The Automatic Acquisition of Knowledge about Discourse Connectives

Institute for Communicating and Collaborative SystemsThis thesis considers the automatic acquisition of knowledge about discourse connectives. It focuses in particular on their semantic properties, and on the relationships that hold between them. There is a considerable body of theoretical and empirical work on discourse connectives. For example, Knott (1996) motivates a taxonomy of discourse connectives based on relationships between them, such as HYPONYMY and EXCLUSIVE, which are defined in terms of substitution tests. Such work requires either great theoretical insight or manual analysis of large quantities of data. As a result, to date no manual classification of English discourse connectives has achieved complete coverage. For example, Knott gives relationships between only about 18% of pairs obtained from a list of 350 discourse connectives. This thesis explores the possibility of classifying discourse connectives automatically, based on their distributions in texts. This thesis demonstrates that state-of-the-art techniques in lexical acquisition can successfully be applied to acquiring information about discourse connectives. Central to this thesis is the hypothesis that distributional similarity correlates positively with semantic similarity. Support for this hypothesis has previously been found for word classes such as nouns and verbs (Miller and Charles, 1991; Resnik and Diab, 2000, for example), but there has been little exploration of the degree to which it also holds for discourse connectives. We investigate the hypothesis through a number of machine learning experiments. These experiments all use unsupervised learning techniques, in the sense that they do not require any manually annotated data, although they do make use of an automatic parser. First, we show that a range of semantic properties of discourse connectives, such as polarity and veridicality (whether or not the semantics of a connective involves some underlying negation, and whether the connective implies the truth of its arguments, respectively), can be acquired automatically with a high degree of accuracy. Second, we consider the tasks of predicting the similarity and substitutability of pairs of discourse connectives. To assist in this, we introduce a novel information theoretic function based on variance that, in combination with distributional similarity, is useful for learning such relationships. Third, we attempt to automatically construct taxonomies of discourse connectives capturing substitutability relationships. We introduce a probability model of taxonomies, and show that this can improve accuracy on learning substitutability relationships. Finally, we develop an algorithm for automatically constructing or extending such taxonomies which uses beam search to help find the optimal taxonomy

Two Aspects of Language, Two Types of Comparison: Toward a Rhetoric of Comparative and World Literature

This article revisits the emergence of “comparative” and “world” literature within the early nineteenth century, arguing that we can only understand the full normative force of the two terms if we read them rhetorically. In order to do this, the article draws on Roman Jakobson’s classic essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (1956). Jakobson makes a number of claims in this essay, the most celebrated of which is his distinction between the two poles of “metaphoric” and “metonymic” language. The motor of metaphor, Jakobson reminds us, is similarity (one thing is like another); the motor of metonymy, on the other hand, is contiguity (one thing is next to, or part of another). Jakobson’s distinction, this article suggests, maps instructively onto the mechanisms of comparative and world literature: where the former compares one text to another, the latter situates one text within the global field of others. For comparison to be possible, initially, the things being compared must stand apart; to claim the status of world literature for a given work, conversely, is to make it part of a broader whole. Comparative and world literature may thus be said to function as a mobile army of metaphors and metonymies

Marinheiro ou camponês? Algumas reflexões sobre as leituras de Sebald do ensaio “O narrador” de Walter Benjamin ("Seaman" or " Peasant"? Some reflections on Sebald's reading of Walter Benjamin's essay "The Narrator")

W.G. Sebald’s private library, which is held in part in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, contains a copy of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminationen. This essay seeks to establish a theoretical framework for Sebald’s narrative technique by investigating his annotations in the closing essay of the book, “The Narrator”. With the help of his underlinings and marginalia, Sebald’s own narrative structures can be interpreted as a means of depicting “natural history”, as an aesthetic response to a philosophical concept. Two principles can be derived from this perspective: the strategy of “interlocking layers” (Einschachteln), and the strategy of montage. It is the dialectic between these two principles that drives Sebald’s prose style. The tension in his work between fact and fiction derives ultimately from an uneasy relationship between his artfully constructed prose-style on the one hand and its quasidocumentary realism on the other

Comparativism, or What We Talk about When We Talk about Comparing

In this essay, I suggest that the study of comparative literature is subject to the same distorting pressures as the study of the Orient. “Comparativism,” as I call it, is like orientalism: both a description and a distortion. Constructing its critique in the process of comparing, it inherits deep foundations of historical, cultural, and geographical prejudgment. As with Said’s orientalism, the cornerstone of this construction is West-Eastern (and North-Southern) paternalism, but it is far from the only building block: other obstacles include predetermined views of genre, medium, and even language. There is little, in fact, that is not grist to the will of Western-educated critics. Eastern comparative methodologies, however, are no more innocent of power struggles than their Western counterparts; for one thing, the structural role of empire is shared by both West and East. Simply replacing one hemisphere with another will hardly recalibrate our critical compasses; wherever we are looking from, partiality of perspective is inevitable. The question, then, is whether comparativism constructs itself diversely in diverse circumstances, or whether its prejudices remain essentially the same despite the changing details of time and place. It is a matter, in other words, of the old comparative contest between similarity and difference. What do we talk about when we talk about comparing

On Purpose: Interest, Disinterest, and Literature we can live by

The idea of ‘literature we can live by’ crystallizes the paradox of art: defined by its distance from life, it requires, at the same time, proximity to life. We turn to art because it offers a protected space of disinterested play – yet we are also profoundly interested in its ethical implications. In the words of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, the work of art – and through its Apollonian pa- tron, literature in particular – tells us that we must change our lives. Ranging widely from antiquity to modernity while highlighting key moments in early modernity and the Enlightenment, this essay identifies a recurring tension between two visions of literature: to be able to comment insightfully on life, it must be apart from it; to be able to respond adequately to life, it must be a part of it. It is not just the metaphors we live by, in other words, but also the metonyms

Model Cards for Model Reporting

Trained machine learning models are increasingly used to perform high-impact tasks in areas such as law enforcement, medicine, education, and employment. In order to clarify the intended use cases of machine learning models and minimize their usage in contexts for which they are not well suited, we recommend that released models be accompanied by documentation detailing their performance characteristics. In this paper, we propose a framework that we call model cards, to encourage such transparent model reporting. Model cards are short documents accompanying trained machine learning models that provide benchmarked evaluation in a variety of conditions, such as across different cultural, demographic, or phenotypic groups (e.g., race, geographic location, sex, Fitzpatrick skin type) and intersectional groups (e.g., age and race, or sex and Fitzpatrick skin type) that are relevant to the intended application domains. Model cards also disclose the context in which models are intended to be used, details of the performance evaluation procedures, and other relevant information. While we focus primarily on human-centered machine learning models in the application fields of computer vision and natural language processing, this framework can be used to document any trained machine learning model. To solidify the concept, we provide cards for two supervised models: One trained to detect smiling faces in images, and one trained to detect toxic comments in text. We propose model cards as a step towards the responsible democratization of machine learning and related AI technology, increasing transparency into how well AI technology works. We hope this work encourages those releasing trained machine learning models to accompany model releases with similar detailed evaluation numbers and other relevant documentation