Seminar: Discourse phenomena

Winter term 2020/21

Helmut Horacek

Time and location: Mi. 16-18, as a video conference

Begin: 4.11.2020 (First meeting and introduction)

Schedule

  • 4.11.2020 Introduction
  • from on 18.11.2020 weekly presentations

    • Articles

    Conversational implicature

  • Aravind Joshi, Bonnie Webher and Ralph Weischedel, "Preventing False Inferences", 1984 available under acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P84/P84-1029.pdf

    A bit historic, but still instructive

  • Ehud Reiter, "The Computational Complexity of Avoiding Conversational Implicatures". In Proc of 28th Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL-1990), pp. 97-104. MIT Press.

    Adds formal aspects to the paper above.

  • J. Marks and E. Reiter, "Avoiding Unwanted Gricean Implicatures in Text and Graphics". In Proc of the 8th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-1990), Volume 1, pp. 450-456. MIT Press.

    Makes a side-step from natural language, by generalizing forces underlying implicatures.

  • Annie Zaenen, Lauri Karttunen, Richard Crouch, "Local Textual Inference: can it be defined or circumscribed?", Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Empirical Modeling of Semantic Equivalenceand Entailment, pages 31-36, Ann Arbor, June 2005.

    Addresses implicatures grounded in lexical material

  • Luciana Benotti, David Traum, "A computational account of comparative implicatures for a spoken dialogue agent Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Semantics", pages 4-17, Tilburg, January 2009.

    Features the role of spoken dialog

  • Janyce Wiebe Lingjia Den, "A Conceptual Framework for Inferring Implicatures", Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 154-159, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. June 27, 2014.

    A principled framework

  • Jae-Il Yeom, "Global Approach to Scalar Implicatures in Dynamic Semantics", 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation 2013

    A new formal account

    • Presupposition

  • Robert E. Mercer, "Presuppositions and Default Reasoning: A Study in Lexical Pragmatics", Workshop on Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation, ACL 91, 1991.

    Use default reasoning to capture the effect of presuppositions

  • Bonnie Webber, Alistair Knott, Matthew Stone and Aravind Joshi, "Discourse Relations: A Structural and Presuppositional Account using Lexicalised TAG", 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 20-26 June 1999 University of Maryland College Park, Maryland, USA

    Presuppositions carried by connections between sentences

  • Robert Kasper, Paul Davis, and Craige Roberts. "An Integrated Approach to Reference and Presupposition Resolution." available under ACL Anthology W99, acl.lcd.upenn.edu/W/W99/W99-0101.pdf

    About the role of presupposition in database querying

  • Sabine Grunder, "An Algorithm for Adverbial Aspect Shift", Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008), pages 289-296, Manchester, August 2008

    Treating the meaning of temporal prepositions as presuppositions

    • Speech acts

  • Susan McRoy and Graeme Hirst, "The Repair of Speech Act Misunderstandings by Abductive Inference", Computational Linguistics 21(4), pp. 435-478, 1995.

    An elaborate model based on the former paper

  • Carberry, S. and L. Lambert, "A Process Model for Recognizing Communicative Acts and Modeling Negotiation Subdialogues", Computational Linguistics, 25(1), pp.1-54, 1999.

    Empirically motivated and elaborate formal model; a talk should focus on parts of the paper

  • Jennifer Chu-Carroll and Sandra Carberry, "Collaborative Response Generation in Planning Dialogues", Computational Linguistics 24(3), pp. 356-400, 1998.

    A model built around speech acts.

  • Debora Field, Allan Ramsay, "How to change a person's mind: Understanding the difference between the effects and consequences of speech acts", Proceedings of the Workshop on Inference in Computational Semantics (ICoS-5), 2006

    The role of speech acts in a specific category of texts

  • Andrew Hickl, "Using Discourse Commitments to Recognize Textual Entailment", Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008), pages 337-344, Manchester, August 2008

    Interpreting commitments to contribute to recognition of semantic relations

  • Ekaterina Shutova, "Models of Metaphor in NLP", Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 688-697, Uppsala, Sweden, 11-16 July 2010.

    An Overview paper about several methods

  • Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Scott Grimm and Christopher Potts, "Not a simple yes or no: Uncertainty in indirect answers", Proceedings of SIGDIAL 2009: the 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group in Discourse and Dialogue, pages 136-143, Queen Mary University of London, September 2009

    Features the role of a specific kind of "informative" answers

  • Luciana Benotti, "Clarification Potential of Instructions", Proceedings of SIGDIAL 2009: the 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group in Discourse and Dialogue, pages 196-205, Queen Mary University of London, September 2009

    Empasizes a specific text genre

  • Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Joseph F. Grafsgaard, Eun Young, Ha Robert Phillips,James C. Lester, "An Affect-Enriched Dialogue Act Classification Modelfor Task-Oriented Dialogue", Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1190-1199, Portland, Oregon, June 19-24, 2011

    Takes additional properties into account

  • David B. Bracewell, Marc T . Tomlinson, and Hui Wang "Identification of Social Acts in Dialogue", Proceedings of COLING 2012: Technical Papers, pages 375-390, COLING 2012, Mumbai, December 2012.

