Semantic Information Pursuit

Using NLP to Model Product Market Boundaries, Market Structure, and Innovation

Emotion, discourse, and linguistic diversity: Emotions in grammar and discourse in northern Australia

How to do things with emotional expressions

Metaphor as a lens through which to examine deep, personal, emotional experiences

Reliable Characterizations of NLP Systems as a Social Responsibility

Subjective Databases

The language system in the human brain

Segmenting and annotating multimodal corpus: inspirations and principles from the traditional Chinese medicine

Il corpus MIDIA: concezione, realizzazione, impieghi

IMPAQTS: un corpus di discorsi politici italiani annotato per gli impliciti linguistici

EvaLatin 1.0: un Corpus per la Valutazione delle Tecnologie del Linguaggio Applicate al Latino

Esplorazioni di treebank multilingue per studi tipologici

Intonation of telephone conversations in a Customer Care Service

Diacronia e sincronia delle polirematiche con struttura preposizionale: un’analisi su corpora

Cosa ci rivelano i corpora sulla complessità testuale dell’italiano?

Keynote

keynote



[![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pf-upload-01/u-59356/0/2021-09-18/me23j72/button_workshop-website.png)](https://lt3.ugent.be/econlp/) 

W1: 3rd Workshop on Economics and Natural Language Processing (ECONLP)

**Title:** Emotion, discourse, and linguistic diversity: Emotions in grammar and discourse in northern Australia
 
 **Session Chair:** Mégane Lesuisse
 
 **Presenter:** [Maïa Ponsonnet](https://underline.io/speakers/145869-maia-ponsonnet)
 
 **Abstract:** This presentation will draw on documentation work carried out with speakers of the Dalabon and Kriol languages of northern Australia since the mid-2000s. Dalabon is a severely endangered language of the Gunwinyguan family (non-Pama-Nyungan) (Evans, Merlan & Tukumba 2004). Kriol is an English-based creole spoken 20 to 30,000 people in the central north of Australia (Schultze-Berndt, Meakins & Angelo 2013). The descendants of Dalabon speakers have now adopted Kriol as their day-to-day language. 
 
In the first part of the talk, I will discuss the underpinnings and implications of attending to emotional language among the Dalabon-speaking communities. I will then dive into the specificities of emotional language in Dalabon, highlighting the prevalence of the linguistic embodiment of emotions (Ponsonnet 2014; Ponsonnet & Laginha in press); as well as a preference for discourse strategies based on avoidance when it comes to managing negative emotions (Rimé 2009). 
 
In the last part of the talk, I will consider Kriol, and whether the adoption of a new language may have influenced the way people talk about emotions (Woodbury 1998). One observation is that in terms of communication potential, Kriol speakers have developed means to talk about emotions in a very similar fashion as in Dalabon (Ponsonnet 2020). On the other hand, there is evidence that discourse practices evolve to accommodate less avoidant emotion-management strategies in emerging contexts (Rodriguez Louro & Collard 2021).

Keynote 3: M. Ponsonnet: Emotion, discourse, and linguistic diversity: Emotions in grammar and discourse in northern Australia

**Title:** How to do things with emotional expressions
 
 **Session Chair:** Giuditta Caliendo
 
 **Presenter:** [Andrea Scarantino](https://underline.io/speakers/145887-andrea-scarantino)
 
 **Abstract:** We tend to think of emotional expressions as primitive and automatic, and of language as sophisticated and under voluntary control. In this talk, I will try to bridge the gap between emotional and linguistic communication by exploring how emotional expressions manage to manifest several of the design features of language. In particular, the core tenet of the Theory of Affective Pragmatics I have developed in the past few years is that emotional expressions are a means not only of expressing what’s inside, but also of directing other people’s behavior, of representing what the world is like and of committing to future courses of action. Since these are some of the main things we can do with language, the take home message of my analysis is that, from a communicative point of view, much of what we can do with language we can also do with non-verbal emotional expressions, in ways that potentially explain the emergence of language itself. I will conclude by presenting some new experimental evidence in support of the view that merely by expressing our emotions we make complex demands on others to do, feel and think particular things.

