United Arab Emirates

The mechanisms underlying human communication have been under investigation for decades, but the answer to how understanding between locutors emerges remains incomplete. Interaction theories suggest the development of a structural alignment between the speakers, allowing for the construction of a shared knowledge base (common ground). In this paper, we propose to apply metrics derived from information theory to quantify the amount of information exchanged between participants, the dynamics of information exchanges, to provide an objective way to measure the common ground instantiation. We focus on a corpus of free conversations augmented with prosodic segmentation and an expert annotation of thematic episodes. We show that during free conversations, the amount of information remains globally constant at the scale of the conversation, but varies depending on the thematic structuring, underlining the role of the speaker introducing the theme. We propose an original methodology applied to uncontrolled material.

EMNLP 2022

Shared knowledge in natural conversations: can entropy metrics shed light on information transfers?

free conversation

information transfer

dialogue

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

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The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

The lack of wide coverage datasets annotated with everyday metaphorical expressions for languages other than English is striking. This means that most research on supervised metaphor detection has been published only for that language. In order to address this issue, this work presents the first corpus annotated with naturally occurring metaphors in Spanish large enough to develop systems to perform metaphor detection. The presented dataset, CoMeta, includes texts from various domains, namely, news, political discourse, Wikipedia and reviews. In order to label CoMeta, we apply the MIPVU method, the guidelines most commonly used to systematically annotate metaphor on real data. We use our newly created dataset to provide competitive baselines by fine-tuning several multilingual and monolingual state-of-the-art large language models. Furthermore, by leveraging the existing VUAM English data in addition to CoMeta, we present the, to the best of our knowledge, first cross-lingual experiments on supervised metaphor detection. Finally, we perform a detailed error analysis that explores the seemingly high transfer of everyday metaphor across these two languages and datasets.

Leveraging a New Spanish Corpus for Multilingual and Cross-lingual Metaphor Detection

Text Simplification (TS) is the task of converting a text into a form that is easier to read while maintaining the meaning of the original text. A sub-task of TS is Cognitive Simplification (CS), converting text to a form that is readily understood by people with cognitive disabilities without rendering it childish or simplistic. This sub-task has yet to be explored with neural methods in NLP, and resources for it are scarcely available. In this paper, we present a method for incorporating knowledge from the cognitive accessibility domain into a TS model, by introducing an inductive bias regarding what simplification operations to use. We show that by adding this inductive bias to a TS-trained model, it is able to adapt better to CS without ever seeing CS data, and outperform a baseline model on a traditional TS benchmark. In addition, we provide a novel test dataset for CS, and analyze the differences between CS corpora and existing TS corpora, in terms of how simplification operations are applied.

Cognitive Simplification Operations Improve Text Simplification

Cross-lingual transfer of parsing models has been shown to work well for several closely-related languages, but predicting the success in other cases remains hard. Our study is a comprehensive analysis of the impact of linguistic distance on the transfer of UD parsers. As an alternative to syntactic typological distances extracted from URIEL, we propose three text-based feature spaces and show that they can be more precise predictors, especially on a more local scale, when only shorter distances are taken into account. Our analyses also reveal that the good coverage in typological databases is not among the factors that explain good transfer.

On Language Spaces, Scales and Cross-Lingual Transfer of UD Parsers

The success of scene graphs for visual scene understanding has brought attention to the benefits of abstracting a visual input (e.g., image) into a structured representation, where entities (people and objects) are nodes connected by edges specifying their relations. Building these representations, however, requires expensive manual annotation in the form of images paired with their scene graphs or frames. These formalisms remain limited in the nature of entities and relations they can capture. In this paper, we propose to leverage a widely-used meaning representation in the field of natural language processing, the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), to address these shortcomings. Compared to scene graphs, which largely emphasize spatial relationships, our visual AMR graphs are more linguistically informed, with a focus on higher-level semantic concepts extrapolated from visual input. Moreover, they allow us to generate meta-AMR graphs to unify information contained in multiple image descriptions under one representation. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, we demonstrate that we can re-purpose an existing text-to-AMR parser to parse images into AMRs. Our findings point to important future research directions for improved scene understanding.

Visual Semantic Parsing: From Images to Abstract Meaning Representation

Humans exhibit garden path effects: When reading sentences that are temporarily structurally ambiguous, they slow down when the structure is disambiguated in favor of the less preferred alternative. Surprisal theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), a prominent explanation of this finding, proposes that these slowdowns are due to the unpredictability of each of the words that occur in these sentences. Challenging this hypothesis, van Schijndel and Linzen (2021) find that estimates of the cost of word predictability derived from language models severely underestimate the magnitude of human garden path effects. In this work, we consider whether this underestimation is due to the fact that humans weight syntactic factors in their predictions more highly than language models do. We propose a method for estimating syntactic predictability from a language model, allowing us to weigh the cost of lexical and syntactic predictability independently. We find that treating syntactic predictability independently from lexical predictability indeed results in larger estimates of garden path. At the same time, even when syntactic predictability is independently weighted, surprisal still greatly underestimate the magnitude of human garden path effects. Our results support the hypothesis that predictability is not the only factor responsible for the processing cost associated with garden path sentences.

Syntactic Surprisal From Neural Models Predicts, But Underestimates, Human Processing Difficulty From Syntactic Ambiguities

Prior studies of zero-shot stance detection identify the attitude of texts towards unseen topics occurring in the same document corpus. Such task formulation has three limitations: (i) Single domain/dataset. A system is optimized on a particular dataset from a single domain; therefore, the resulting system cannot work well on other datasets; (ii) the model is evaluated on a limited number of unseen topics; (iii) it is assumed that part of the topics has rich annotations, which might be impossible in real-world applications. These drawbacks will lead to an impractical stance detection system that fails to generalize to open domains and open-form topics.  This work defines OpenStance: open-domain zero-shot stance detection, aiming to handle stance detection in an open world with neither domain constraints nor topic-specific annotations. The key challenge of OpenStance lies in open-domain generalization: learning a system with fully unspecific supervision but capable of generalizing to any dataset. To solve OpenStance, we propose to combine indirect supervision, from textual entailment datasets, and weak supervision, from data generated automatically by pre-trained Language Models. Our single system, without any topic-specific supervision, outperforms the supervised method on three popular datasets. To our knowledge, this is the first work that studies stance detection under the open-domain zero-shot setting. All data and code will be publicly released.

OpenStance: Real-world Zero-shot Stance Detection

Even though fine-tuned neural language models have been pivotal in enabling "deep" automatic text analysis, optimizing text representations for specific applications remains a crucial bottleneck.  In this study, we look at this problem in the context of a task from computational social science, namely modeling pairwise similarities between political parties. Our research question is what level of structural information is necessary to create robust text representation, contrasting a strongly informed approach (which uses both claim span and claim category annotations) with approaches that forgo one or both types of annotation with document structure-based heuristics. Evaluating our models on the manifestos of German parties for the 2021 federal election. We find that heuristics that maximize within-party over between-party similarity along with a normalization step lead to reliable party similarity prediction, without the need for manual annotation.

Optimizing text representations to capture (dis)similarity between political parties

We propose an ACT-R cue-based retrieval model of the real-time gender predictions displayed by second language (L2) learners. The model extends a previous model of native (L1) speakers according to two central accounts in L2 sentence processing: (i) the Interference Hypothesis, which proposes that retrieval interference is higher in L2 than L1 speakers; (ii) the Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis, which proposes that problems with gender agreement are due to weak gender representations. We tested the predictions of these accounts using data from two visual world experiments, which found that the gender predictions elicited by German possessive pronouns were delayed and smaller in size in L2 than L1 speakers. The experiments  also found a "match effect", such that when the antecedent and possessee of the pronoun had the same gender, predictions were earlier than when the two genders differed. This match effect was smaller in L2 than L1 speakers. The model implementing the Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis captured the effects of smaller predictions, smaller match effect and delayed predictions in one of the two conditions. By contrast, the model implementing the Interference Hypothesis captured the smaller prediction effect but it showed an earlier prediction effect and an increased match effect in L2 than L1 speakers. These results provide evidence for the Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis, and they demonstrate a method for extending computational models of L1 to L2 processing.

Computational cognitive modeling of predictive sentence processing in a second language

Targeted studies testing knowledge of subject-verb agreement (SVA) indicate that pre-trained language models encode syntactic information. We assert that if models robustly encode subject-verb agreement, they should be able to identify when agreement is correct and when it is incorrect. To that end, we propose grammatical error detection as a diagnostic probe to evaluate token-level contextual representations for their knowledge of SVA. We evaluate contextual representations at each layer from five pre-trained English language models: BERT, XLNet, GPT-2, RoBERTa and ELECTRA. We leverage public annotated training data from both English second language learners and Wikipedia edits, and report results on manually crafted stimuli for subject-verb agreement. We find that masked language models linearly encode information relevant to the detection of SVA errors, while the autoregressive models perform on par with our baseline. However, we also observe a divergence in performance when probes are trained on different training sets, and when they are evaluated on different syntactic constructions, suggesting the information pertaining to SVA error detection is not robustly encoded.

Probing for targeted syntactic knowledge through grammatical error detection

Text segmentation is a natural language processing task with popular applications, such as topic segmentation, element discourse extraction, and sentence tokenization. Much work has been done to develop accurate segmentation similarity metrics, but even the most advanced metrics used today, B, and WindowDiff, exhibit incorrect behavior due to their evaluation of boundaries in isolation. In this paper, we present a new segment-alignment based approach to segmentation similarity scoring and a new similarity metric A. We show that A does not exhibit the erratic behavior of $ and WindowDiff, quantify the likelihood of B and WindowDiff misbehaving through simulation, and discuss the versatility of alignment-based approaches for segmentation similarity scoring. We make our implementation of A publicly available and encourage the community to explore more sophisticated approaches to text segmentation similarity scoring.

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Leveraging a New Spanish Corpus for Multilingual and Cross-lingual Metaphor Detection

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Locating strongly informative utterances in conversation using multimodal cues

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