Gemma Bel-Enguix

Also published as: Gemma Bel Enguix, Gemma Bel Enguix, Gemma Bel-enguix


2024

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PCICUNAM at WASSA 2024: Cross-lingual Emotion Detection Task with Hierarchical Classification and Weighted Loss Functions
Jesús Vázquez-Osorio | Gerardo Sierra | Helena Gómez-Adorno | Gemma Bel-Enguix
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis

This paper addresses the shared task of multi-lingual emotion detection in tweets, presented at the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, and Social Media Analysis (WASSA) co-located with the ACL 2024 conference. The task involves predicting emotions from six classes in tweets from five different languages using only English for model training. Our approach focuses on addressing class imbalance through data augmentation, hierarchical classification, and the application of focal loss and weighted cross-entropy loss functions. These methods enhance our transformer-based model’s ability to transfer emotion detection capabilities across languages, resulting in improved performance despite the constraints of limited computational resources.

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PCIC at SMM4H 2024: Enhancing Reddit Post Classification on Social Anxiety Using Transformer Models and Advanced Loss Functions
Leon Hecht | Victor Pozos | Helena Gomez Adorno | Gibran Fuentes-Pineda | Gerardo Sierra | Gemma Bel-Enguix
Proceedings of The 9th Social Media Mining for Health Research and Applications (SMM4H 2024) Workshop and Shared Tasks

We present our approach to solving the task of identifying the effect of outdoor activities on social anxiety based on reddit posts. We employed state-of-the-art transformer models enhanced with a combination of advanced loss functions. Data augmentation techniques were also used to address class imbalance within the training set. Our method achieved a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.655 on the test data, surpassing the workshop’s mean F1-Score of 0.519. These findings suggest that integrating weighted loss functions improves the performance of transformer models in classifying unbalanced text data, while data augmentation can improve the model’s ability to generalize.

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MBZUAI-UNAM at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Sentence-CROBI, a Simple Cross-Bi-Encoder-Based Neural Network Architecture for Semantic Textual Relatedness
Jesus German Ortiz Barajas | Gemma Bel-enguix | Helena Goméz-adorno
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)

The Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR) shared task aims at detecting the degree of semantic relatedness between pairs of sentences on low-resource languages from Afroasiatic, Indoeuropean, Austronesian, Dravidian, and Nigercongo families. We use the Sentence-CROBI architecture to tackle this problem. The model is adapted from its original purpose of paraphrase detection to explore its capacities in a related task with limited resources and in multilingual and monolingual settings. Our approach combines the vector representation of cross-encoders and bi-encoders and possesses high adaptable capacity by combining several pre-trained models. Our system obtained good results on the low-resource languages of the dataset using a multilingual fine-tuning approach.

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iimasNLP at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Unveiling structure-aware language models for automatic generated text identification
Andric Valdez | Fernando Márquez | Jorge Pantaleón | Helena Gómez | Gemma Bel-enguix
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)

Large language models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence systems that can generate text, translate languages, and answer questions in a human-like way. While these advances are impressive, there is concern that LLMs could also be used to generate fake or misleading content. In this work, as a part of our participation in SemEval-2024 Task-8, we investigate the ability of LLMs to identify whether a given text was written by a human or by a specific AI. We believe that human and machine writing style patterns are different from each other, so integrating features at different language levels can help in this classification task. For this reason, we evaluate several LLMs that aim to extract valuable multilevel information (such as lexical, semantic, and syntactic) from the text in their training processing. Our best scores on Sub- taskA (monolingual) and SubtaskB were 71.5% and 38.2% in accuracy, respectively (both using the ConvBERT LLM); for both subtasks, the baseline (RoBERTa) achieved an accuracy of 74%.

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GIL-IIMAS UNAM at SemEval-2024 Task 1: SAND: An In Depth Analysis of Semantic Relatedness Using Regression and Similarity Characteristics
Francisco Lopez-ponce | Ángel Cadena | Karla Salas-jimenez | Gemma Bel-enguix | David Preciado-márquez
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)

The STR shared task aims at detecting the degree of semantic relatedness between sentence pairs in multiple languages. Semantic relatedness relies on elements such as topic similarity, point of view agreement, entailment, and even human intuition, making it a broader field than sentence similarity. The GIL-IIMAS UNAM team proposes a model based in the SAND characteristics composition (Sentence Transformers, AnglE Embeddings, N-grams, Sentence Length Difference coefficient) and classical regression algorithms. This model achieves a 0.83 Spearman Correlation score in the English test, and a 0.73 in the Spanish counterpart, finishing just above the SemEval baseline in English, and second place in Spanish.

