Patrick Blackburn


2022

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Ethics consideration sections in natural language processing papers
Luciana Benotti | Patrick Blackburn
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we present the results of a manual classification of all ethical consideration sections for ACL 2021. We also compare how many papers had an ethics consideration section per track and per world region in ACL 2021. We classified papers according to the ethical issues covered (research benefits, potential harms, and vulnerable groups affected) and whether the paper was marked as requiring ethics review by at least one reviewer. Moreover, we discuss recurring obstacles we have observed (highlighting some interesting texts we found along the way) and conclude with three suggestions. We think that this paper may be useful for anyone who needs to write — or review — an ethics section and would like to get an overview of what others have done.

2021

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The Impact of Answers in Referential Visual Dialog
Mauricio Mazuecos | Patrick Blackburn | Luciana Benotti
Proceedings of the Reasoning and Interaction Conference (ReInAct 2021)

In the visual dialog task GuessWhat?! two players maintain a dialog in order to identify a secret object in an image. Computationally, this is modeled using a question generation module and a guesser module for the questioner role and an answering model, the Oracle, to answer the generated questions. This raises a question: what’s the risk of having an imperfect oracle model?. Here we present work in progress in the study of the impact of different answering models in human generated questions in GuessWhat?!. We show that having access to better quality answers has a direct impact on the guessing task for human dialog and argue that better answers could help train better question generation models.

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Grounding as a Collaborative Process
Luciana Benotti | Patrick Blackburn
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Collaborative grounding is a fundamental aspect of human-human dialog which allows people to negotiate meaning. In this paper we argue that it is missing from current deep learning approaches to dialog. Our central point is that making mistakes and being able to recover from them collaboratively is a key ingredient in grounding meaning. We illustrate the pitfalls of being unable to ground collaboratively, discuss what can be learned from the language acquisition and dialog systems literature, and reflect on how to move forward.

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A recipe for annotating grounded clarifications
Luciana Benotti | Patrick Blackburn
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

In order to interpret the communicative intents of an utterance, it needs to be grounded in something that is outside of language; that is, grounded in world modalities. In this paper, we argue that dialogue clarification mechanisms make explicit the process of interpreting the communicative intents of the speaker’s utterances by grounding them in the various modalities in which the dialogue is situated. This paper frames dialogue clarification mechanisms as an understudied research problem and a key missing piece in the giant jigsaw puzzle of natural language understanding. We discuss both the theoretical background and practical challenges posed by this problem and propose a recipe for obtaining grounding annotations. We conclude by highlighting ethical issues that need to be addressed in future work.

2010

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Negotiating causal implicatures
Luciana Benotti | Patrick Blackburn
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference

2007

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Book Reviews: The Proper Treatment of Events, by Michiel van Lambalgen and Fritz Hamm
Patrick Blackburn
Computational Linguistics, Volume 33, Number 2, June 2007

2006

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Book Reviews: The Language of Time: A Reader, edited by Inderjeet Mani, James Pustejovsky and Rob Gaizauskas
Patrick Blackburn
Computational Linguistics, Volume 32, Number 3, September 2006

1995

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A Specification Language for Lexical Functional Grammars
Patrick Blackburn | Claire Gardent
Seventh Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1993

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Talking About Trees
Patrick Blackburn | Claire Gardent | Wilfried Meyer-Viol
Sixth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Decidability and Undecidability in stand-alone Feature Logics
Patrick Blackburn | Edith Spaan
Sixth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1991

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A Logical Approach to Arabic Phonology
Steven Bird | Patrick Blackburn
Fifth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics