Alex Chengyu Fang

Also published as: Alex C. Fang


2024

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Annotating Evaluative Language: Challenges and Solutions in Applying Appraisal Theory
Jiamei Zeng | Min Dong | Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the 20th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation @ LREC-COLING 2024

This article describes a corpus-based experiment to identify the challenges and solutions in the annotation of evaluative language according to the scheme defined in Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2005). Originating from systemic functional linguistics, Appraisal Theory provides a robust framework for the analysis of linguistic expressions of evaluation, stance, and interpersonal relationships. Despite its theoretical richness, the practical application of Appraisal Theory in text annotation presents significant challenges, chiefly due to the intricacies of identifying and classifying evaluative expressions within its sub-system of Attitude, which comprises Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation. This study examines these challenges through the annotation of a corpus of editorials related to the Russian-Ukraine conflict and aims to offer practical solutions to enhance the transparency and consistency of the annotation. By refining the annotation process and addressing the subjective nature in the identification and classification of evaluative language, this work represents some timely effort in the annotation of pragmatic knowledge in language resources.

2022

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Testing the Annotation Consistency of Hallidayan Transitivity Processes: A Multi-variable Structural Approach
Min Dong | Xiaoyan Liu | Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the 18th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation within LREC2022

SFL seeks to explain identifiable, observable phenomena of language use in context through the application of a theoretical framework which models language as a functional, meaning making system (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004). Due to the lack of explicit annotation criteria and the divide between conceptual vs. syntactic criteria in practice, it has been a tough job to achieve consistency in the annotation of Hallidayn transitivity processes. The present study proposed that explicit structural and syntactic criteria should be adopted as a basis. Drawing on syntactic and grammatical features as judgement cues, we applied structurally oriented criteria for the annotation of the process categories and participant roles combining a set of interrelated syntactic variables and established the annotation criteria for contextualised circumstantial categories in structural as well as semantic terms. An experiment was carried out to test the usefulness of these annotation criteria, applying percent agreement and Cohen’s kappa as measurements of interrater reliability between the two annotators in each of the five pairs. The results verified our assumptions, albeit rather mildly, and, more significantly, offered some first empirical indications about the practical consistency of transitivity analysis in SFL. In the future work, the research team expect to draw on the insights and experience from some of the ISO standards devoted to semantic annotation such as dialogue acts (Bunt et al. 2012) and semantic roles (ISO-24617-4, 2014).

2018

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A Re-examination of Syntactic Complexity by Investigating the Internal Structure Variations of Adverbial Clauses across Speech and Writing
Mingyu Wan | Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

2017

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Revisiting the ISO standard for dialogue act annotation
Harry Bunt | Volha Petukhova | Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the 13th Joint ISO-ACL Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-13)

2014

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A Corpus-Based Quantitative Study of Nominalizations across Chinese and British Media English
Ying Liu | Alex Chengyu Fang | Naixing Wei
Proceedings of the 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computing

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A Quantitative View of Short Utterances in Daily Conversation: A Case Study of Thats right, Thats true and Thats correct
Yanjiao Li | Alex Chengyu Fang | Jing Cao
Proceedings of the 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computing

2013

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Issues in the addition of ISO standard annotations to the Switchboard corpus
Harry Bunt | Alex C. Fang | Xiaoyue Liu | Jing Cao | Volha Petukhova
Proceedings of the 9th Joint ISO - ACL SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation

2012

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Collaborative Annotation of Dialogue Acts: Application of a New ISO Standard to the Switchboard Corpus
Alex C. Fang | Harry Bunt | Jing Cao | Xiaoyue Liu
Proceedings of the Workshop on Innovative Hybrid Approaches to the Processing of Textual Data

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ISO 24617-2: A semantically-based standard for dialogue annotation
Harry Bunt | Jan Alexandersson | Jae-Woong Choe | Alex Chengyu Fang | Koiti Hasida | Volha Petukhova | Andrei Popescu-Belis | David Traum
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

