Ludovica Pannitto


2023

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CALaMo: a Constructionist Assessment of Language Models
Ludovica Pannitto | Aurélie Herbelot
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP (CxGs+NLP, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023)

This paper presents a novel framework for evaluating Neural Language Models’ linguistic abilities using a constructionist approach. Not only is the usage-based model in line with the un- derlying stochastic philosophy of neural architectures, but it also allows the linguist to keep meaning as a determinant factor in the analysis. We outline the framework and present two possible scenarios for its application.

2021

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A dissemination workshop for introducing young Italian students to NLP
Lucio Messina | Lucia Busso | Claudia Roberta Combei | Alessio Miaschi | Ludovica Pannitto | Gabriele Sarti | Malvina Nissim
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP

We describe and make available the game-based material developed for a laboratory run at several Italian science festivals to popularize NLP among young students.

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Teaching NLP with Bracelets and Restaurant Menus: An Interactive Workshop for Italian Students
Ludovica Pannitto | Lucia Busso | Claudia Roberta Combei | Lucio Messina | Alessio Miaschi | Gabriele Sarti | Malvina Nissim
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP

Although Natural Language Processing is at the core of many tools young people use in their everyday life, high school curricula (in Italy) do not include any computational linguistics education. This lack of exposure makes the use of such tools less responsible than it could be, and makes choosing computational linguistics as a university degree unlikely. To raise awareness, curiosity, and longer-term interest in young people, we have developed an interactive workshop designed to illustrate the basic principles of NLP and computational linguistics to high school Italian students aged between 13 and 18 years. The workshop takes the form of a game in which participants play the role of machines needing to solve some of the most common problems a computer faces in understanding language: from voice recognition to Markov chains to syntactic parsing. Participants are guided through the workshop with the help of instructors, who present the activities and explain core concepts from computational linguistics. The workshop was presented at numerous outlets in Italy between 2019 and 2020, both face-to-face and online.

2020

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Recurrent babbling: evaluating the acquisition of grammar from limited input data
Ludovica Pannitto | Aurélie Herbelot
Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been shown to capture various aspects of syntax from raw linguistic input. In most previous experiments, however, learning happens over unrealistic corpora, which do not reflect the type and amount of data a child would be exposed to. This paper remedies this state of affairs by training an LSTM over a realistically sized subset of child-directed input. The behaviour of the network is analysed over time using a novel methodology which consists in quantifying the level of grammatical abstraction in the model’s generated output (its ‘babbling’), compared to the language it has been exposed to. We show that the LSTM indeed abstracts new structures as learning proceeds.

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Are Word Embeddings Really a Bad Fit for the Estimation of Thematic Fit?
Emmanuele Chersoni | Ludovica Pannitto | Enrico Santus | Alessandro Lenci | Chu-Ren Huang
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

While neural embeddings represent a popular choice for word representation in a wide variety of NLP tasks, their usage for thematic fit modeling has been limited, as they have been reported to lag behind syntax-based count models. In this paper, we propose a complete evaluation of count models and word embeddings on thematic fit estimation, by taking into account a larger number of parameters and verb roles and introducing also dependency-based embeddings in the comparison. Our results show a complex scenario, where a determinant factor for the performance seems to be the availability to the model of reliable syntactic information for building the distributional representations of the roles.

2017

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FA3L at SemEval-2017 Task 3: A ThRee Embeddings Recurrent Neural Network for Question Answering
Giuseppe Attardi | Antonio Carta | Federico Errica | Andrea Madotto | Ludovica Pannitto
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017)

In this paper we present ThReeNN, a model for Community Question Answering, Task 3, of SemEval-2017. The proposed model exploits both syntactic and semantic information to build a single and meaningful embedding space. Using a dependency parser in combination with word embeddings, the model creates sequences of inputs for a Recurrent Neural Network, which are then used for the ranking purposes of the Task. The score obtained on the official test data shows promising results.