Majid Laali


2017

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Automatic Mapping of French Discourse Connectives to PDTB Discourse Relations
Majid Laali | Leila Kosseim
Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

In this paper, we present an approach to exploit phrase tables generated by statistical machine translation in order to map French discourse connectives to discourse relations. Using this approach, we created DisCoRel, a lexicon of French discourse connectives and their PDTB relations. When evaluated against LEXCONN, DisCoRel achieves a recall of 0.81 and an Average Precision of 0.68 for the Concession and Condition relations.

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Improving Discourse Relation Projection to Build Discourse Annotated Corpora
Majid Laali | Leila Kosseim
Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2017

The naive approach to annotation projection is not effective to project discourse annotations from one language to another because implicit relations are often changed to explicit ones and vice-versa in the translation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on the intersection between statistical word-alignment models to identify unsupported discourse annotations. This approach identified 65% of the unsupported annotations in the English-French parallel sentences from Europarl. By filtering out these unsupported annotations, we induced the first PDTB-style discourse annotated corpus for French from Europarl. We then used this corpus to train a classifier to identify the discourse-usage of French discourse connectives and show a 15% improvement of F1-score compared to the classifier trained on the non-filtered annotations.

2016

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The CLaC Discourse Parser at CoNLL-2016
Majid Laali | Andre Cianflone | Leila Kosseim
Proceedings of the CoNLL-16 shared task

2015

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The CLaC Discourse Parser at CoNLL-2015
Majid Laali | Elnaz Davoodi | Leila Kosseim
Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning - Shared Task

2014

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Inducing Discourse Connectives from Parallel Texts
Majid Laali | Leila Kosseim
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers