The 44th Language Lunch
Date: 2014-10-13
Location: G.07 Informatics Forum
Chinese Poetry Generation with Recurrent Neural Networks
Xingxing,Zhang; None; None
We propose a model for Chinese poem generation based on recurrent neural networks which we argue is ideally suited to capturing poetic content and form. Our generator jointly performs content selection (“what to say”) and surface realization (“how to say”) by learning representations of individual characters, and their combinations into one or more lines as well as how these mutually reinforce and constrain each other. Poem lines are generated incrementally by taking into account the entire history of what has been generated so far rather than the limited horizon imposed by the previous line or lexical n-grams. Experimental results show that our model outperforms competitive Chinese poetry generation systems using both automatic and manual evaluation methods.
Discriminative Lexical Semantic Segmentation with Gaps: Running the MWE Gamut
Nathan,Schneider; None; None
rnWe present a novel representation, evaluation measure, and supervised models for the task of identifying the multiword expressions (MWEs) in a sentence, resulting in a lexical semantic segmentation. Our approach generalizes a standard chunking representation to encode MWEs containing gaps, thereby enabling efficient sequence tagging algorithms for feature-rich discriminative models. Experiments on a new dataset of English web text offer the first linguistically-driven evaluation of MWE identification with truly heterogeneous expression types. Our statistical sequence model greatly outperforms a lookup-based segmentation procedure, achieving nearly 60% F1 for MWE identification.
The effect of extroversion on communication: Evidence from an interlocutor visibility manipulation
Sinead,O Carroll; None; None
In this study we test how introversion-extroversion affects language and gesture use depending on whether the interlocutor is visible to the speaker. Adults described arrays of objects, half the time with a screen occluding their interlocutor and half the time with the interlocutor visible. When participants could not see their listener, they used more words, particularly concrete words and tended to gesture more. This difference was moderated by extroversion for gestures (i.e., extroverts gestured more when their interlocutor was occluded) but not for speech. We argue that visibility of a listener may influence task difficulty differentially according to extroversion, and may also impact how speakers rely on gestures in accessing the specific and concrete language they think listeners need when they can’t be seen.
An improved probabilistic account of counterfactual reasoning
Chris,Lucas; None; None
When people want to identify the causes of an event, assign credit or blame, or learn from their mistakes, they often reflect on how things could have gone differently. In this kind of reasoning, one considers a counterfactual world in which some events are different from their real-world counterparts and considers what else would have changed. Researchers have recently proposed several probabilistic models that aim to capture how people do (or should) reason about counterfactuals. We present a new model and show that it accounts better for human inferences than several alternative models. Our model builds on the work of Pearl (2000), and extends his approach in a way that accommodates backtracking inferences and that acknowledges the difference between counterfactual interventions and counterfactual observations. We present six new experiments and analyze data from four experiments carried out by Rips (2010), and the results suggest that the new model provides an accurate account of both mean human judgments and the judgments of individuals.
Sociocultural determination of linguistic structure: input variability and morphological complexity
Mark,Atkinson; None; None
Languages spoken by larger groups are claimed to be less morphologically complex than those of smaller populations (Lupyan & Dale 2010), although the mechanism by which group size could have this effect is yet to be convincingly identified (Nettle 2012). One proposed candidate mechanism is the differing degrees of input homogeneity: in larger groups, the linguistic input is thought to be provided by a greater number of speakers, and this may hamper the acquisition, and hence cross-generational transfer, of more complex morphological features (Hay & Bauer 2007, Nettle 2012).rnrnI describe two experiments which aimed to rigorously assess this candidate mechanism, and ultimately find no evidence to support it. In the first experiment, 60 participants were trained on a morphologically-complex miniature language of Hungarian sentences, and their acquisition of its case system assessed. Two conditions were considered: one in which the aural input was provided by a single native speaker, and one in which it was provided by three speakers. No statistically-significant difference in the participants? acquisition of the case system was found. There was, however, some suggestion that more limited acquisition was due to the learners finding the training strings difficult to segment, and that this was more prevalent in the multiple-speaker condition. The second experiment therefore aimed to assess whether speech-stream segmentation was more difficult when the input was provided by three speakers compared to one (n=48), extending the work of Saffran et al. (1996), which demonstrated that adult learners can use distributional cues to determine word boundaries in continuous speech. Again, no evidence was found to support the proposal that an increase in the number of speakers who provide a leaner?s linguistic input affects their ability to acquire complex morphology.
