Eugen Ruppert


2022

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Modeling Referential Gaze in Task-oriented Settings of Varying Referential Complexity
Özge Alacam | Eugen Ruppert | Sina Zarrieß | Ganeshan Malhotra | Chris Biemann | Sina Zarrieß
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: AACL-IJCNLP 2022

Referential gaze is a fundamental phenomenon for psycholinguistics and human-human communication. However, modeling referential gaze for real-world scenarios, e.g. for task-oriented communication, is lacking the well-deserved attention from the NLP community. In this paper, we address this challenging issue by proposing a novel multimodal NLP task; namely predicting when the gaze is referential. We further investigate how to model referential gaze and transfer gaze features to adapt to unseen situated settings that target different referential complexities than the training environment. We train (i) a sequential attention-based LSTM model and (ii) a multivariate transformer encoder architecture to predict whether the gaze is on a referent object. The models are evaluated on the three complexity datasets. The results indicate that the gaze features can be transferred not only among various similar tasks and scenes but also across various complexity levels. Taking the referential complexity of a scene into account is important for successful target prediction using gaze parameters especially when there is not much data for fine-tuning.

2020

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Eye4Ref: A Multimodal Eye Movement Dataset of Referentially Complex Situations
Özge Alacam | Eugen Ruppert | Amr Rekaby Salama | Tobias Staron | Wolfgang Menzel
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Eye4Ref is a rich multimodal dataset of eye-movement recordings collected from referentially complex situated settings where the linguistic utterances and their visual referential world were available to the listener. It consists of not only fixation parameters but also saccadic movement parameters that are time-locked to accompanying German utterances (with English translations). Additionally, it also contains symbolic knowledge (contextual) representations of the images to map the referring expressions onto the objects in corresponding images. Overall, the data was collected from 62 participants in three different experimental setups (86 systematically controlled sentence–image pairs and 1844 eye-movement recordings). Referential complexity was controlled by visual manipulations (e.g. number of objects, visibility of the target items, etc.), and by linguistic manipulations (e.g., the position of the disambiguating word in a sentence). This multimodal dataset, in which the three different sources of information namely eye-tracking, language, and visual environment are aligned, offers a test of various research questions not from only language perspective but also computer vision.

2019

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UHH-LT at SemEval-2019 Task 6: Supervised vs. Unsupervised Transfer Learning for Offensive Language Detection
Gregor Wiedemann | Eugen Ruppert | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

We present a neural network based approach of transfer learning for offensive language detection. For our system, we compare two types of knowledge transfer: supervised and unsupervised pre-training. Supervised pre-training of our bidirectional GRU-3-CNN architecture is performed as multi-task learning of parallel training of five different tasks. The selected tasks are supervised classification problems from public NLP resources with some overlap to offensive language such as sentiment detection, emoji classification, and aggressive language classification. Unsupervised transfer learning is performed with a thematic clustering of 40M unlabeled tweets via LDA. Based on this dataset, pre-training is performed by predicting the main topic of a tweet. Results indicate that unsupervised transfer from large datasets performs slightly better than supervised training on small ‘near target category’ datasets. In the SemEval Task, our system ranks 14 out of 103 participants.

2018

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Building a Web-Scale Dependency-Parsed Corpus from CommonCrawl
Alexander Panchenko | Eugen Ruppert | Stefano Faralli | Simone P. Ponzetto | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

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Unsupervised, Knowledge-Free, and Interpretable Word Sense Disambiguation
Alexander Panchenko | Fide Marten | Eugen Ruppert | Stefano Faralli | Dmitry Ustalov | Simone Paolo Ponzetto | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Interpretability of a predictive model is a powerful feature that gains the trust of users in the correctness of the predictions. In word sense disambiguation (WSD), knowledge-based systems tend to be much more interpretable than knowledge-free counterparts as they rely on the wealth of manually-encoded elements representing word senses, such as hypernyms, usage examples, and images. We present a WSD system that bridges the gap between these two so far disconnected groups of methods. Namely, our system, providing access to several state-of-the-art WSD models, aims to be interpretable as a knowledge-based system while it remains completely unsupervised and knowledge-free. The presented tool features a Web interface for all-word disambiguation of texts that makes the sense predictions human readable by providing interpretable word sense inventories, sense representations, and disambiguation results. We provide a public API, enabling seamless integration.

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Unsupervised Does Not Mean Uninterpretable: The Case for Word Sense Induction and Disambiguation
Alexander Panchenko | Eugen Ruppert | Stefano Faralli | Simone Paolo Ponzetto | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

The current trend in NLP is the use of highly opaque models, e.g. neural networks and word embeddings. While these models yield state-of-the-art results on a range of tasks, their drawback is poor interpretability. On the example of word sense induction and disambiguation (WSID), we show that it is possible to develop an interpretable model that matches the state-of-the-art models in accuracy. Namely, we present an unsupervised, knowledge-free WSID approach, which is interpretable at three levels: word sense inventory, sense feature representations, and disambiguation procedure. Experiments show that our model performs on par with state-of-the-art word sense embeddings and other unsupervised systems while offering the possibility to justify its decisions in human-readable form.

2016

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TAXI at SemEval-2016 Task 13: a Taxonomy Induction Method based on Lexico-Syntactic Patterns, Substrings and Focused Crawling
Alexander Panchenko | Stefano Faralli | Eugen Ruppert | Steffen Remus | Hubert Naets | Cédrick Fairon | Simone Paolo Ponzetto | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

2015

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Analysing domain suitability of a sentiment lexicon by identifying distributionally bipolar words
Lucie Flekova | Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro | Eugen Ruppert
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

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JoBimViz: A Web-based Visualization for Graph-based Distributional Semantic Models
Eugen Ruppert | Manuel Kaufmann | Martin Riedl | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2015 System Demonstrations