Discourse analysis plays a crucial role in Natural Language Processing, with discourse relation prediction arguably being the most difficult task in discourse parsing. Previous studies have generally focused on explicit or implicit discourse relation classification in monologues, leaving dialogue an under-explored domain. Facing the data scarcity issue, we propose to leverage self-training strategies based on a Transformer backbone. Moreover, we design the first semi-supervised pipeline that sequentially predicts discourse structures and relations. Using 50 examples, our relation prediction module achieves 58.4 in accuracy on the STAC corpus, close to supervised state-of-the-art. Full parsing results show notable improvements compared to the supervised models both in-domain (gaming) and cross-domain (technical chat), with better stability.

Discourse processing suffers from data sparsity, especially for dialogues. As a result, we explore approaches to infer latent discourse structures for dialogues, based on attention matrices from Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). We investigate multiple auxiliary tasks for fine-tuning and show that the dialogue-tailored Sentence Ordering task performs best. To locate and exploit discourse information in PLMs, we propose an unsupervised and a semi-supervised method. Our proposals thereby achieve encouraging results on the STAC corpus, with F1 scores of 57.2 and 59.3 for the unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, respectively. When restricted to projective trees, our scores improved to 63.3 and 68.1.

This paper describes the continuation of a project that aims at establishing an interoperable annotation schema for quantification phenomena as part of the ISO suite of standards for semantic annotation, known as the Semantic Annotation Framework. After a break, caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the project was relaunched in early 2022 with a second working draft of an annotation scheme, which is discussed in this paper. Keywords: semantic annotation, quantification, interoperability, annotation schema, ISO standard

Depression is a serious mental illness that impacts the way people communicate, especially through their emotions, and, allegedly, the way they interact with others. This work examines depression signals in dialogs, a less studied setting that suffers from data sparsity. We hypothesize that depression and emotion can inform each other, and we propose to explore the influence of dialog structure through topic and dialog act prediction. We investigate a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) approach, where all tasks mentioned above are learned jointly with dialog-tailored hierarchical modeling. We experiment on the DAIC and DailyDialog corpora – both contain dialogs in English – and show important improvements over state-of-the-art on depression detection (at best 70.6% F1), which demonstrates the correlation of depression with emotion and dialog organization and the power of MTL to leverage information from different sources.

We investigate linguistic markers associated with schizophrenia in clinical conversations by detecting predictive features among French-speaking patients. Dealing with human-human dialogues makes for a realistic situation, but it calls for strategies to represent the context and face data sparsity. We compare different approaches for data representation – from individual speech turns to entire conversations –, and data modeling, using lexical, morphological, syntactic, and discourse features, dimensions presumed to be tightly connected to the language of schizophrenia. Previous English models were mostly lexical and reached high performance, here replicated (93.7% acc.). However, our analysis reveals that these models are heavily biased, which probably concerns most datasets on this task. Our new delexicalized models are more general and robust, with the best accuracy score at 77.9%.

Nous présentons des expériences visant à identifier automatiquement des patients présentant des symptômes de schizophrénie dans des conversations contrôlées entre patients et psychothérapeutes. Nous fusionnons l’ensemble des tours de parole de chaque interlocuteur et entraînons des modèles de classification utilisant des informations lexicales, morphologiques et syntaxiques. Cette étude est la première du genre sur le français et obtient des résultats comparables à celles sur l’anglais. Nos premières expériences tendent à montrer que la parole des personnes avec schizophrénie se distingue de celle des témoins : le meilleur modèle obtient une exactitude de 93,66%. Des informations plus riches seront cependant nécessaires pour parvenir à un modèle robuste.

The main aim of this paper is to provide a characterization of the response space for questions using a taxonomy grounded in a dialogical formal semantics. As a starting point we take the typology for responses in the form of questions provided in (Lupkowski and Ginzburg, 2016). This work develops a wide coverage taxonomy for question/question sequences observable in corpora including the BNC, CHILDES, and BEE, as well as formal modelling of all the postulated classes. Our aim is to extend this work to cover all responses to questions. We present the extended typology of responses to questions based on a corpus studies of BNC, BEE and Maptask with include 506, 262, and 467 question/response pairs respectively. We compare the data for English with data from Polish using the Spokes corpus (205 question/response pairs). We discuss annotation reliability and disagreement analysis. We sketch how each class can be formalized using a dialogical semantics appropriate for dialogue management.