Testing Epistemic Injustice

This work builds on the trivial observation that everyone is not trusted equally. One’s gender, ethnic group, occupation etc. will affect how one’s information is believed and interpreted by others. We begin by reviewing past approaches to reliability and epistemic injustice, and the factors which affect how one’s reliability is evaluated by others in discourse. We then discuss recent experimental results which show that the linguistic manipulation of gender seems  to affect the strategies with which the source’s reliability is evaluated. We argue that masculine sources benefit from more charitable assumptions than feminine ones. To support this claim, we present the results of a fine-grained categorization task. The results of this task seem to support our claim about charity, i.e. that a masculine source can more easily claim competence about a topic categorized as feminine, whereas the converse appears less true

Informational content vs. discourse orientation: experimental and computational perspectives

The aim of this study is to investigate how human speakers and computational language models process (i) the informational content and (ii) the discourse orientation of natural language sentences. These two dimensions of meaning have received little attention outside theoretical literature, especially in the computational linguistics domain. To help fill this void, we present the results of four experiments that exploit the specific semantics of two French adverbs, namely presque (≃ ’almost’) and à peine (≃ ’barely’), which put these two dimensions of meaning at odds. Each experiment focuses on one kind of population (humans or language models), and one kind of meaning (informational content or discourse orientation). Our results show that humans are indeed sensitive to informational content and discourse direction, as assumed in the theoretical literature. Language models exhibit a less transparent behavior. Their performances in dealing with the semantics of presque appear in line with predictions based on the way these models are trained, but this does not extend to à peine

The probabilistic dimension of discourse markers

International audienceno abstrac

Exhaustive Interpretation in Adversative Coordination

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The Meaning of the French additive \textquoteleftAussi': Presupposition and Discourse Similarity

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'Only' only marks exclusion

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'Only' without its scales

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Les propriétés argumentatives des implicatures conversationnelles

Les propriétés argumentatives des implicatures conversationnelle

What but-sentences argue for: a modern argumentative analysis of 'but'

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