Jena D. Hwang


2023

pdf
COBRA Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Effects and Harms of Offensive Statements
Xuhui Zhou | Hao Zhu | Akhila Yerukola | Thomas Davidson | Jena D. Hwang | Swabha Swayamdipta | Maarten Sap
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Understanding the harms and offensiveness of statements requires reasoning about the social and situational context in which statements are made. For example, the utterance “your English is very good” may implicitly signal an insult when uttered by a white man to a non-white colleague, but uttered by an ESL teacher to their student would be interpreted as a genuine compliment. Such contextual factors have been largely ignored by previous approaches to toxic language detection. We introduce COBRA frames, the first context-aware formalism for explaining the intents, reactions, and harms of offensive or biased statements grounded in their social and situational context. We create COBRACORPUS, a dataset of 33k potentially offensive statements paired with machine-generated contexts and free-text explanations of offensiveness, implied biases, speaker intents, and listener reactions. To study the contextual dynamics of offensiveness, we train models to generate COBRA explanations, with and without access to the context. We find that explanations by context-agnostic models are significantly worse than by context-aware ones, especially in situations where the context inverts the statement’s offensiveness (29% accuracy drop). Our work highlights the importance and feasibility of contextualized NLP by modeling social factors.

pdf
Penguins Don’t Fly: Reasoning about Generics through Instantiations and Exceptions
Emily Allaway | Jena D. Hwang | Chandra Bhagavatula | Kathleen McKeown | Doug Downey | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Generics express generalizations about the world (e.g., birds can fly) that are not universally true (e.g., newborn birds and penguins cannot fly). Commonsense knowledge bases, used extensively in NLP, encode some generic knowledge but rarely enumerate such exceptions and knowing when a generic statement holds or does not hold true is crucial for developing a comprehensive understanding of generics. We present a novel framework informed by linguistic theory to generate exemplars—specific cases when a generic holds true or false. We generate ~19k exemplars for ~650 generics and show that our framework outperforms a strong GPT-3 baseline by 12.8 precision points. Our analysis highlights the importance of linguistic theory-based controllability for generating exemplars, the insufficiency of knowledge bases as a source of exemplars, and the challenges exemplars pose for the task of natural language inference.

pdf
Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor “Understanding” Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest
Jack Hessel | Ana Marasovic | Jena D. Hwang | Lillian Lee | Jeff Da | Rowan Zellers | Robert Mankoff | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large neural networks can now generate jokes, but do they really “understand” humor? We challenge AI models with three tasks derived from the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest: matching a joke to a cartoon, identifying a winning caption, and explaining why a winning caption is funny. These tasks encapsulate progressively more sophisticated aspects of “understanding” a cartoon; key elements are the complex, often surprising relationships between images and captions and the frequent inclusion of indirect and playful allusions to human experience and culture. We investigate both multimodal and language-only models: the former are challenged with the cartoon images directly, while the latter are given multifaceted descriptions of the visual scene to simulate human-level visual understanding. We find that both types of models struggle at all three tasks. For example, our best multimodal models fall 30 accuracy points behind human performance on the matching task, and, even when provided ground-truth visual scene descriptors, human-authored explanations are preferred head-to-head over the best machine-authored ones (few-shot GPT-4) in more than 2/3 of cases. We release models, code, leaderboard, and corpus, which includes newly-gathered annotations describing the image’s locations/entities, what’s unusual in the scene, and an explanation of the joke.

pdf
I2D2: Inductive Knowledge Distillation with NeuroLogic and Self-Imitation
Chandra Bhagavatula | Jena D. Hwang | Doug Downey | Ronan Le Bras | Ximing Lu | Lianhui Qin | Keisuke Sakaguchi | Swabha Swayamdipta | Peter West | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Commonsense capabilities of pre-trained language models dramatically improve with scale, leading many to believe that scale is the only winning recipe. But is it? Here, we investigate an alternative that a priori seems impossible: can smaller language models (e.g., GPT-2) win over models that are orders of magnitude larger and better (e.g., GPT-3), if powered with novel commonsense distillation algorithms?The key intellectual challenge is to design a learning algorithm that achieve a competitive level of commonsense acquisition, without relying on the benefits of scale. In particular, we study generative models of commonsense knowledge, focusing on the task of generating generics, statements of commonsense facts about everyday concepts, e.g., birds can fly. We introduce I2D2, a novel commonsense distillation framework that loosely follows the Symbolic Knowledge Distillation of West et al. but breaks the dependence on the extreme-scale teacher model with two innovations: (1) the novel adaptation of NeuroLogic Decoding to enhance the generation quality of the weak, off-the-shelf language models, and (2) self-imitation learning to iteratively learn from the model’s own enhanced commonsense acquisition capabilities. Empirical results suggest that scale is not the only way, as novel algorithms can be a promising alternative. Moreover, our study leads to a new corpus of generics, Gen-A-tomic, that is the largest and highest quality available to date.

