 research outputs found
The role of non-connective discourse cues and their interaction with connectives
The disambiguation and processing of coherence relations is often investigated with a focus on explicit connectives, such as but or so. Other, non-connective cues from the context also facilitate discourse inferences, although their precise disambiguating role and interaction with connectives have been largely overlooked in the psycholinguistic literature so far. This study reports on two crowdsourcing experiments that test the role of contextual cues (parallelism, antonyms, resultative verbs) in the disambiguation of contrast and consequence relations. We compare the effect of contextual cues in conceptually different relations, and with connectives that differ in their semantic precision. Using offline tasks, our results show that contextual cues significantly help disambiguating contrast and consequence relations in the absence of connectives. However, when connectives are present in the context, the effect of cues only holds if the connective is acceptable in the target relation. Overall, our study suggests that cues are decisive on their own, but only secondary in the presence of connectives. These results call for further investigation of the complex interplay between connective types, contextual cues, relation types and other linguistic and cognitive factors
Automatic Identification of AltLexes using Monolingual Parallel Corpora
The automatic identification of discourse relations is still a challenging
task in natural language processing. Discourse connectives, such as "since" or
"but", are the most informative cues to identify explicit relations; however
discourse parsers typically use a closed inventory of such connectives. As a
result, discourse relations signaled by markers outside these inventories (i.e.
AltLexes) are not detected as effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel
method to leverage parallel corpora in text simplification and lexical
resources to automatically identify alternative lexicalizations that signal
discourse relation. When applied to the Simple Wikipedia and Newsela corpora
along with WordNet and the PPDB, the method allowed the automatic discovery of
91 AltLexes.Comment: 6 pages, Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language
Processing (RANLP 2017
Anaphora and Discourse Structure
We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to
signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within
discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational
meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a
simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics,
and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial
connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We
conclude by sketching out a lexicalised grammar for discourse that facilitates
discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor
resolution and inference.Comment: 45 pages, 17 figures. Revised resubmission to Computational
Linguistic
Adversarial Connective-exploiting Networks for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification
Implicit discourse relation classification is of great challenge due to the
lack of connectives as strong linguistic cues, which motivates the use of
annotated implicit connectives to improve the recognition. We propose a feature
imitation framework in which an implicit relation network is driven to learn
from another neural network with access to connectives, and thus encouraged to
extract similarly salient features for accurate classification. We develop an
adversarial model to enable an adaptive imitation scheme through competition
between the implicit network and a rival feature discriminator. Our method
effectively transfers discriminability of connectives to the implicit features,
and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PDTB benchmark.Comment: To appear in ACL201
GumDrop at the DISRPT2019 Shared Task: A Model Stacking Approach to Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection
In this paper we present GumDrop, Georgetown University's entry at the DISRPT
2019 Shared Task on automatic discourse unit segmentation and connective
detection. Our approach relies on model stacking, creating a heterogeneous
ensemble of classifiers, which feed into a metalearner for each final task. The
system encompasses three trainable component stacks: one for sentence
splitting, one for discourse unit segmentation and one for connective
detection. The flexibility of each ensemble allows the system to generalize
well to datasets of different sizes and with varying levels of homogeneity.Comment: Proceedings of Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking
(DISRPT2019
Some Logical Notations for Pragmatic Assertions
The pragmatic notion of assertion has an important inferential role in logic. There are also many notational forms to express assertions in logical systems. This paper reviews, compares and analyses languages with signs for assertions, including explicit signs such as Frege’s and Dalla Pozza’s logical systems and implicit signs with no specific sign for assertion, such as Peirce’s algebraic and graphical logics and the recent modification of the latter termed Assertive Graphs. We identify and discuss the main ‘points’ of these notations on the logical representation of assertions, and evaluate their systems from the perspective of the philosophy of logical notations. Pragmatic assertions turn out to be useful in providing intended interpretations of a variety of logical systems
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
The Hausa perfective tense-aspect used in wh-/focus constructions and historical narratives: a unified account
In this paper I revisit and elaborate some of the ideas I outlined in the earlier paper, concentrating on the semantic characteristics of the paired Perfective tense-aspects in a major (universal) discourse context—spontaneously-produced past-time narrative. The main focus is on the role of the paradigm known traditionally (and unfortunately) as the “Relative Perfective”, a set which is in partial complementary distribution with the “General/Neutral Perfective”. This specially inflected tense-aspect form is the one exploited at discourse-level to assert prominent events on the time-axis in foregrounded narrative sequences, but it is also required in classic clause-level wh-constructions, i.e., wh-interrogatives, declarative focus constructions, and relative clauses, operations which often share structural properties across languages. The central claim is that the fronted focus/wh- constructions and pivotal foregrounded portions of past-time narratives utilize the same specialized Perfective tense-aspect morphology because they achieve the same discourse-pragmatic goals—they all supply the most communicatively PROMINENT and focal NEW information
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