The degree of semantic relatedness of two units of language has long been considered fundamental to understanding meaning. Additionally, automatically determining relatedness has many applications such as question answering and summarization. However, prior NLP work has largely focused on semantic similarity, a subset of relatedness, because of a lack of relatedness datasets. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for Semantic Textual Relatedness, STR-2022, that has 5,500 English sentence pairs manually annotated using a comparative annotation framework, resulting in fine-grained scores. We show that human intuition regarding relatedness of sentence pairs is highly reliable, with a repeat annotation correlation of 0.84. We use the dataset to explore questions on what makes sentences semantically related. We also show the utility of STR-2022 for evaluating automatic methods of sentence representation and for various downstream NLP tasks.Our dataset, data statement, and annotation questionnaire can be found at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7599667.

Recently, neural language models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating high-quality discourse. While many recent papers have analyzed the syntactic aspects encoded in LMs, there has been no analysis to date of the inter-sentential, rhetorical knowledge. In this paper, we propose a method that quantitatively evaluates the rhetorical capacities of neural LMs. We examine the capacities of neural LMs understanding the rhetoric of discourse by evaluating their abilities to encode a set of linguistic features derived from Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Our experiments show that BERT-based LMs outperform other Transformer LMs, revealing the richer discourse knowledge in their intermediate layer representations. In addition, GPT-2 and XLNet apparently encode less rhetorical knowledge, and we suggest an explanation drawing from linguistic philosophy. Our method shows an avenue towards quantifying the rhetorical capacities of neural LMs.

Current approaches to cross-lingual sentiment analysis try to leverage the wealth of labeled English data using bilingual lexicons, bilingual vector space embeddings, or machine translation systems. Here we show that it is possible to use a single linear transformation, with as few as 2000 word pairs, to capture fine-grained sentiment relationships between words in a cross-lingual setting. We apply these cross-lingual sentiment models to a diverse set of tasks to demonstrate their functionality in a non-English context. By effectively leveraging English sentiment knowledge without the need for accurate translation, we can analyze and extract features from other languages with scarce data at a very low cost, thus making sentiment and related analyses for many languages inexpensive.