    An empirical approach to extended speech acts

  • Shafiq Joty, Tasnim Mohiuddin. "Modeling Speech Acts in AsynchronousConversations: A Neural-CRF Approach", Computational Linguistics, Volume 44, Issue 4 - December 2018

    • Conversational structure

  • Ralph Weischedel and Norman Sondheimer, "Meta-rules as a Basis for Processing Ill-Formed Input", American Journal of Computational Linguistics 9(3-4), pp. 161-177, 1983.

    A bit historic, but still instructive (LISP-like formalizations)

  • Susan McRoy and Graeme Hirst, "Abductive Explanation of Dialogue Misunderstandings", available under http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/E/E93/E93-1033.pdf

    Speech act interpretation in context

  • Moore, J. D. and Paris, C., "Planning Text for Advisory Dialogues: Capturing entional and Rhetorical Information", Computational Linguistics, 19(4), pp.651-694, 1993.

    Application for a specific text genre.

  • David Traum and James Allen, "Discourse Obligations in Dialogue Processing", 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-94), pp. 1-8, 1994.

    Techniques to handle a central concept underlying dialogs

  • Green, N. and S. Carberry, "Interpreting and Generating Indirect Answers", Computational Linguistics, 25(3), pp. 389-435, 1999.

    Empirically motivated and elaborate formal model;a talk should focus on parts of the paper.

  • Colin Matheson, Massimo Poesio, and David Traum, "Modelling Grounding and Discourse Obligations Using Update Rules", Northamerican ACL (NAACL-2000), pp. 1-8, 2000.

    A realization of dialog techniques in working systems

  • Massimo Poesio and David Traum, "Conversational Actions and Discourse Situations", Computational Intelligence 13(3), pp. 309-347, 1997.

    An elaboration in DRT.

  • Marcu, D. "Extending a Formal and Computational Model of Rhetorical Structure Theory with Intentional Structures a la Grosz and Sidner", Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics COLING'2000, Saarbrücken, pp. 523-529, 2000.

    A theoretical and compact work, but with plenty of examples.

  • Cristea, D. Ide, N., Marcu, D. and Tablan, V., "An Emprical Investigation of the Relation between Discourse Structure and Co-Reference", Proceedings of COLING 2000, pp. 208-214, 2000.

    Investigates the role of discourse structures for interpreting references.

  • Eli Hagen and Fred Popowich, "Flexible Speech Act Based Dialogue Management, "Proceedings of the 1st SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and DialogueHeld in conjunction with The 38th Annual Meeting of theAssociation for Computational Linguistics7-8 October 2000 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)

    Reasoning about dialog continuations

  • Kotaro Funakoshi and Takenobu Tokunaga, "Identifying Repair Targets in Action Control Dialogue", EACL-2006 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistic April, 3rd-7th, 2006, Trento, Italy

    Recognition of a specific category of speech acts in context

  • Farah Benamara. "Cooperative Question Answering in Restricted Domains: the WEBCOOP Experiment" available under acl.ldc.upenn.edu/acl2004/ qarestricteddomain/ps/benamara.ps

    Interpretation and response generation with cooperative measures

  • Alex Lascarides, Nicholas Asher, "Agreement and Disputes in Dialogue", Proceedings of the 9th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 29-36,Columbus, June 2008.

    Modeling argumentative dialogs in major aspects

  • David DeVault, Matthew Stone, "Learning to Interpret Utterances Using Dialogue History ", Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL, pages 184-192, Athens, Greece, 30 March-April 2009.

    Attempts to exploit regularities over context

  • Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Yo Sato, Ruth Kempson, Andrew Gargett, Christine Howes, "Dialogue Modelling and the Remit of Core Grammar", Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Semantics, pages 128-139, Tilburg, January 2009.

    Describung dialog functions by a grammar

  • Kirsten Bergmann Hannes Rieser Stefan Kopp, "Regulating Dialogue with Gestures-Towards an Empirically Grounded Simulation with Conversational Agents", Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2011, the 12 th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 88-97, Portland, Oregon, June 17-18, 2011.