pdf
ClarifyDelphi: Reinforced Clarification Questions with Defeasibility Rewards for Social and Moral Situations
Valentina Pyatkin | Jena D. Hwang | Vivek Srikumar | Ximing Lu | Liwei Jiang | Yejin Choi | Chandra Bhagavatula
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Context is everything, even in commonsense moral reasoning. Changing contexts can flip the moral judgment of an action; Lying to a friend is wrong in general, but may be morally acceptable if it is intended to protect their life. We present ClarifyDelphi, an interactive system that learns to ask clarification questions (e.g., why did you lie to your friend?) in order to elicit additional salient contexts of a social or moral situation. We posit that questions whose potential answers lead to diverging moral judgments are the most informative. Thus, we propose a reinforcement learning framework with a defeasibility reward that aims to maximize the divergence between moral judgments of hypothetical answers to a question. Human evaluation demonstrates that our system generates more relevant, informative and defeasible questions compared to competitive baselines. Our work is ultimately inspired by studies in cognitive science that have investigated the flexibility in moral cognition (i.e., the diverse contexts in which moral rules can be bent), and we hope that research in this direction can assist both cognitive and computational investigations of moral judgments.

2022

pdf
ComFact: A Benchmark for Linking Contextual Commonsense Knowledge
Silin Gao | Jena D. Hwang | Saya Kanno | Hiromi Wakaki | Yuki Mitsufuji | Antoine Bosselut
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Understanding rich narratives, such as dialogues and stories, often requires natural language processing systems to access relevant knowledge from commonsense knowledge graphs. However, these systems typically retrieve facts from KGs using simple heuristics that disregard the complex challenges of identifying situationally-relevant commonsense knowledge (e.g., contextualization, implicitness, ambiguity).In this work, we propose the new task of commonsense fact linking, where models are given contexts and trained to identify situationally-relevant commonsense knowledge from KGs. Our novel benchmark, ComFact, contains ~293k in-context relevance annotations for commonsense triplets across four stylistically diverse dialogue and storytelling datasets. Experimental results confirm that heuristic fact linking approaches are imprecise knowledge extractors. Learned fact linking models demonstrate across-the-board performance improvements (~34.6% F1) over these heuristics. Furthermore, improved knowledge retrieval yielded average downstream improvements of 9.8% for a dialogue response generation task. However, fact linking models still significantly underperform humans, suggesting our benchmark is a promising testbed for research in commonsense augmentation of NLP systems.

pdf
Putting Context in SNACS: A 5-Way Classification of Adpositional Pragmatic Markers
Yang Janet Liu | Jena D. Hwang | Nathan Schneider | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 16th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVI) within LREC2022

The SNACS framework provides a network of semantic labels called supersenses for annotating adpositional semantics in corpora. In this work, we consider English prepositions (and prepositional phrases) that are chiefly pragmatic, contributing extra-propositional contextual information such as speaker attitudes and discourse structure. We introduce a preliminary taxonomy of pragmatic meanings to supplement the semantic SNACS supersenses, with guidelines for the annotation of coherence connectives, commentary markers, and topic and focus markers. We also examine annotation disagreements, delve into the trickiest boundary cases, and offer a discussion of future improvements.

