Articles

AbstractWe propose the first lightly-supervised approach to scoring an argument’s persuasiveness. Key to our approach is the novel hypothesis that lightly-supervised persuasiveness scoring is possible by explicitly modeling the major errors that negatively impact persuasiveness. In an evaluation on a new annotated corpus of online debate arguments, our approach rivals …...

AbstractWe explore techniques to maximize the effectiveness of discourse information in the task of authorship attribution. We present a novel method to embed discourse features in a Convolutional Neural Network text classifier, which achieves a state-of-the-art result by a significant margin. We empirically investigate several featurization methods to understand the …...

AbstractThe problem of blend formation in generative linguistics is interesting in the context of neologism, their quick adoption in modern life and the creative generative process guiding their formation. Blend quality depends on multitude of factors with high degrees of uncertainty. In this work, we investigate if the modern neural …...

AbstractRecurrent Neural Network models are the state-of-the-art for Named Entity Recognition (NER). We present two innovations to improve the performance of these models. The first innovation is the introduction of residual connections between the Stacked Recurrent Neural Network model to address the degradation problem of deep neural networks. The second …...

AbstractTweet-level sentiment classification in Twitter social networking has many challenges: exploiting syntax, semantic, sentiment, and context in tweets. To address these problems, we propose a novel approach to sentiment analysis that uses lexicon features for building lexicon embeddings (LexW2Vs) and generates character attention vectors (CharAVs) by using a Deep Convolutional …...

AbstractIn this paper we propose a lightly-supervised framework to rapidly build text classifiers for contextual advertising. Traditionally text classification techniques require labeled training documents for each predefined class. In the scenario of contextual advertising, advertisers often want to target to a specific class of webpages most relevant to their product …...

AbstractThe sentiment aggregation problem accounts for analyzing the sentiment of a user towards various aspects/features of a product, and meaningfully assimilating the pragmatic significance of these features/aspects from an opinionated text. The current paper addresses the sentiment aggregation problem, by assigning weights to each aspect appearing in the user-generated content, …...

AbstractTargeted sentiment analysis investigates the sentiment polarities on given target mentions from input texts. Different from sentence level sentiment, it offers more fine-grained knowledge on each entity mention. While early work leveraged syntactic information, recent research has used neural representation learning to induce features automatically, thereby avoiding error propagation of …...

AbstractCurrent approaches to cross-lingual sentiment analysis try to leverage the wealth of labeled English data using bilingual lexicons, bilingual vector space embeddings, or machine translation systems. Here we show that it is possible to use a single linear transformation, with as few as 2000 word pairs, to capture fine-grained sentiment …...

AbstractIdentifying implicit discourse relations between text spans is a challenging task because it requires understanding the meaning of the text. To tackle this task, recent studies have tried several deep learning methods but few of them exploited the syntactic information. In this work, we explore the idea of incorporating syntactic …...

AbstractImplicit discourse relation recognition is an extremely challenging task due to the lack of indicative connectives. Various neural network architectures have been proposed for this task recently, but most of them suffer from the shortage of labeled data. In this paper, we address this problem by procuring additional training data …...

AbstractThe popularity of image sharing on social media and the engagement it creates between users reflect the important role that visual context plays in everyday conversations. We present a novel task, Image Grounded Conversations (IGC), in which natural-sounding conversations are generated about a shared image. To benchmark progress, we introduce …...

AbstractThis study addresses the problem of identifying the meaning of unknown words or entities in a discourse with respect to the word embedding approaches used in neural language models. We proposed a method for on-the-fly construction and exploitation of word embeddings in both the input and output layers of a …...

AbstractDespite successful applications across a broad range of NLP tasks, conditional random fields (“CRFs”), in particular the linear-chain variant, are only able to model local features. While this has important benefits in terms of inference tractability, it limits the ability of the model to capture long-range dependencies between items. Attempts …...

AbstractAlthough features of linguistic typology are a promising alternative to lexical evidence for tracing evolutionary history of languages, a large number of missing values in the dataset pose serious difficulties for statistical modeling. In this paper, we combine two existing approaches to the problem: (1) the synchronic approach that focuses …...

AbstractRecently, encoder-decoder neural networks have shown impressive performance on many sequence-related tasks. The architecture commonly uses an attentional mechanism which allows the model to learn alignments between the source and the target sequence. Most attentional mechanisms used today is based on a global attention property which requires a computation of …...

AbstractAcoustic emotion recognition aims to categorize the affective state of the speaker and is still a difficult task for machine learning models. The difficulties come from the scarcity of training data, general subjectivity in emotion perception resulting in low annotator agreement, and the uncertainty about which features are the most …...

AbstractWe revisit the idea of mining Wikipedia in order to generate named-entity annotations. We propose a new methodology that we applied to English Wikipedia to build WiNER, a large, high quality, annotated corpus. We evaluate its usefulness on 6 NER tasks, comparing 4 popular state-of-the art approaches. We show that …...

AbstractIn this paper we introduce the problem of identifying usage expression sentences in a consumer product review. We create a human-annotated gold standard dataset of 565 reviews spanning five distinct product categories. Our dataset consists of more than 3,000 annotated sentences. We further introduce a classification system to label sentences …...

AbstractThis article presents a contrastive analysis between reading time and syntactic/semantic categories in Japanese. We overlaid the reading time annotation of BCCWJ-EyeTrack and a syntactic/semantic category information annotation on the ‘Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese’. Statistical analysis based on a mixed linear model showed that verbal phrases tend to …...