People debate on a variety of topics on online platforms such as Reddit, or Facebook. Debates can be lengthy, with users exchanging a wealth of information and opinions. However, conversations do not always go smoothly, and users sometimes engage in unsound argumentation techniques to prove a claim. These techniques are called fallacies. Fallacies are persuasive arguments that provide insufficient or incorrect evidence to support the claim. In this paper, we study the most frequent fallacies on Reddit, and we present them using the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. We construct a new annotated dataset of fallacies, using user comments containing fallacy mentions as noisy labels, and cleaning the data via crowdsourcing. Finally, we study the task of classifying fallacies using neural models. We find that generally the models perform better in the presence of conversational context. We have released the data and the code at github.com/sahaisaumya/informal_fallacies.

Grammatical gender may be determined by semantics, orthography, phonology, or could even be arbitrary. Identifying patterns in the factors that govern noun genders can be useful for language learners, and for understanding innate linguistic sources of gender bias. Traditional manual rule-based approaches may be substituted by more accurate and scalable but harder-to-interpret computational approaches for predicting gender from typological information. In this work, we propose interpretable gender classification models for French, which obtain the best of both worlds. We present high accuracy neural approaches which are augmented by a novel global surrogate based approach for explaining predictions. We introduce ‘auxiliary attributes’ to provide tunable explanation complexity.

Pronunciation lexicons and prediction models are a key component in several speech synthesis and recognition systems. We know that morphologically related words typically follow a fixed pattern of pronunciation which can be described by language-specific paradigms. In this work we explore how deep recurrent neural networks can be used to automatically learn and exploit this pattern to improve the pronunciation prediction quality of words related by morphological inflection. We propose two novel approaches for supplying morphological information, using the word’s morphological class and its lemma, which are typically annotated in standard lexicons. We report improvements across a number of European languages with varying degrees of phonological and morphological complexity, and two language families, with greater improvements for languages where the pronunciation prediction task is inherently more challenging. We also observe that combining bidirectional LSTM networks with attention mechanisms is an effective neural approach for the computational problem considered, across languages. Our approach seems particularly beneficial in the low resource setting, both by itself and in conjunction with transfer learning.