    Extending the acount on conversation by gestures

  • Teruhisa Misu, Kallirroi Georgila, Anton Leuski, David Traum "Reinforcement Learning of Question-Answering Dialogue Policies for Virtual Museum Guides", Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), pages 84-93, Seoul, South Korea, 5-6 July 2012.

    Dialog continuations examined

  • Pierre Lison "Probabilistic Dialogue Models with Prior Domain Knowledge", Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), pages 179-188, Seoul, South Korea, 5-6 July 2012.

    Encapsulating knowledge in decisions about dialog continuations

  • Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg "Implicitness of Discourse Relations", Proceedings of COLING 2012: Technical Papers, pages 2669-2684, COLING 2012, Mumbai, December 2012.

    An empirical appraoch to disambiguating discourse relations

  • Adam Vogel, Max Bodoia, Christopher Potts, and Dan Jurafsky "Emergence of Gricean Maxims from Multi-Agent Decision Theory", Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2013, pages 1072-1081, Atlanta, Georgia, 9-14 June 2013.

    Grounding linguistic principles in behavioral rationality

  • Amita Misra & Marilyn A. Walker "Topic Independent Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue", Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference, pages 41-50, Metz, France, 22-24 August 2013.

    Reasoning about the principled outcome of a dialog

  • Florian Nothdurft Felix Richter and Wolfgang Minker "Probabilistic Human-Computer Trust Handling", Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2014 Conference, pages 51-59, Philadelphia, U.S.A., 18-20 June 2014.

    A bit of a HCI perspective

  • Ioannis Efstathiou Oliver Lemon, "Learning non-cooperative dialogue behaviours", Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2014 Conference, pages 60-68, Philadelphia, U.S.A., 18-20 June 2014.

    A contrast to the usual task-oriented perspective

  • Elnaz Nouri David Traum, "Initiative Taking in Negotiation", Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2014 Conference, pages 186-193, Philadelphia, U.S.A., 18-20 June 2014.

    A specific aspect of dialog control

  • Mathieu Morey, Philippe Muller, Nicholas Asher. "A Dependency Perspective on RST DiscourseParsing and Evaluation", Computational Linguistics, Volume 44, Issue 2 - June 2018.

  • Varada Kolhatkar, Adam Roussel, Stefanie Dipper, Heike Zinsmeister. "Anaphora With Non-nominal Antecedentsin Computational Linguistics:a Survey", Computational Linguistics, Volume 44, Issue 3 - June 2018

  • Mrinmaya Sachan, Avinava Dubey, Eduard H. Hovy, Tom M. Mitchell, Dan Roth, Eric P. Xing, "Discourse in Multimedia: A Case Study in Extracting Geometry Knowledge from Textbooks", Computational Linguistics, Volume 45, Issue 4 - December 2019.

    • Coherence

  • Donia Scott and Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza. "Getting the Message Across in RST-based Text Generation." In Robert Dale, Chris Mellish and Michael Zock, Eds., Current Research in Natural Language Generation, pp. 47-73, Academic Press, 1990.

    Discusses and motivates (heuristic) rules to express rhetorical relations by linguistic means

  • Keith Vander Linden and James Martin, "Expressing Rhetorical Relations in Instructional Text: A Case Study of the Purposes Relation.", Computational Linguistics 21(1), pp. 29-57, 1995.

    A detailed analysis of the use and realization of one RST relation.

  • Marcu, D. "The Rhetorical Parsing of Natural Language Texts", Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 96-104, 1997.

    Making use of RST for analysis (an exceptional approach)

  • Ziheng Lin, Hwee Tou Ng and Min-Yen Kan, "Automatically Evaluating Text Coherence Using Discourse Relations ", Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 997-1006, Portland, Oregon, June 19-24, 2011

    Methods for measuring degrees of coherence

  • Regina Barzilay, Mirella Lapata, "Modeling Local Coherence: An Entity-Based Approach", Journal Computational Linguistics, 2008.

    Coherence from the perspective of entities

  • Fatemeh Torabi Asr, Vera Demberg, "On the Information Conveyed by Discourse Markers", Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages 84-93, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 8, 2013.