2021

pdf
On-the-Fly Attention Modulation for Neural Generation
Yue Dong | Chandra Bhagavatula | Ximing Lu | Jena D. Hwang | Antoine Bosselut | Jackie Chi Kit Cheung | Yejin Choi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

pdf
Moral Stories: Situated Reasoning about Norms, Intents, Actions, and their Consequences
Denis Emelin | Ronan Le Bras | Jena D. Hwang | Maxwell Forbes | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In social settings, much of human behavior is governed by unspoken rules of conduct rooted in societal norms. For artificial systems to be fully integrated into social environments, adherence to such norms is a central prerequisite. To investigate whether language generation models can serve as behavioral priors for systems deployed in social settings, we evaluate their ability to generate action descriptions that achieve predefined goals under normative constraints. Moreover, we examine if models can anticipate likely consequences of actions that either observe or violate known norms, or explain why certain actions are preferable by generating relevant norm hypotheses. For this purpose, we introduce Moral Stories, a crowd-sourced dataset of structured, branching narratives for the study of grounded, goal-oriented social reasoning. Finally, we propose decoding strategies that combine multiple expert models to significantly improve the quality of generated actions, consequences, and norms compared to strong baselines.

pdf
Reflective Decoding: Beyond Unidirectional Generation with Off-the-Shelf Language Models
Peter West | Ximing Lu | Ari Holtzman | Chandra Bhagavatula | Jena D. Hwang | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Publicly available, large pretrained Language Models (LMs) generate text with remarkable quality, but only sequentially from left to right. As a result, they are not immediately applicable to generation tasks that break the unidirectional assumption, such as paraphrasing or text-infilling, necessitating task-specific supervision. In this paper, we present Reflective Decoding, a novel unsupervised algorithm that allows for direct application of unidirectional LMs to non-sequential tasks. Our 2-step approach requires no supervision or even parallel corpora, only two off-the-shelf pretrained LMs in opposite directions: forward and backward. First, in the contextualization step, we use LMs to generate ensembles of past and future contexts which collectively capture the input (e.g. the source sentence for paraphrasing). Second, in the reflection step, we condition on these “context ensembles”, generating outputs that are compatible with them. Comprehensive empirical results demonstrate that Reflective Decoding outperforms strong unsupervised baselines on both paraphrasing and abductive text infilling, significantly narrowing the gap between unsupervised and supervised methods. Reflective Decoding surpasses multiple supervised baselines on various metrics including human evaluation.

pdf
Edited Media Understanding Frames: Reasoning About the Intent and Implications of Visual Misinformation
Jeff Da | Maxwell Forbes | Rowan Zellers | Anthony Zheng | Jena D. Hwang | Antoine Bosselut | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Understanding manipulated media, from automatically generated ‘deepfakes’ to manually edited ones, raises novel research challenges. Because the vast majority of edited or manipulated images are benign, such as photoshopped images for visual enhancements, the key challenge is to understand the complex layers of underlying intents of media edits and their implications with respect to disinformation. In this paper, we study Edited Media Frames, a new formalism to understand visual media manipulation as structured annotations with respect to the intents, emotional reactions, attacks on individuals, and the overall implications of disinformation. We introduce a dataset for our task, EMU, with 56k question-answer pairs written in rich natural language. We evaluate a wide variety of vision-and-language models for our task, and introduce a new model PELICAN, which builds upon recent progress in pretrained multimodal representations. Our model obtains promising results on our dataset, with humans rating its answers as accurate 48.2% of the time. At the same time, there is still much work to be done – and we provide analysis that highlights areas for further progress.

2020

pdf
Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms
Maxwell Forbes | Jena D. Hwang | Vered Shwartz | Maarten Sap | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Social norms—the unspoken commonsense rules about acceptable social behavior—are crucial in understanding the underlying causes and intents of people’s actions in narratives. For example, underlying an action such as “wanting to call cops on my neighbor” are social norms that inform our conduct, such as “It is expected that you report crimes.” We present SOCIAL CHEMISTRY, a new conceptual formalism to study people’s everyday social norms and moral judgments over a rich spectrum of real life situations described in natural language. We introduce SOCIAL-CHEM-101, a large-scale corpus that catalogs 292k rules-of-thumb such as “It is rude to run a blender at 5am” as the basic conceptual units. Each rule-of-thumb is further broken down with 12 different dimensions of people’s judgments, including social judgments of good and bad, moral foundations, expected cultural pressure, and assumed legality, which together amount to over 4.5 million annotations of categorical labels and free-text descriptions. Comprehensive empirical results based on state-of-the-art neural models demonstrate that computational modeling of social norms is a promising research direction. Our model framework, Neural Norm Transformer, learns and generalizes SOCIAL-CHEM-101 to successfully reason about previously unseen situations, generating relevant (and potentially novel) attribute-aware social rules-of-thumb.