This paper summarizes the latest, final version of ISO standard 24617-2 ``Semantic annotation framework, Part 2: Dialogue acts"""". Compared to the preliminary version ISO DIS 24617-2:2010, described in Bunt et al. (2010), the final version additionally includes concepts for annotating rhetorical relations between dialogue units, defines a full-blown compositional semantics for the Dialogue Act Markup Language DiAML (resulting, as a side-effect, in a different treatment of functional dependence relations among dialogue acts and feedback dependence relations); and specifies an optimally transparent XML-based reference format for the representation of DiAML annotations, based on the systematic application of the notion of `ideal concrete syntax'. We describe these differences and briefly discuss the design and implementation of an incremental method for dialogue act recognition, which proves the usability of the ISO standard for automatic dialogue annotation.

2010

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Towards an ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation
Harry Bunt | Jan Alexandersson | Jean Carletta | Jae-Woong Choe | Alex Chengyu Fang | Koiti Hasida | Kiyong Lee | Volha Petukhova | Andrei Popescu-Belis | Laurent Romary | Claudia Soria | David Traum
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

This paper describes an ISO project which aims at developing a standard for annotating spoken and multimodal dialogue with semantic information concerning the communicative functions of utterances, the kind of semantic content they address, and their relations with what was said and done earlier in the dialogue. The project, ISO 24617-2 ""Semantic annotation framework, Part 2: Dialogue acts"", is currently at DIS stage. The proposed annotation schema distinguishes 9 orthogonal dimensions, allowing each functional segment in dialogue to have a function in each of these dimensions, thus accounting for the multifunctionality that utterances in dialogue often have. A number of core communicative functions is defined in the form of ISO data categories, available at http://semantic-annotation.uvt.nl/dialogue-acts/iso-datcats.pdf; they are divided into ""dimension-specific"" functions, which can be used only in a particular dimension, such as Turn Accept in the Turn Management dimension, and ""general-purpose"" functions, which can be used in any dimension, such as Inform and Request. An XML-based annotation language, ""DiAML"" is defined, with an abstract syntax, a semantics, and a concrete syntax.

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Enhanced Genre Classification through Linguistically Fine-Grained POS Tags
Alex Chengyu Fang | Jing Cao
Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

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eSpatialML: An Event-Driven Spatial Annotation Framework
Kiyong Lee | Jonathan Webster | Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

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Unsupervised Classification of Biomedical Abstracts Using Lexical Association
Jonathon Read | Jonathan Webster | Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

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How Well Conditional Random Fields Can be Used in Novel Term Recognition
Xing Zhang | Yan Song | Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

2009

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Adapting NLP and Corpus Analysis Techniques to Structured Imagery Analysis in Classical Chinese Poetry
Alex Chengyu Fang | Fengju Lo | Cheuk Kit Chinn
Proceedings of the Workshop on Adaptation of Language Resources and Technology to New Domains

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Adjective Density as a Text Formality Characteristic for Automatic Text Classification: A Study Based on the British National Corpus
Alex Chengyu Fang | Jing Cao
Proceedings of the 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Volume 1

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Latin Etymologies as Features on BNC Text Categorization
Alex Chengyu Fang | Wanyin Li | Nancy Ide
Proceedings of the 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Volume 2

2005

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The Syntactically Annotated ICE Corpus and the Automatic Induction of a Formal Grammar
Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Linguistically Interpreted Corpora (LINC-2005)

2000

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From Cases to Rules and Vice Versa: Robust Practical Parsing With Analogy
Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Parsing Technologies

This article describes the architecture of the Survey Parser and discusses two major components related to the analogy-based parsing of unrestricted English. Firstly, it discusses the automatic generation of a large declarative formal grammar from a corpus that has been syntactically analysed. Secondly, it describes analogy-based parsing that employs both the automatically learned rules and the database of cases to determine the syntactic structure of the input string. Statistics are presented to characterise the performance of the parsing system.

1996

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Improving Automated Alignment in Multilingual Corpora
J.A. Campbell | N. Chatterjee | M. Manela | Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the 11th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

1995

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Automated Alignment in Multilingual Corpora
J.A. Campbell | Alex Chengyu Fang
Proceedings of the 10th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation