Takuma Sato


2025

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Is Partial Linguistic Information Sufficient for Discourse Connective Disambiguation? A Case Study of Concession
Takuma Sato | Ai Kubota | Koji Mineshima
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)

Discourse relations are sometimes explicitly conveyed by specific connectives.However, some connectives can signal multiple discourse relations; in such cases, disambiguation is necessary to determine which relation is intended.This task is known as *discourse connective disambiguation* (Pitler and Nenkova, 2009), and particular attention is often given to connectives that can convey both *concession* and other relations (e.g., *synchronous*).In this study, we conducted experiments to analyze which linguistic features play an important role in the disambiguation of polysemous connectives in Japanese.A neural language model (BERT) was fine-tuned using inputs from which specific linguistic features (e.g., word order, specific lexicon, etc.) had been removed.We analyzed which linguistic features affect disambiguation by comparing the model’s performance.Our results show that even after performing drastic removal, such as deleting one of the two arguments that constitute the discourse relation, the model’s performance remained relatively robust.However, the removal of certain lexical items or words belonging to specific lexical categories significantly degraded disambiguation performance, highlighting their importance in identifying the intended discourse relation.

2024

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Annotation of Japanese Discourse Relations Focusing on Concessive Inferences
Ai Kubota | Takuma Sato | Takayuki Amamoto | Ryota Akiyoshi | Koji Mineshima
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

In this study, we focus on the inference presupposed in the concessive discourse relation and present the discourse relation annotation for the Japanese connectives ‘nagara’ and ‘tsutsu’, both of which have two usages: Synchronous and Concession, just like English while. We also present the annotation for ‘tokorode’, which is ambiguous in three ways: Temporal, Location, and Concession. While corpora containing concessive discourse relations already exist, the distinctive feature of our study is that it aims to identify the concessive inferential relations by writing out the implicit presupposed inferences. In this paper, we report on the annotation methodology and its results, as well as the characteristics of concession that became apparent during annotation.