@inproceedings{chen-etal-2023-fastkassim,
    title = "{F}ast{KASSIM}: A Fast Tree Kernel-Based Syntactic Similarity Metric",
    author = "Chen, Maximillian  and
      Chen, Caitlyn  and
      Yu, Xiao  and
      Yu, Zhou",
    editor = "Vlachos, Andreas  and
      Augenstein, Isabelle",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = may,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Dubrovnik, Croatia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2023.eacl-main.17/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.17",
    pages = "211--231",
    abstract = "Syntax is a fundamental component of language, yet few metrics have been employed to capture syntactic similarity or coherence at the utterance- and document-level. The existing standard document-level syntactic similarity metric is computationally expensive and performs inconsistently when faced with syntactically dissimilar documents. To address these challenges, we present FastKASSIM, a metric for utterance- and document-level syntactic similarity which pairs and averages the most similar constituency parse trees between a pair of documents based on tree kernels. FastKASSIM is more robust to syntactic dissimilarities and runs up to to 5.32 times faster than its predecessor over documents in the r/ChangeMyView corpus. FastKASSIM`s improvements allow us to examine hypotheses in two settings with large documents. We find that syntactically similar arguments on r/ChangeMyView tend to be more persuasive, and that syntax is predictive of authorship attribution in the Australian High Court Judgment corpus."
}