Crowdsourcing Argumentation Structures in Chinese Hotel Reviews

Argumentation mining aims at automatically extracting the premises-claim discourse structures in natural language texts. There is a great demand for argumentation corpora for customer reviews. However, due to the controversial nature of the argumentation annotation task, there exist very few large-scale argumentation corpora for customer reviews. In this work, we novelly use the crowdsourcing technique to collect argumentation annotations in Chinese hotel reviews. As the first Chinese argumentation dataset, our corpus includes 4814 argument component annotations and 411 argument relation annotations, and its annotations qualities are comparable to some widely used argumentation corpora in other languages.Comment: 6 pages,3 figures,This article has been submitted to "The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC2017)

Author's response: Mundari and argumentation in word-class analysis

1. Introduction: Our three commentators raise such a host of deep and interesting issues that we cannot hope to answer them all within the time and space at our disposal. To begin with, we would like to thank them for pushing us to articulate the reason

Individual and Domain Adaptation in Sentence Planning for Dialogue

One of the biggest challenges in the development and deployment of spoken dialogue systems is the design of the spoken language generation module. This challenge arises from the need for the generator to adapt to many features of the dialogue domain, user population, and dialogue context. A promising approach is trainable generation, which uses general-purpose linguistic knowledge that is automatically adapted to the features of interest, such as the application domain, individual user, or user group. In this paper we present and evaluate a trainable sentence planner for providing restaurant information in the MATCH dialogue system. We show that trainable sentence planning can produce complex information presentations whose quality is comparable to the output of a template-based generator tuned to this domain. We also show that our method easily supports adapting the sentence planner to individuals, and that the individualized sentence planners generally perform better than models trained and tested on a population of individuals. Previous work has documented and utilized individual preferences for content selection, but to our knowledge, these results provide the first demonstration of individual preferences for sentence planning operations, affecting the content order, discourse structure and sentence structure of system responses. Finally, we evaluate the contribution of different feature sets, and show that, in our application, n-gram features often do as well as features based on higher-level linguistic representations

Head-initial constructions in japanese

Japanese is often taken to be strictly head-final in its syntax. In our work on a broad-coverage, precision implemented HPSG for Japanese, we have found that while this is generally true, there are nonetheless a few minor exceptions to the broad trend. In this paper, we describe the grammar engineering project, present the exceptions we have found, and conclude that this kind of phenomenon motivates on the one hand the HPSG type hierarchical approach which allows for the statement of both broad generalizations and exceptions to those generalizations and on the other hand the usefulness of grammar engineering as a means of testing linguistic hypotheses

Information structure and the referential status of bare plurals

The goal of this paper is to study the influence of information structure in the referential status of linguistic expressions such as bare plurals and indefinite NPs in Spanish. In particular, we will argue for the following claims: (a) Spanish bare plurals can receive a generic interpretation in object position and (b) Spanish bare plurals in object position can be topics in siru. We will focus on object position because of the well known semantic and syntactic constraints that affect preverbal subject bare plurals in Spanish

Supporting the resolution of inconsistencies in specifications based on mathematical argumentation theory (Model theoretic aspects of the notion of independence and dimension)

In this paper, we propose a method to support for resolving “inconsistencies” in a requirement specification document which is written in a natural language. We also develop a tool based on the method. We use mathematical argumentation theory and natural language processing to realize the method. Based on mathematical argumentation theory, we can formulate various “inconsistencies” including logical contradiction as an attack relation R in an argumentation framework (A, R). Then an extension S in (A, R) represents a set of acceptable descriptions of a requirement specification document. Moreover, an extension S suggests an engineer the set of descriptions which should be corrected to resolve “inconsistencies” by referring R. Our method consists of the following methods. First, we adopt the method in [1], which is based on natural language processing, to generate an argumentation framework (A, R) from a requirement specification document. Second, we use the method in [2] to define an extension S of (A, R) in an extension of first-order logic, and then we use the method in [3] to enumerate extensions from (A, R) by solving a Partial Maximal Satisfiable Subsets Enumeration problem that is an extension of a Maximal Satisfiable Subsets Enumeration problem. Finally we visualize the (A, R) and S's to support for resolving “inconsistencies” in a requirement specification document