    On the contribution of discourse markers to understanding

  • Xiaolong Li, Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, "Semantic Grounding in Dialogue for Complex Problem Solving", Human Language Technologies: The 2015 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, pages 841-850, 2015

    Finding a common ground in specific technical areas

  • Attapol T. Rutherfor, Nianwen Xue, "Improving the Inference of Implicit Discourse Relations via Classifying Explicit Discourse Connectives", Human Language Technologies: The 2015 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, pages 799-808, 2015

    On notoriously difficult to interpret discourse relations

  • Stephanie Lukin, Pranav Anand, Marilyn Walker and Steve Whittaker, "Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion", Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pages 742-753

    On the role of argumentation

  • Henning Wachsmuth, Nona Naderi, Yufang Hou, Yonatan Bilu, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Tim Alberdingk Thijm, Graeme Hirst, Benno Stein , "Computational Argumentation Quality Assessment in Natural Language", Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pages 176-187

    On the role of argumentation, too

  • Naho Orita, Eliana Vornov, Naomi H. Feldman, Hal Daume III, "Why discourse affects speakers choice of referring expressions", Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 1639-1649

    Buildingg referring expressions in context

  • Abhijit Mishra, Diptesh Kanojia, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey, Pushpak Bhattacharyya "Harnessing Cognitive Features for Sarcasm Detection", Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1095-1104

    One of the few papers addressing sarcasm

  • Hyeju Jang, Yohan Jo, Qinlan Shen, Michael Miller,¿Seungwhan Moon, Carolyn P. Rose, "Metaphor Detection with Topic Transition, Emotion and Cognition in Context", Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 216-225

    A compound model to deal with metaphors

  • Hongsong Li, Kenny Q. Zhu, Haixun Wang, "Data-Driven Metaphor Recognition and Explanation", Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1 (2013) 379-390

    A more empirically-based approach

  • Dan Goldwasser, Xiao Zhang, "Understanding Satirical Articles Using Common-Sense ", Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 4, pp. 537-549, 2016

    Another approach to deal with non-seriously meant statements

  • Shafiq Joty, Giuseppe Carenini, Raymond T. Ng, "CODRA: A Novel Discriminative Framework for Rhetorical Analysis", Computational Linguistics Volume 41, Number 3 385-435, 2015

    A general approach

  • Ekaterina Shutova, "Design and Evaluation of Metaphor Processing Systems", Computational Linguistics Volume 41, Number 4 579-623, 2015 

    Another approach to metaphors

  • Farah Benamara, "Evaluative Language Beyond Bags of Words: Linguistic Insights and Computational Applications", Computational Linguistics Volume 43, Number 1 201-264, 2017

    On the role of evaluative statements

  • Debanjan Ghosh, Alexander R. Fabbri, Smaranda Muresan> "Sarcasm Analysis Using Conversation Contex", Computational Linguistics Volume 44, Number 4.

    • Reference interpretation

  • Joel Treteault, "A Corpus-Based Evaluation of Centering and Pronoun Resolution", Computational Linguistics 27(4), pp. 507-520, 2001.

    A comparison and evaluation of several algorithms.

  • Bonnie Webber, Matthew Stone, Aravind Joshi, Alistair Knott, "Anaphora and Discourse Structure", Computational Linguistics 29(4), pp. 545-587, 2003.

    Plenty of examples, relatively easily to read, since it is not too formal

  • Altaf Rahman and Vincent Ng "Coreference Resolution with World Knowledge", Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 814-824, Portland, Oregon, June 19-24, 2011

    Improvements through increased knowledge

  • Kotaro Funakoshi Mikio Nakano Takenobu Tokunaga Ryu Iida "A Unified Probabilistic Approach to Referring Expressions", Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), pages 237-246, Seoul, South Korea, 5-6 July 2012.

    A unifying theory for interpreting referring expressions

  • Rodolfo Delmonte, "Coping With Implicit Arguments And Events Coreference", Proceedings of the The 1st Workshop on EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation, pages1-10, Atlanta, Georgia, 14 June 2013.

    Uncovering some implicit information for coreference purposes

  • Haoruo Peng and Daniel Khashabi and Dan Roth "Solving Hard Coreference Problems", Human Language Technologies: The 2015 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, pages 809-819, 2015

    An ambitious investigation

  • Sudha Rao, Allyson Ettinger, Hal Daume III, Philip Resnik "Dialogue focus tracking for zero pronoun resolution", Human Language Technologies: The 2015 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, pages 494-503

    Particularly important for languages with fewer pronoun appearances

    • Prerequisites/remarks

    Joint lecture computer science/computational linguistics

    Extension to the lecture "Einführung in Diskurs" by Vera Demberg (SS20) - recommendable, but no formal prerequisite

    Certificates

    Presentation, contribution to discussions, written summary

    Credit points

    Kleiner CoLi-Schein (Diplom): 2 CP (presentation only);
    Grosser CoLi-Schein (Diplom): 4 CP (presentation and homework);
    CoLi (BSc/Ma): 4 CP (presentation only);
    CoLi (BSc/Ma): 7 CP (presentation and homework);
    Computer science: 9 CP (presentation and homework)

    E-mail Helmut Horacek