pdf
Back to the Future: Unsupervised Backprop-based Decoding for Counterfactual and Abductive Commonsense Reasoning
Lianhui Qin | Vered Shwartz | Peter West | Chandra Bhagavatula | Jena D. Hwang | Ronan Le Bras | Antoine Bosselut | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Abductive and counterfactual reasoning, core abilities of everyday human cognition, require reasoning about what might have happened at time t, while conditioning on multiple contexts from the relative past and future. However, simultaneous incorporation of past and future contexts using generative language models (LMs) can be challenging, as they are trained either to condition only on the past context or to perform narrowly scoped text-infilling. In this paper, we propose DeLorean, a new unsupervised decoding algorithm that can flexibly incorporate both the past and future contexts using only off-the-shelf, left-to-right language models and no supervision. The key intuition of our algorithm is incorporating the future through back-propagation, during which, we only update the internal representation of the output while fixing the model parameters. By alternating between forward and backward propagation, DeLorean can decode the output representation that reflects both the left and right contexts. We demonstrate that our approach is general and applicable to two nonmonotonic reasoning tasks: abductive text generation and counterfactual story revision, where DeLorean outperforms a range of unsupervised and some supervised methods, based on automatic and human evaluation.

pdf
Sprucing up Supersenses: Untangling the Semantic Clusters of Accompaniment and Purpose
Jena D. Hwang | Nathan Schneider | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

We reevaluate an existing adpositional annotation scheme with respect to two thorny semantic domains: accompaniment and purpose. ‘Accompaniment’ broadly speaking includes two entities situated together or participating in the same event, while ‘purpose’ broadly speaking covers the desired outcome of an action, the intended use or evaluated use of an entity, and more. We argue the policy in the SNACS scheme for English should be recalibrated with respect to these clusters of interrelated meanings without adding complexity to the overall scheme. Our analysis highlights tradeoffs in lumping vs. splitting decisions as well as the flexibility afforded by the construal analysis.

pdf
Thinking Like a Skeptic: Defeasible Inference in Natural Language
Rachel Rudinger | Vered Shwartz | Jena D. Hwang | Chandra Bhagavatula | Maxwell Forbes | Ronan Le Bras | Noah A. Smith | Yejin Choi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Defeasible inference is a mode of reasoning in which an inference (X is a bird, therefore X flies) may be weakened or overturned in light of new evidence (X is a penguin). Though long recognized in classical AI and philosophy, defeasible inference has not been extensively studied in the context of contemporary data-driven research on natural language inference and commonsense reasoning. We introduce Defeasible NLI (abbreviated 𝛿-NLI), a dataset for defeasible inference in natural language. Defeasible NLI contains extensions to three existing inference datasets covering diverse modes of reasoning: common sense, natural language inference, and social norms. From Defeasible NLI, we develop both a classification and generation task for defeasible inference, and demonstrate that the generation task is much more challenging. Despite lagging human performance, however, generative models trained on this data are capable of writing sentences that weaken or strengthen a specified inference up to 68% of the time.

pdf
K-SNACS: Annotating Korean Adposition Semantics
Jena D. Hwang | Hanwool Choe | Na-Rae Han | Nathan Schneider
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

While many languages use adpositions to encode semantic relationships between content words in a sentence (e.g., agentivity or temporality), the details of how adpositions work vary widely across languages with respect to both form and meaning. In this paper, we empirically adapt the SNACS framework (Schneider et al., 2018) to Korean, a language that is typologically distant from English—the language SNACS was based on. We apply the SNACS framework to annotate the highly popular novellaThe Little Prince with semantic supersense labels over allKorean postpositions. Thus, we introduce the first broad-coverage corpus annotated with Korean postposition semantics and provide a detailed analysis of the corpus with an apples-to-apples comparison between Korean and English annotations

pdf
Analysis of the Penn Korean Universal Dependency Treebank (PKT-UD): Manual Revision to Build Robust Parsing Model in Korean
Tae Hwan Oh | Ji Yoon Han | Hyonsu Choe | Seokwon Park | Han He | Jinho D. Choi | Na-Rae Han | Jena D. Hwang | Hansaem Kim
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies and the IWPT 2020 Shared Task on Parsing into Enhanced Universal Dependencies

In this paper, we first open on important issues regarding the Penn Korean Universal Treebank (PKT-UD) and address these issues by revising the entire corpus manually with the aim of producing cleaner UD annotations that are more faithful to Korean grammar. For compatibility to the rest of UD corpora, we follow the UDv2 guidelines, and extensively revise the part-of-speech tags and the dependency relations to reflect morphological features and flexible word- order aspects in Korean. The original and the revised versions of PKT-UD are experimented with transformer-based parsing models using biaffine attention. The parsing model trained on the revised corpus shows a significant improvement of 3.0% in labeled attachment score over the model trained on the previous corpus. Our error analysis demonstrates that this revision allows the parsing model to learn relations more robustly, reducing several critical errors that used to be made by the previous model.

2019

pdf
Preparing SNACS for Subjects and Objects
Adi Shalev | Jena D. Hwang | Nathan Schneider | Vivek Srikumar | Omri Abend | Ari Rappoport
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

Research on adpositions and possessives in multiple languages has led to a small inventory of general-purpose meaning classes that disambiguate tokens. Importantly, that work has argued for a principled separation of the semantic role in a scene from the function coded by morphosyntax. Here, we ask whether this approach can be generalized beyond adpositions and possessives to cover all scene participants—including subjects and objects—directly, without reference to a frame lexicon. We present new guidelines for English and the results of an interannotator agreement study.

2018

pdf bib
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018)
Agata Savary | Carlos Ramisch | Jena D. Hwang | Nathan Schneider | Melanie Andresen | Sameer Pradhan | Miriam R. L. Petruck
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018)

pdf
Coordinate Structures in Universal Dependencies for Head-final Languages
Hiroshi Kanayama | Na-Rae Han | Masayuki Asahara | Jena D. Hwang | Yusuke Miyao | Jinho D. Choi | Yuji Matsumoto
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018)

This paper discusses the representation of coordinate structures in the Universal Dependencies framework for two head-final languages, Japanese and Korean. UD applies a strict principle that makes the head of coordination the left-most conjunct. However, the guideline may produce syntactic trees which are difficult to accept in head-final languages. This paper describes the status in the current Japanese and Korean corpora and proposes alternative designs suitable for these languages.

pdf
Building Universal Dependency Treebanks in Korean
Jayeol Chun | Na-Rae Han | Jena D. Hwang | Jinho D. Choi
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

pdf
Comprehensive Supersense Disambiguation of English Prepositions and Possessives
Nathan Schneider | Jena D. Hwang | Vivek Srikumar | Jakob Prange | Austin Blodgett | Sarah R. Moeller | Aviram Stern | Adi Bitan | Omri Abend
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Semantic relations are often signaled with prepositional or possessive marking—but extreme polysemy bedevils their analysis and automatic interpretation. We introduce a new annotation scheme, corpus, and task for the disambiguation of prepositions and possessives in English. Unlike previous approaches, our annotations are comprehensive with respect to types and tokens of these markers; use broadly applicable supersense classes rather than fine-grained dictionary definitions; unite prepositions and possessives under the same class inventory; and distinguish between a marker’s lexical contribution and the role it marks in the context of a predicate or scene. Strong interannotator agreement rates, as well as encouraging disambiguation results with established supervised methods, speak to the viability of the scheme and task.

2017

pdf
Double Trouble: The Problem of Construal in Semantic Annotation of Adpositions
Jena D. Hwang | Archna Bhatia | Na-Rae Han | Tim O’Gorman | Vivek Srikumar | Nathan Schneider
Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017)

We consider the semantics of prepositions, revisiting a broad-coverage annotation scheme used for annotating all 4,250 preposition tokens in a 55,000 word corpus of English. Attempts to apply the scheme to adpositions and case markers in other languages, as well as some problematic cases in English, have led us to reconsider the assumption that an adposition’s lexical contribution is equivalent to the role/relation that it mediates. Our proposal is to embrace the potential for construal in adposition use, expressing such phenomena directly at the token level to manage complexity and avoid sense proliferation. We suggest a framework to represent both the scene role and the adposition’s lexical function so they can be annotated at scale—supporting automatic, statistical processing of domain-general language—and discuss how this representation would allow for a simpler inventory of labels.

