One important aspect of language is how speakers generate utterances and texts to convey their intended meanings. In this paper, we bring various aspects of the Construction Grammar (CxG) and the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) theories in a deep learning computational framework to model empathic language. Our corpus consists of 440 essays written by premed students as narrated simulated patient–doctor interactions. We start with baseline classifiers (state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks and transformer models). Then, we enrich these models with a set of linguistic constructions proving the importance of this novel approach to the task of empathy classification for this dataset. Our results indicate the potential of such constructions to contribute to the overall empathy profile of first-person narrative essays.

As digital social platforms and mobile technologies become more prevalent and robust, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in facilitating human communication will grow. This, in turn, will encourage development of intuitive, adaptive, and effective empathic AI interfaces that better address the needs of socially and culturally diverse communities. In this paper, we present several design considerations of an intelligent digital interface intended to guide the clinicians toward more empathetic communication. This approach allows various communities of practice to investigate how AI, on one side, and human communication and healthcare needs, on the other, can contribute to each other’s development.

Empathy is a vital component of health care and plays a key role in the training of future doctors. Paying attention to medical students’ self-reflective stories of their interactions with patients can encourage empathy and the formation of professional identities that embody desirable values such as integrity and respect. We present a computational approach and linguistic analysis of empathic language in a large corpus of 440 essays written by pre-med students as narrated simulated patient – doctor interactions. We analyze the discourse of three kinds of empathy: cognitive, affective, and prosocial as highlighted by expert annotators. We also present various experiments with state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks and transformer models for classifying these forms of empathy. To further improve over these results, we develop a novel system architecture that makes use of frame semantics to enrich our state-of-the-art models. We show that this novel framework leads to significant improvement on the empathy classification task for this dataset.

In this paper we focus on patterns of colexification (co-expressions of form-meaning mapping in the lexicon) as an aspect of lexical-semantic organization, and use them to build large scale synset graphs across BabelNet’s typologically diverse set of 499 world languages. We introduce and compare several approaches: monolingual and cross-lingual colexification graphs, popular distributional models, and fusion approaches. The models are evaluated against human judgments on a semantic similarity task for nine languages. Our strong empirical findings also point to the importance of universality of our graph synset embedding representations with no need for any language-specific adaptation when evaluated on the lexical similarity task. The insights of our exploratory investigation of large-scale colexification graphs could inspire significant advances in NLP across languages, especially for tasks involving languages which lack dedicated lexical resources, and can benefit from language transfer from large shared cross-lingual semantic spaces.

Our submission to the SemEval-2018 Task1: Affect in Tweets shared task competition is a supervised learning model relying on standard lexicon features coupled with word embedding features. We used an ensemble of diverse models, including random forests, gradient boosted trees, and linear models, corrected for training-development set mismatch. We submitted the system’s output for subtasks 1 (emotion intensity prediction), 2 (emotion ordinal classification), 3 (valence intensity regression) and 4 (valence ordinal classification), for English tweets. We placed 25th, 19th, 24th and 15th in the four subtasks respectively. The baseline considered was an SVM (Support Vector Machines) model with linear kernel on the lexicon and embedding based features. Our system’s final performance measured in Pearson correlation scores outperformed the baseline by a margin of 2.2% to 14.6% across all tasks.

This paper presents the first phase of building YADAC ― a multi-genre Dialectal Arabic (DA) corpus ― that is compiled using Web data from microblogs (i.e. Twitter), blogs/forums and online knowledge market services in which both questions and answers are user-generated. In addition to introducing two new genres to the current efforts of building DA corpora (i.e. microblogs and question-answer pairs extracted from online knowledge market services), the paper highlights and tackles several new issues related to building DA corpora that have not been handled in previous studies: function-based Web harvesting and dialect identification, vowel-based spelling variation, linguistic hypercorrection and its effect on spelling variation, unsupervised Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging and base phrase chunking for DA. Although the algorithms for both POS tagging and base-phrase chunking are still under development, the results are promising.

This paper describes the first phase of building a lexicon of Egyptian Cairene Arabic (ECA) ― one of the most widely understood dialects in the Arab World ― and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Each ECA entry is mapped to its MSA synonym, Part-of-Speech (POS) tag and top-ranked contexts based on Web queries; and thus each entry is provided with basic syntactic and semantic information for a generic lexicon compatible with multiple NLP applications. Moreover, through their MSA synonyms, ECA entries acquire access to MSA available NLP tools and resources which are considerably available. Using an associationist approach based on the correlations between word co-occurrence patterns in both dialects, we change the direction of the acquisition process from parallel to circular to overcome a bottleneck of current research on Arabic dialects, namely the lack of parallel corpora, and to alleviate accuracy rates for using unrelated Web documents which are more frequently available. Manually evaluated for 1,000 word entries by two native speakers of the ECA-MSA varieties, the proposed approach achieves a promising F-measured performance rate of 70.9%. In discussion to the proposed algorithm, different semantic issues are highlighted for upcoming phases of the induction of a more comprehensive ECA-MSA lexicon.