Keynote 1: A. Scarantino: How to do things with emotional expressions

**Title:** Metaphor as a lens through which to examine deep, personal, emotional experiences
 
 **Session Chair:** Maarten Lemmens
 
 **Presenter:** [Jeannette Littlemore](https://underline.io/speakers/145891-jeannette-littlemore)
 
 **Abstract:** Language is the most sophisticated tool humans have developed to communicate emotional experiences. However, due to their highly personal, idiosyncratic nature, such experiences can often be difficult to put into words. The dimensional aspects of emotional experiences, i.e., those involving valence, dominance and arousal can be expressed through literal language. However, once we go beyond these dimensional accounts and try to describe the subjective felt experiences of emotions it is necessary to employ metaphor. Metaphors provide information about the rich detail of human emotional experience in a way that literal language does not (Semino et al., 2017). Metaphorical skill and imagination are therefore important in communicating the nature of unshared experience and creating rapport (Reisfield & Wilson, 2004). For this reason, when talking about deep, personal emotional experiences that are difficult to describe, people often reach for metaphor, with more personal experiences leading to more creative uses of metaphor (Fainsilber & Ortony, 1987; Williams-Whitney et al., 1992). Possible reasons for this are the fact that metaphors allow us to describe ineffable experiences in more concrete, tangible, and often physical terms, and metaphors are sufficiently flexible to allow us to employ a finite set of linguistic resources to express precisely, an infinite range of experiences (Colston & Gibbs, 2021).
 In this talk I present findings from four studies, which involved the analysis of metaphor in order to better understand people’s personal, emotional experiences. These experiences include: pregnancy loss; bereavement; the description of positive and negative workplace experiences; and older adults’ experiences of lockdown during Covid 19. Through these studies I reveal what metaphor analysis can tell us about: embodied grief; agency and identity; relationships with others, including the deceased; attitudes towards time, the extent to which experiences are shared by communities; and the ways in which these experiences change over time. I reflect on the benefits and drawbacks of the methods employed and discuss the ways in which findings from some of these studies have been incorporated into professional development materials that have been designed for those who support the bereaved.
 
 References
 
* Colston, H. L., & Gibbs, R. W. (2021). Figurative language communicates directly because it precisely demonstrates what we mean. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale.
* Fainsilber, L., & Ortony, A. (1987). Metaphorical uses of language in the expression of emotions. Metaphor and Symbol, 2(4), 239–250.
* Reisfield, G. M., & Wilson, G. R. (2004). Use of metaphor in the discourse on cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 22(19), 4024–4027.
* Semino, E., Demjén, Z., Hardie, A., Payne, S., & Rayson, P. (2017). Metaphor, cancer and the end of life: A corpus-based study. Routledge.
* Williams-Whitney, D., Mio, J. S., & Whitney, P. (1992). Metaphor production in creative writing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 21(6).

Keynote 2: J. Littlemore: Metaphor as a lens through which to examine deep, personal, emotional experiences

Live Session will take place on the main stage. Please click on the main stage button below to join the session. 
[![](https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/underline.prod/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/f5c487c8670fce039ed0b6aa5a8c158f.png)](https://underline.io/events/167/main-stage) 
**Date: **Tuesday, 3 August 2021 
**Time: **15:30 UTC - 16:30 UTC 
**Session Chair: ** Fei Xia 
**Speaker: **Christopher Potts, Stanford University 

**[Christopher Potts recorded talk](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CAzYdiPKLjb1nfEmkagwcn3tNk4DPZ6A/view?usp=sharing)
 [Christopher Potts speaker slides ](http://web.stanford.edu/~cgpotts/talks/potts-acl2021-slides-handout.pdf)**

**Title: **Reliable Characterizations of NLP Systems as a Social Responsibility 

**Abstract: **This is an incredible moment for NLP. We all routinely work with models whose capabilities
would have seemed like science fiction just two decades ago, powerful organizations eagerly await our
latest results, and NLP technologies are playing an increasingly large role in shaping our society. As
a result, all of us in the NLP community are likely to participate in research that will contribute (to
varying degrees and perhaps only indirectly) to technologies that will impact many people’s lives, with
both positive and negative consequences for example, technologies that broaden accessibility, enhance
creative self-expression, heighten surveillance, and create propaganda. What can we do to fulfill the
social responsibility that this brings? As a (very) partial answer to this question, I will review a number
of important recent developments, spanning many research groups, concerning dataset creation, model
introspection, and system assessment. Taken together, these ideas can help us more reliably characterize
how NLP systems will behave, and more reliably communicate this information to a wider range of
potential users. In this way, they can help us meet our obligations to the people whose lives are impacted
by the results of our research. 

**Bio: **Christopher Potts is Professor and Chair of Linguistics and Professor (by courtesy) of Computer
Science at Stanford, and a faculty member in the Stanford NLP Group and the Stanford AI Lab. His
group uses computational methods to explore how emotion is expressed in language and how linguistic
production and interpretation are influenced by the context of utterance. This research combines methods
from linguistics, cognitive psychology, and computer science, in the service of both scientific discovery
and technology development. He was previously Chief Scientist at Roam Analytics, a start-up focused
on applying NLP in healthcare and the life sciences (now Parexel AI Labs). He is a long-time Action
Editor at TACL, a frequent Area Chair at ACL conferences, and currently an Ethics Committee co-chair
for EMNLP 2021.

