Articles

AbstractThe use of misogynistic and sexist language has increased in recent years in social media, and is increasing in the Arabic world in reaction to reforms attempting to remove restrictions on women lives. However, there are few benchmarks for Arabic misogyny and sexism detection, and in those the annotations are …...

AbstractThis paper introduces CoRoSeOf, a large corpus of Romanian social media manually annotated for sexist and offensive language. We describe the annotation process of the corpus, provide initial analyses, and baseline classification results for sexism detection on this data set. The resulting corpus contains 39 245 tweets, annotated by multiple …...

AbstractEntity linking in dialogue is the task of mapping entity mentions in utterances to a target knowledge base. Prior work on entity linking has mainly focused on well-written articles such as Wikipedia, annotated newswire, or domain-specific datasets. We extend the study of entity linking to open domain dialogue by presenting …...

AbstractDigital recorded written and spoken dialogues are becoming increasingly available as an effect of the technological advances such as online messenger services and the use of chatbots. Summaries are a natural way of presenting the important information gathered from dialogues. We present a unique data set that consists of Dutch …...

AbstractHealth behaviour change is a difficult and prolonged process that requires sustained motivation and determination. Conversa- tional agents have shown promise in supporting the change process in the past. One therapy approach that facilitates change and has been used as a framework for conversational agents is motivational interviewing. However, existing …...

AbstractIntegrating the existing interruption and turn switch classification methods, we propose a new annotation schema to annotate different types of interruptions through timeliness, switch accomplishment and speech content level. The proposed method is able to distinguish smooth turn exchange, backchannel and interruption (including interruption types) and to annotate dyadic conversation. …...

AbstractThe performance of hate speech detection models relies on the datasets on which the models are trained. Existing datasets are mostly prepared with a limited number of instances or hate domains that define hate topics. This hinders large-scale analysis and transfer learning with respect to hate domains. In this study, …...

AbstractQuestion Answering, including Reading Comprehension, is one of the NLP research areas that has seen significant scientific breakthroughs over the past few years, thanks to the concomitant advances in Language Modeling. Most of these breakthroughs, however, are centered on the English language. In 2020, as a first strong initiative to …...

As voice user interfaces and conversational agents grow in importance, automatic speech recognition (ASR) encounters increasingly free-form and informal input data. Conversa- tional speech is at once the most challenging and the most ecologically relevant type of data for speech recognition in this context. Here we evaluate the performance of …...

AbstractHate speech detection is a prominent and challenging task, since hate messages are often expressed in subtle ways and with characteristics that may vary depending on the author. Hence, many models suffer from the generalization problem. However, retrieving and monitoring hateful content on social media is a current necessity. In …...

AbstractAn idealized, though simplistic, view of the referring expression production and grounding process in (situated) dialogue assumes that a speaker must merely appropriately specify their expression so that the target referent may be successfully identified by the addressee. However, referring in conversation is a collaborative process that cannot be aptly …...

AbstractStudying and mitigating gender and other biases in natural language have become important areas of research from both algorithmic and data perspectives. This paper explores the idea of reducing gender bias in a language generation context by generating gender variants of sentences. Previous work in this field has either been …...

AbstractNLP technologies such as text similarity assessment, question answering and text classification are increasingly being used to develop intelligent educational applications. The long-term goal of our work is an intelligent tutoring system for German secondary schools, which will support students in a school exercise that requires them to identify arguments …...

AbstractCan NLP assist in building formal models for verifying complex systems? We study this challenge in the context of parsing Network File System (NFS) specifications. We define a semantic-dependency problem over SpecIR, a representation language we introduce to model sentences appearing in NFS specification documents (RFCs) as IF-THEN statements, and …...

AbstractObtaining linguistic annotation from novice crowdworkers is far from trivial. A case in point is the annotation of discourse relations, which is a complicated task. Recent methods have obtained promising results by extracting relation labels from either discourse connectives (DCs) or question-answer (QA) pairs that participants provide. The current contribution …...

AbstractWe introduce the CRASS (counterfactual reasoning assessment) data set and benchmark utilizing questionized counterfactual conditionals as a novel and powerful tool to evaluate large language models. We present the data set design and benchmark. We test six state-of-the-art models against our benchmark. Our results show that it poses a valid …...

AbstractThe scientific community is increasingly aware of the necessity to embrace pluralism and consistently represent major and minor social groups. Currently, there are no standard evaluation techniques for different types of biases. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to provide evaluation sets and protocols to measure existing biases in our …...

AbstractAlthough information on the Internet can be shared in many languages, the language presence on the World Wide Web is very disproportionate. The problem of multilingualism on the Web, in particular access, availability and quality of information in the world’s languages, has been the subject of UNESCO focus for several …...

AbstractSocial media are heavily used by many users to share their mental health concerns and diagnoses. This trend has turned social media into a large-scale resource for researchers focused on detecting mental health conditions. Social media usage varies considerably across individuals. Thus, classification of patterns, including detecting signs of depression, …...

AbstractDifferent algorithms have been proposed to detect semantic shifts (changes in a word meaning over time) in a diachronic corpus. Yet, and somehow surprisingly, no reference corpus has been designed so far to evaluate them, leaving researchers to fallback to troublesome evaluation strategies. In this work, we introduce a methodology …...