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Evaluating the Development of Linguistic Metaphor Annotation in Mexican Spanish Popular Science Tweets
Alec Montero | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Sergio-Luis Ojeda-Trueba | Marisela Colín Rodea
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang 2024)

Following previous work on metaphor annotation and automatic metaphor processing, this study presents the evaluation of an initial phase in the novel area of linguistic metaphor detection in Mexican Spanish popular science tweets. Specifically, we examine the challenges posed by the annotation process stemming from disagreement among annotators. During this phase of our work, we conducted the annotation of a corpus comprising 3733 Mexican Spanish popular science tweets. This corpus was divided into two halves and each half was then assigned to two different pairs of native Mexican Spanish-speaking annotators. Despite rigorous methodology and continuous training, inter-annotator agreement as measured by Cohen’s kappa was found to be low, slightly above chance levels, although the concordance percentage exceeded 60%. By elucidating the inherent complexity of metaphor annotation tasks, our evaluation emphasizes the implications of these findings and offers insights for future research in this field, with the aim of creating a robust dataset for machine learning.

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The Mexican Gayze: A Computational Analysis of the Attitudes towards the LGBT+ Population in Mexico on Social Media Across a Decade
Scott Andersen | Segio-Luis Ojeda-Trueba | Juan Vásquez | Gemma Bel-Enguix
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2024)

Thanks to the popularity of social media, data generated by online communities provides an abundant source of diverse language information. This abundance of data allows NLP practitioners and computational linguists to analyze sociolinguistic phenomena occurring in digital communication. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter discourse around the Mexican Spanish-speaking LGBT+ community. For this, we evaluate how the polarity of some nouns related to the LGBT+ community has evolved in conversational settings using a corpus of tweets that cover a time span of ten years. We hypothesize that social media’s fast-moving, turbulent linguistic environment encourages language evolution faster than ever before. Our results indicate that most of the inspected terms have undergone some shift in denotation or connotation. No other generalizations can be observed in the data, given the difficulty that current NLP methods have to account for polysemy, and the wide differences between the various subgroups that make up the LGBT+ community. A fine-grained analysis of a series of LGBT+-related lexical terms is also included in this work.

2023

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HOMO-MEX: A Mexican Spanish Annotated Corpus for LGBT+phobia Detection on Twitter
Juan Vásquez | Scott Andersen | Gemma Bel-enguix | Helena Gómez-adorno | Sergio-luis Ojeda-trueba
The 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)

In the past few years, the NLP community has actively worked on detecting LGBT+Phobia in online spaces, using textual data publicly available Most of these are for the English language and its variants since it is the most studied language by the NLP community. Nevertheless, efforts towards creating corpora in other languages are active worldwide. Despite this, the Spanish language is an understudied language regarding digital LGBT+Phobia. The only corpus we found in the literature was for the Peninsular Spanish dialects, which use LGBT+phobic terms different than those in the Mexican dialect. For this reason, we present Homo-MEX, a novel corpus for detecting LGBT+Phobia in Mexican Spanish. In this paper, we describe our data-gathering and annotation process. Also, we present a classification benchmark using various traditional machine learning algorithms and two pre-trained deep learning models to showcase our corpus classification potential.

2022

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HeteroCorpus: A Corpus for Heteronormative Language Detection
Juan Vásquez | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Scott Thomas Andersen | Sergio-Luis Ojeda-Trueba
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)

In recent years, plenty of work has been done by the NLP community regarding gender bias detection and mitigation in language systems. Yet, to our knowledge, no one has focused on the difficult task of heteronormative language detection and mitigation. We consider this an urgent issue, since language technologies are growing increasingly present in the world and, as it has been proven by various studies, NLP systems with biases can create real-life adverse consequences for women, gender minorities and racial minorities and queer people. For these reasons, we propose and evaluate HeteroCorpus; a corpus created specifically for studying heterononormative language in English. Additionally, we propose a baseline set of classification experiments on our corpus, in order to show the performance of our corpus in classification tasks.