Keynote 3 # Speaker: Chris Potts

Keynote lectures

**Chair: Matteo Palmonari** 

![](https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/underline.prod/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/d732bff234828a7dbe063c25bfe0e47c.png)


**Dr. Fedorenko** is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies the human language system. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 2002, and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007. She was then awarded a K99R00 career development award from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. In 2014, she joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and in 2019 she returned to MIT where she is currently the Frederick A. (1971) and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Associate Professor of Neuroscience in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Dr. Fedorenko uses fMRI, intracranial recordings and stimulation, EEG/ERPs, MEG, as well as computational modeling, to study adults and children, including those with developmental and acquired brain disorders.


**The language system in the human brain**

The goal of my research program is to understand the representations and computations that enable us to share complex thoughts with one another via language, and their neural implementation. A decade ago, I developed a robust new approach to the study of language in the brain based on identifying language-responsive cortex functionally in individual participants. Originally developed for fMRI, we have since extended this approach to other modalities, like intracranial recordings. Using this functional-localization approach, I identified and characterized a set of frontal and temporal brain areas that i) support language comprehension and production (spoken and written); ii) are robustly separable from the lower-level perceptual (e.g., speech processing) and motor (e.g., articulation) brain areas; iii) are spatially and functionally similar across diverse languages (>40 languages from 11 language families); and iv) form a functionally integrated system with substantial redundancy across different components. In this talk, I will highlight a few discoveries from the last decade and argue that the primary goal of language is efficient information transfer rather than enabling complex thought, as has been argued in one prominent philosophical and linguistic tradition (e.g., Wittgenstein, 1921; Berwick & Chomsky, 2016). I will use two kinds of evidence to make this argument. */First/*, I will examine the relationship between language and other aspects of cognition, including social cognitive abilities and complex thought/reasoning. I will show that the language brain regions are highly selective for language over diverse non-linguistic processes while also showing a deep and intriguing link with a system that supports social cognition. And /*second*/, I will examine different properties of language and argue that language both has a) properties that make it well-suited for communication, and b) properties that make it not suitable for complex thought. Both of these lines of evidence support the communicative function of language, and suggest that the idea that language evolved to allow for more complexity in thought is unlikely.

Invited Talk: Evelina Fedorenko: The language system in the human brain

invited talk

**Chair:** Emanuela Cresti (Università di Firenze - Accademi
della Crusca) **Title:** Segmenting and annotating multimodal corpus: inspirations and principles from the traditional Chinese medicine (Invited Lecture) 
**Author:** Gu Yueguo (The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) 
 
**Title:** Il corpus MIDIA: concezione, realizzazione, impieghi 
**Authors:** Claudio Iacobini, Paolo D’Achille (Università di Salerno; Università Roma Tre) 
 
**Title:** IMPAQTS: un corpus di discorsi politici italiani annotato per gli impliciti linguistici 
**Author:** Federica Cominetti, Alessandro Panunzi, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Lorenzo Gregori (Università Roma Tre; Università di Firenze)

SESSIONE PLENARIA 1

**Chair:** Fracnesca Dovetto (Università di Napoli Federico II) **Title:** EvaLatin 1.0: un Corpus per la Valutazione delle Tecnologie del Linguaggio Applicate al Latino 
**Author:** Rachele Sprugnoli, Matteo Pellegrini, Marco Passarotti, Flavio Massimo Cecchini
(Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano; Università di Bergamo) 


 **Title:** Esplorazioni di treebank multilingue per studi tipologici 
**Authors:** Chiara Alzetta, Felice Dell'Orletta, Simonetta Montemagni, Giulia Venturi
(ILC-CNR; Università di Genova) 

**Title:** Intonation of telephone conversations in a Customer Care Service 
**Author:** Philippe Martin (Université Paris Diderot)

SESSIONE PLENARIA 2

**Chair:** Alessandro Panunzi (Università di Firenze)
 
**Title:** Corpus-based research in English grammar (Invited Lecture) 
**Author:** Bas Aarts (University College London) 

 
**Title:** La concezione delle congiunzioni e degli avverbi nella linguistica dei corpora 
**Author:** Anna-Maria De Cesare (Università di Basilea) 

 
**Title:** Diacronia e sincronia delle polirematiche con struttura preposizionale: un’analisi su corpora 
**Authors:** Vittorio Ganfi, Valentina Piunno (Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma; Università Roma)
 


**Title:** La punteggiatura italiana attraverso i corpora. Teoria, sincronia e diacronia 
**Authors:** Angela Ferrari, Letizia Lala, Filippo Pecorari
(Universität Basel, Université de Lausanne) 


 **Title:** Cosa ci rivelano i corpora sulla complessità testuale dell’italiano? 
**Author:** Iørn Korzen (Copenhagen Business School)