Sean Trott


2021

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RAW-C: Relatedness of Ambiguous Words in Context (A New Lexical Resource for English)
Sean Trott | Benjamin Bergen
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)

Most words are ambiguous—-i.e., they convey distinct meanings in different contexts—-and even the meanings of unambiguous words are context-dependent. Both phenomena present a challenge for NLP. Recently, the advent of contextualized word embeddings has led to success on tasks involving lexical ambiguity, such as Word Sense Disambiguation. However, there are few tasks that directly evaluate how well these contextualized embeddings accommodate the more continuous, dynamic nature of word meaning—-particularly in a way that matches human intuitions. We introduce RAW-C, a dataset of graded, human relatedness judgments for 112 ambiguous words in context (with 672 sentence pairs total), as well as human estimates of sense dominance. The average inter-annotator agreement (assessed using a leave-one-annotator-out method) was 0.79. We then show that a measure of cosine distance, computed using contextualized embeddings from BERT and ELMo, correlates with human judgments, but that cosine distance also systematically underestimates how similar humans find uses of the same sense of a word to be, and systematically overestimates how similar humans find uses of different-sense homonyms. Finally, we propose a synthesis between psycholinguistic theories of the mental lexicon and computational models of lexical semantics.

2020

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(Re)construing Meaning in NLP
Sean Trott | Tiago Timponi Torrent | Nancy Chang | Nathan Schneider
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding—namely, that the way something is expressed reflects different ways of conceptualizing or construing the information being conveyed. We first define this phenomenon more precisely, drawing on considerable prior work in theoretical cognitive semantics and psycholinguistics. We then survey some dimensions of construed meaning and show how insights from construal could inform theoretical and practical work in NLP.