2020

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Enhancing Job Searches in Mexico City with Language Technologies
Gerardo Sierra Martínez | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Helena Gómez-Adorno | Juan Manuel Torres Moreno | Tonatiuh Hernández-García | Julio V Guadarrama-Olvera | Jesús-Germán Ortiz-Barajas | Ángela María Rojas | Tomas Damerau | Soledad Aragón Martínez
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Government and Public Administration (LT4Gov)

In this paper, we show the enhancing of the Demanded Skills Diagnosis (DiCoDe: Diagnóstico de Competencias Demandadas), a system developed by Mexico City’s Ministry of Labor and Employment Promotion (STyFE: Secretaría de Trabajo y Fomento del Empleo de la Ciudad de México) that seeks to reduce information asymmetries between job seekers and employers. The project uses webscraping techniques to retrieve job vacancies posted on private job portals on a daily basis and with the purpose of informing training and individual case management policies as well as labor market monitoring. For this purpose, a collaboration project between STyFE and the Language Engineering Group (GIL: Grupo de Ingeniería Lingüística) was established in order to enhance DiCoDe by applying NLP models and semantic analysis. By this collaboration, DiCoDe’s job vacancies system’s macro-structure and its geographic referencing at the city hall (municipality) level were improved. More specifically, dictionaries were created to identify demanded competencies, skills and abilities (CSA) and algorithms were developed for dynamic classifying of vacancies and identifying terms for searches on free text, in order to improve the results and processing time of queries.

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CPLM, a Parallel Corpus for Mexican Languages: Development and Interface
Gerardo Sierra Martínez | Cynthia Montaño | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Diego Córdova | Margarita Mota Montoya
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Mexico is a Spanish speaking country that has a great language diversity, with 68 linguistic groups and 364 varieties. As they face a lack of representation in education, government, public services and media, they present high levels of endangerment. Due to the lack of data available on social media and the internet, few technologies have been developed for these languages. To analyze different linguistic phenomena in the country, the Language Engineering Group developed the Corpus Paralelo de Lenguas Mexicanas (CPLM) [The Mexican Languages Parallel Corpus], a collaborative parallel corpus for the low-resourced languages of Mexico. The CPLM aligns Spanish with six indigenous languages: Maya, Ch’ol, Mazatec, Mixtec, Otomi, and Nahuatl. First, this paper describes the process of building the CPLM: text searching, digitalization and alignment process. Furthermore, we present some difficulties regarding dialectal and orthographic variations. Second, we present the interface and types of searching as well as the use of filters.

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Temporal Relations Annotation and Extrapolation Based on Semi-intervals and Boundig Relations
Alejandro Pimentel | Gemma Bel Enguix | Gerardo Sierra Martínez | Azucena Montes
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

The computational treatment of temporal relations is based on the work of Allen, who establishes 13 different types, and Freksa, who designs a cognitive procedure to manage them. Freksa’s notation is not widely used because, although it has cognitive and expressive advantages, it is too complex from the computational perspective. This paper proposes a system for the annotation and management of temporal relations that combines the richness and expressiveness of Freksa’s approach with the simplicity of Allen’s notation. Our method is summarized in the application of bounding relations, thanks to which it is possible to obtain the temporary representation of complete neighborhoods capable of representing vague temporal relations such as those that can be frequently found in a text. Such advantages are obtained without the need to greatly increase the complexity of the labeling process since the markup language is almost the same as TimeML, to which only a second temporary “relType”’ type label relationship is added. Our experiments show that the temporal relationships that present vagueness are in fact much more common than those in which a single relationship can be established precisely. For these reasons, our new labeling system achieves a more agreeable representation of temporal relations.

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Automatic Word Association Norms (AWAN)
Jorge Reyes-Magaña | Gerardo Sierra Martínez | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Helena Gomez-Adorno
Proceedings of the Workshop on the Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon

Word Association Norms (WAN) are collections that present stimuli words and the set of their associated responses. The corpus is widely used in diverse areas of expertise. In order to reduce the effort to have a good quality resource that can be reproduced in many languages with minimum sources, a methodology to build Automatic Word Association Norms is proposed (AWAN). The methodology has an input of two simple elements: a) dictionary, and b) pre-processed Word Embeddings. This new kind of WAN is evaluated in two ways: i) learning word embeddings based on the node2vec algorithm and comparing them with human annotated benchmarks, and ii) performing a lexical search for a reverse dictionary. Both evaluations are done in a weighted graph with the AWAN lexical elements. The results showed that the methodology produces good quality AWANs.

