Towards a Benchmark of Natural Language Arguments

The connections among natural language processing and argumentation theory are becoming stronger in the latest years, with a growing amount of works going in this direction, in different scenarios and applying heterogeneous techniques. In this paper, we present two datasets we built to cope with the combination of the Textual Entailment framework and bipolar abstract argumentation. In our approach, such datasets are used to automatically identify through a Textual Entailment system the relations among the arguments (i.e., attack, support), and then the resulting bipolar argumentation graphs are analyzed to compute the accepted arguments

ACTA: A Tool for Argumentative Clinical Trial Analysis

International audienceArgumentative analysis of textual documents of various nature (e.g., persuasive essays, online discussion blogs, scientific articles) allows to detect the main argumentative components (i.e., premises and claims) present in the text and to predict whether these components are connected to each other by argumentative relations (e.g., support and attack), leading to the identification of (possibly complex) argumentative structures. Given the importance of argument-based decision making in medicine, in this demo paper we introduce ACTA, a tool for automating the argumentative analysis of clinical trials. The tool is designed to support doctors and clinicians in identifying the document(s) of interest about a certain disease, and in analyzing the main argumentative content and PICO elements

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Building a General Knowledge Base of Physical Objects for Robots

Poster paperInternational audienceIn this paper we present an ongoing work on building a repository of knowledge about objects typically found in homes, their usual locations and usage. We extract an RDF knowledge base by automatically reading text on the Web and applying simple inference rules. The obtained common sense object relations are ready to be used in a domestic robotic setting, e.g. " a frying pan is usually located in the kitchen "

Building a General Knowledge Base of Physical Objects for Robots

Poster paperInternational audienceIn this paper we present an ongoing work on building a repository of knowledge about objects typically found in homes, their usual locations and usage. We extract an RDF knowledge base by automatically reading text on the Web and applying simple inference rules. The obtained common sense object relations are ready to be used in a domestic robotic setting, e.g. " a frying pan is usually located in the kitchen "

Comparing Automated Methods to Detect Explicit Content in Song Lyrics

International audienceThe Parental Advisory Label (PAL) is a warning label that is placed on audio recordings inrecognition of profanity or inappropriate references, with the intention of alerting parents of material potentially unsuitable for children.Since 2015, digital providers – such as iTunes,Spotify, Amazon Music and Deezer – also follow PAL guidelines and tag such tracks as “explicit”. Nowadays, such labelling is carried out mainly manually on voluntary basis, with the drawbacks of being time consuming and therefore costly, error prone and partly a subjective task. In this paper, we compare auto-mated methods ranging from dictionary-basedlookup to state-of-the-art deep neural networks to automatically detect explicit contents in English lyrics. We show that more complex models perform only slightly better on this task, and relying on a qualitative analysis of thedata, we discuss the inherent hardness and subjectivity of the task

Decomposing Semantic Inferences

International audienceBeside formal approaches to semantic inference that rely on logical representation of meaning, the notion of Textual Entailment (TE) has been proposed as an applied framework to capture major semantic inference needs across applications in Computational Linguistics. Although several approaches have been tried and evaluation campaigns have shown improvements in TE, a renewed interest is rising in the research community towards a deeper and better understanding of the core phenomena involved in textual inference. Pursuing this direction, we are convinced that crucial progress will derive from a focus on decomposing the complexity of the TE task into basic phenomena and on their combination. In this paper, we carry out a deep analysis on TE data sets, investigating the relations among two relevant aspects of semantic inferences: the logical dimension, i.e. the capacity of the inference to prove the conclusion from its premises, and the linguistic dimension, i.e. the linguistic devices used to accomplish the goal of the inference. We propose a decomposition approach over TE pairs, where single linguistic phenomena are isolated in what we have called atomic inference pairs, and we show that at this granularity level the actual correlation between the linguistic and the logical dimensions of semantic inferences emerges and can be empirically observed