2016

pdf
Crazy Mad Nutters: The Language of Mental Health
Jena D. Hwang | Kristy Hollingshead
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology

pdf
A Corpus of Preposition Supersenses
Nathan Schneider | Jena D. Hwang | Vivek Srikumar | Meredith Green | Abhijit Suresh | Kathryn Conger | Tim O’Gorman | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016)

pdf
Applying Universal Dependency to the Arapaho Language
Irina Wagner | Andrew Cowell | Jena D. Hwang
Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016)

2015

pdf
Identification of Caused Motion Construction
Jena D. Hwang | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the Fourth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

pdf
A Hierarchy with, of, and for Preposition Supersenses
Nathan Schneider | Vivek Srikumar | Jena D. Hwang | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

2014

pdf
PropBank: Semantics of New Predicate Types
Claire Bonial | Julia Bonn | Kathryn Conger | Jena D. Hwang | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

This research focuses on expanding PropBank, a corpus annotated with predicate argument structures, with new predicate types; namely, noun, adjective and complex predicates, such as Light Verb Constructions. This effort is in part inspired by a sister project to PropBank, the Abstract Meaning Representation project, which also attempts to capture “who is doing what to whom” in a sentence, but does so in a way that abstracts away from syntactic structures. For example, alternate realizations of a ‘destroying’ event in the form of either the verb ‘destroy’ or the noun ‘destruction’ would receive the same Abstract Meaning Representation. In order for PropBank to reach the same level of coverage and continue to serve as the bedrock for Abstract Meaning Representation, predicate types other than verbs, which have previously gone without annotation, must be annotated. This research describes the challenges therein, including the development of new annotation practices that walk the line between abstracting away from language-particular syntactic facts to explore deeper semantics, and maintaining the connection between semantics and syntactic structures that has proven to be very valuable for PropBank as a corpus of training data for Natural Language Processing applications.

pdf
Criteria for Identifying and Annotating Caused Motion Constructions in Corpus Data
Jena D. Hwang | Annie Zaenen | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

While natural language processing performance has been improved through the recognition that there is a relationship between the semantics of the verb and the syntactic context in which the verb is realized, sentences where the verb does not conform to the expected syntax-semantic patterning behavior remain problematic. For example, in the sentence “The crowed laughed the clown off the stage”, a verb of non-verbal communication laugh is used in a caused motion construction and gains a motion entailment that is atypical given its inherent lexical semantics. This paper focuses on our efforts at defining the semantic types and varieties of caused motion constructions (CMCs) through an iterative annotation process and establishing annotation guidelines based on these criteria to aid in the production of a consistent and reliable annotation. The annotation will serve as training and test data for classifiers for CMCs, and the CMC definitions developed throughout this study will be used in extending VerbNet to handle representations of sentences in which a verb is used in a syntactic context that is atypical for its lexical semantics.

2011

pdf
Incorporating Coercive Constructions into a Verb Lexicon
Claire Bonial | Susan Windisch Brown | Jena D. Hwang | Christopher Parisien | Martha Palmer | Suzanne Stevenson
Proceedings of the ACL 2011 Workshop on Relational Models of Semantics

2010

pdf bib
Towards a Domain Independent Semantics: Enhancing Semantic Representation with Construction Grammar
Jena D. Hwang | Rodney D. Nielsen | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the NAACL HLT Workshop on Extracting and Using Constructions in Computational Linguistics

pdf
Identifying Assertions in Text and Discourse: The Presentational Relative Clause Construction
Cecily Jill Duffield | Jena D. Hwang | Laura A. Michaelis
Proceedings of the NAACL HLT Workshop on Extracting and Using Constructions in Computational Linguistics

pdf
PropBank Annotation of Multilingual Light Verb Constructions
Jena D. Hwang | Archna Bhatia | Claire Bonial | Aous Mansouri | Ashwini Vaidya | Nianwen Xue | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the Fourth Linguistic Annotation Workshop

2007

pdf
Criteria for the Manual Grouping of Verb Senses
Cecily Jill Duffield | Jena D. Hwang | Susan Windisch Brown | Dmitriy Dligach | Sarah E. Vieweg | Jenny Davis | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the Linguistic Annotation Workshop

Search