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MineriaUNAM at SemEval-2020 Task 3: Predicting Contextual WordSimilarity Using a Centroid Based Approach and Word Embeddings
Helena Gomez-Adorno | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Jorge Reyes-Magaña | Benjamín Moreno | Ramón Casillas | Daniel Vargas
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper presents our systems to solve Task 3 of Semeval-2020, which aims to predict the effect that context has on human perception of similarity of words. The task consists of two subtasks in English, Croatian, Finnish, and Slovenian: (1) predicting the change of similarity and (2) predicting the human scores of similarity, both of them for a pair of words within two different contexts. We tackled the problem by developing two systems, the first one uses a centroid approach and word vectors. The second one uses the ELMo language model, which is trained for each pair of words with the given context. Our approach achieved the highest score in subtask 2 for the English language.

2019

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MineriaUNAM at SemEval-2019 Task 5: Detecting Hate Speech in Twitter using Multiple Features in a Combinatorial Framework
Luis Enrique Argota Vega | Jorge Carlos Reyes-Magaña | Helena Gómez-Adorno | Gemma Bel-Enguix
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper presents our approach to the Task 5 of Semeval-2019, which aims at detecting hate speech against immigrants and women in Twitter. The task consists of two sub-tasks, in Spanish and English: (A) detection of hate speech and (B) classification of hateful tweets as aggressive or not, and identification of the target harassed as individual or group. We used linguistically motivated features and several types of n-grams (words, characters, functional words, punctuation symbols, POS, among others). For task A, we trained a Support Vector Machine using a combinatorial framework, whereas for task B we followed a multi-labeled approach using the Random Forest classifier. Our approach achieved the highest F1-score in sub-task A for the Spanish language.


A Parallel Corpus Mixtec-Spanish
Cynthia Montaño | Gerardo Sierra Martínez | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Helena Gomez
Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Widening NLP

This work is about the compilation process of parallel documents Spanish-Mixtec. There are not many Spanish-Mixec parallel texts and most of the sources are non-digital books. Due to this, we need to face the errors when digitizing the sources and difficulties in sentence alignment, as well as the fact that does not exist a standard orthography. Our parallel corpus consists of sixty texts coming from books and digital repositories. These documents belong to different domains: history, traditional stories, didactic material, recipes, ethnographical descriptions of each town and instruction manuals for disease prevention. We have classified this material in five major categories: didactic (6 texts), educative (6 texts), interpretative (7 texts), narrative (39 texts), and poetic (2 texts). The final total of tokens is 49,814 Spanish words and 47,774 Mixtec words. The texts belong to the states of Oaxaca (48 texts), Guerrero (9 texts) and Puebla (3 texts). According to this data, we see that the corpus is unbalanced in what refers to the representation of the different territories. While 55% of speakers are in Oaxaca, 80% of texts come from this region. Guerrero has the 30% of speakers and the 15% of texts and Puebla, with the 15% of the speakers has a representation of the 5% in the corpus.

2018

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Sociolinguistic Corpus of WhatsApp Chats in Spanish among College Students
Alejandro Dorantes | Gerardo Sierra | Tlauhlia Yamín Donohue Pérez | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Mónica Jasso Rosales
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media

This work presents the Sociolinguistic Corpus of WhatsApp Chats in Spanish among College Students, a corpus of raw data for general use. Its purpose is to offer data for the study of of language and interactions via Instant Messaging (IM) among bachelors. Our paper consists of an overview of both the corpus’s content and demographic metadata. Furthermore, it presents the current research being conducted with it —namely parenthetical expressions, orality traits, and code-switching. This work also includes a brief outline of similar corpora and recent studies in the field of IM.

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Textual Features Indicative of Writing Proficiency in Elementary School Spanish Documents
Gemma Bel-Enguix | Diana Dueñas Chávez | Arturo Curiel Díaz
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications

Childhood acquisition of written language is not straightforward. Writing skills evolve differently depending on external factors, such as the conditions in which children practice their productions and the quality of their instructors’ guidance. This can be challenging in low-income areas, where schools may struggle to ensure ideal acquisition conditions. Developing computational tools to support the learning process may counterweight negative environmental influences; however, few work exists on the use of information technologies to improve childhood literacy. This work centers around the computational study of Spanish word and syllable structure in documents written by 2nd and 3rd year elementary school students. The studied texts were compared against a corpus of short stories aimed at the same age group, so as to observe whether the children tend to produce similar written patterns as the ones they are expected to interpret at their literacy level. The obtained results show some significant differences between the two kinds of texts, pointing towards possible strategies for the implementation of new education software in support of written language acquisition.

