8,590 research outputs found
Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social
nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational
linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article
we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics"
that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the
relation between language and social identity, language use in social
interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the
potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how
the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement
existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and
challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey
the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and
conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication:
18th February, 201
Domain knowledge, uncertainty, and parameter constraints
Ph.D.Committee Chair: Guy Lebanon; Committee Member: Alex Shapiro; Committee Member: Alexander Gray; Committee Member: Chin-Hui Lee; Committee Member: Hongyuan Zh
Parsing Argumentation Structures in Persuasive Essays
In this article, we present a novel approach for parsing argumentation
structures. We identify argument components using sequence labeling at the
token level and apply a new joint model for detecting argumentation structures.
The proposed model globally optimizes argument component types and
argumentative relations using integer linear programming. We show that our
model considerably improves the performance of base classifiers and
significantly outperforms challenging heuristic baselines. Moreover, we
introduce a novel corpus of persuasive essays annotated with argumentation
structures. We show that our annotation scheme and annotation guidelines
successfully guide human annotators to substantial agreement. This corpus and
the annotation guidelines are freely available for ensuring reproducibility and
to encourage future research in computational argumentation.Comment: Under review in Computational Linguistics. First submission: 26
October 2015. Revised submission: 15 July 201
Emotion Recognition in Conversation using Probabilistic Soft Logic
Creating agents that can both appropriately respond to conversations and
understand complex human linguistic tendencies and social cues has been a long
standing challenge in the NLP community. A recent pillar of research revolves
around emotion recognition in conversation (ERC); a sub-field of emotion
recognition that focuses on conversations or dialogues that contain two or more
utterances. In this work, we explore an approach to ERC that exploits the use
of neural embeddings along with complex structures in dialogues. We implement
our approach in a framework called Probabilistic Soft Logic (PSL), a
declarative templating language that uses first-order like logical rules, that
when combined with data, define a particular class of graphical model.
Additionally, PSL provides functionality for the incorporation of results from
neural models into PSL models. This allows our model to take advantage of
advanced neural methods, such as sentence embeddings, and logical reasoning
over the structure of a dialogue. We compare our method with state-of-the-art
purely neural ERC systems, and see almost a 20% improvement. With these
results, we provide an extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis over the
DailyDialog conversation dataset
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