In this article we present Enhanced Rhetorical Structure Theory (eRST), a new theoretical framework for computational discourse analysis, based on an expansion of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The framework encompasses discourse relation graphs with tree-breaking, non-projective and concurrent relations, as well as implicit and explicit signals which give explainable rationales to our analyses. We survey shortcomings of RST and other existing frameworks, such as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) and Discourse Dependencies, and address these using constructs in the proposed theory. We provide annotation, search and visualization tools for data, and present and evaluate a freely available corpus of English annotated according to our framework, encompassing 12 spoken and written genres with over 200K tokens. Finally, we discuss automatic parsing, evaluation metrics and applications for data in our framework.

eRST: A Signaled Graph Theory of Discourse Relations and Organization

Human label variation (HLV) is a valuable source of information that arises when multiple human annotators provide different labels for valid reasons. In Natural Language Inference (NLI) earlier approaches to capturing HLV involve either collecting annotations from many crowd workers to represent human judgment distribution (HJD) or use expert linguists to provide detailed explanations for their chosen labels. While the former method provides denser HJD information, obtaining it is resource-intensive. In contrast, the latter offers richer textual information but it is challenging to scale up to many human judges. Besides, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as evaluators ("LLM judges") but with mixed results, and few works aim to study HJDs. This study proposes to exploit LLMs to approximate HJDs using a small number of expert labels and explanations. Our experiments show that a few explanations significantly improve LLMs' ability to approximate HJDs with and without explicit labels, thereby providing a solution to scale up annotations for HJD. However, fine-tuning smaller soft-label aware models with the LLM-generated model judgment distributions (MJDs) presents partially inconsistent results: while similar in distance, their resulting fine-tuned models and visualized distributions differ substantially. We show the importance of complementing instance-level distance measures with a global-level shape metric and visualization to more effectively evaluate MJDs against human judgment distributions.

Seeing the Big through the Small: Can LLMs Approximate Human Judgment Distributions on NLI from a Few Explanations?

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key information extraction task with a long-standing tradition. 
While recent studies address and aim to correct annotation errors via re-labeling efforts, little is known about the sources of label variation, such as text ambiguity, annotation error, or guideline divergence. This is especially the case for high-quality datasets and beyond English CoNLL03. 
This paper studies disagreements in expert-annotated named entity datasets for three varieties: English, Danish, and DialectX.
We show that text ambiguity and artificial guideline changes are dominant factors for diverse annotations among high-quality revisions. 
We survey student annotations on a subset of difficult entities and substantiate the feasibility and necessity of manifold annotations for understanding named entity ambiguities from a distributional perspective.

Different Tastes of Entities: Investigating Human Label Variation in Named Entity Annotations

Discourse + Phonology + Syntax

technical paper

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

This poster session includes Main Conference posters and Findings from the following areas:

Speech Processing and Spoken Language Understanding •  Resources and Evaluation • Human-centered NLP • NLP Applications

In-Person Poster Session D (Riverfront Hall)

poster

Real language is underspecified, vague, and ambiguous. Indeed, past work (Zipf, 1949; Piantadosi, 2012) has suggested that ambiguity may be an inextricable feature of natural language, resulting from competing communicative pressures. Resolving the meaning of language is a never-ending process of making inferences based on implicit knowledge. For example, we know that ''the girl saw the man with the telescope'' is ambiguous and could refer to two situations, while ''the girl saw the man with the hamburger'' is not, or that ''near'' in ''the house near the airport'' and ''the ant near the crumb'' does not refer to the same distance. Being able to capture this kind of knowledge is central to building systems with a human-like understanding of language, as well as to providing a full account of natural language itself. [**Read more**](https://unimplicit2024.github.io/)
 [**Invited Speakers**](https://unimplicit2024.github.io/#speakers) **Program Overview** 
09:30 - 09:45 Welcome and Opening Remarks 
09:45 - 10:45 Invited Talk 1 - Raquel Fernández 
10:45 - 11:15 Coffee Break 
11:15 - 12:30 In-Person Poster Session 
12:30 - 13:45 Lunch 
13:45 - 14:30 In-Person Oral Presentations 
14:30 - 15:30 Invited Talk 2 - Malihe Alkhani 
15:30 - 16:00 Coffee Break 
16:00 - 17:00 Invited Talk 3 - Benjamin Bergen 
17:00 - 17:10 Closing Remarks [**Detailed Program**](https://unimplicit2024.github.io/#program)

W5: The Third Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language (UnImplicit)

workshop paper

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Siyao Peng

3

1

Presentations

eRST: A Signaled Graph Theory of Discourse Relations and Organization

Seeing the Big through the Small: Can LLMs Approximate Human Judgment Distributions on NLI from a Few Explanations?

Different Tastes of Entities: Investigating Human Label Variation in Named Entity Annotations

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