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Word-word Relations in Dementia and Typical Aging
Natalia Arias-Trejo | Aline Minto-García | Diana I. Luna-Umanzor | Alma E. Ríos-Ponce | Balderas-Pliego Mariana | Gemma Bel-Enguix
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Language Cognition and Computational Models

Older adults tend to suffer a decline in some of their cognitive capabilities, being language one of least affected processes. Word association norms (WAN) also known as free word associations reflect word-word relations, the participant reads or hears a word and is asked to write or say the first word that comes to mind. Free word associations show how the organization of semantic memory remains almost unchanged with age. We have performed a WAN task with very small samples of older adults with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), vascular dementia (VaD) and mixed dementia (MxD), and also with a control group of typical aging adults, matched by age, sex and education. All of them are native speakers of Mexican Spanish. The results show, as expected, that Alzheimer disease has a very important impact in lexical retrieval, unlike vascular and mixed dementia. This suggests that linguistic tests elaborated from WAN can be also used for detecting AD at early stages.

2014

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A Graph-Based Approach for Computing Free Word Associations
Gemma Bel Enguix | Reinhard Rapp | Michael Zock
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

A graph-based algorithm is used to analyze the co-occurrences of words in the British National Corpus. It is shown that the statistical regularities detected can be exploited to predict human word associations. The corpus-derived associations are evaluated using a large test set comprising several thousand stimulus/response pairs as collected from humans. The finding is that there is a high agreement between the two types of data. The considerable size of the test set allows us to split the stimulus words into a number of classes relating to particular word properties. For example, we construct six saliency classes, and for the words in each of these classes we compare the simulation results with the human data. It turns out that for each class there is a close relationship between the performance of our system and human performance. This is also the case for classes based on two other properties of words, namely syntactic and semantic word ambiguity. We interpret these findings as evidence for the claim that human association acquisition must be based on the statistical analysis of perceived language and that when producing associations the detected statistical regularities are replicated.

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How well can a corpus-derived co-occurrence network simulate human associative behavior?
Gemma Bel Enguix | Reinhard Rapp | Michael Zock
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning (CogACLL)

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Retrieving Word Associations with a Simple Neighborhood Algorithm in a Graph-based Resource
Gemma Bel-Enguix
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex)

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TALN-RECITAL 2014 Workshop RLTLN 2014 : Réseaux Lexicaux pour le TAL (RLTLN 2014 : Lexical Networks for NLP)
Michael Zock | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Reinhard Rapp
TALN-RECITAL 2014 Workshop RLTLN 2014 : Réseaux Lexicaux pour le TAL (RLTLN 2014 : Lexical Networks for NLP)

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Linguistic Convergence in Societies with Asymmetrically Distributed Reputation
Gemma Bel-Enguix
TALN-RECITAL 2014 Workshop RLTLN 2014 : Réseaux Lexicaux pour le TAL (RLTLN 2014 : Lexical Networks for NLP)

2013

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Lexical access via a simple co-occurrence network (Trouver les mots dans un simple réseau de co-occurrences) [in French]
Gemma Bel-Enguix | Michael Zock
Proceedings of TALN 2013 (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2006

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Ambiguous Turn-Taking Games in Conversations
Gemma Bel-Enguix | Maria Dolores Jiménez-López
Actes de la 13ème conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. Posters

Human-computer interfaces require models of dialogue structure that capture the variability and unpredictability within dialogue. Semantic and pragmatic context are continuously evolving during conversation, especially by the distribution of turns that have a direct effect in dialogue exchanges. In this paper we use a formal language paradigm for modelling multi-agent system conversations. Our computational model combines pragmatic minimal units –speech acts– for constructing dialogues. In this framework, we show how turn-taking distribution can be ambiguous and propose an algorithm for solving it, considering turn coherence, trajectories and turn pairing. Finally, we suggest overlapping as one of the possible phenomena emerging from an unresolved turn-taking.