Nina Schneidermann


2023

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Probing for Hyperbole in Pre-Trained Language Models
Nina Schneidermann | Daniel Hershcovich | Bolette Pedersen
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)

Hyperbole is a common figure of speech, which is under-explored in NLP research. In this study, we conduct edge and minimal description length (MDL) probing experiments on three pre-trained language models (PLMs) in an attempt to explore the extent to which hyperbolic information is encoded in these models. We use both word-in-context and sentence-level representations as model inputs as a basis for comparison. We also annotate 63 hyperbole sentences from the HYPO dataset according to an operational taxonomy to conduct an error analysis to explore the encoding of different hyperbole categories. Our results show that hyperbole is to a limited extent encoded in PLMs, and mostly in the final layers. They also indicate that hyperbolic information may be better encoded by the sentence-level representations, which, due to the pragmatic nature of hyperbole, may therefore provide a more accurate and informative representation in PLMs. Finally, the inter-annotator agreement for our annotations, a Cohen’s Kappa of 0.339, suggest that the taxonomy categories may not be intuitive and need revision or simplification.

2022

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Evaluating a New Danish Sentiment Resource: the Danish Sentiment Lexicon, DSL
Nina Schneidermann | Bolette Pedersen
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Sentiment Analysis and Linguistic Linked Data

In this paper, we evaluate a new sentiment lexicon for Danish, the Danish Sentiment Lexicon (DSL), to gain input regarding how to carry out the final adjustments of the lexicon. A feature of the lexicon that differentiates it from other sentiment resources for Danish is that it is linked to a large number of other Danish lexical resources via the DDO lemma and sense inventory and the LLOD via the Danish wordnet, DanNet. We perform our evaluation on four datasets labeled with sentiments. In addition, we compare the lexicon against two existing benchmarks for Danish: the Afinn and the Sentida resources. We observe that DSL performs mostly comparably to the existing resources, but that more fine-grained explorations need to be done in order to fully exploit its possibilities given its linking properties.

2020

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Towards a Gold Standard for Evaluating Danish Word Embeddings
Nina Schneidermann | Rasmus Hvingelby | Bolette Pedersen
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper presents the process of compiling a model-agnostic similarity goal standard for evaluating Danish word embeddings based on human judgments made by 42 native speakers of Danish. Word embeddings resemble semantic similarity solely by distribution (meaning that word vectors do not reflect relatedness as differing from similarity), and we argue that this generalization poses a problem in most intrinsic evaluation scenarios. In order to be able to evaluate on both dimensions, our human-generated dataset is therefore designed to reflect the distinction between relatedness and similarity. The goal standard is applied for evaluating the “goodness” of six existing word embedding models for Danish, and it is discussed how a relatively low correlation can be explained by the fact that semantic similarity is substantially more challenging to model than relatedness, and that there seems to be a need for future human judgments to measure similarity in full context and along more than a single spectrum.