Amir Zeldes


2023

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ELQA: A Corpus of Metalinguistic Questions and Answers about English
Shabnam Behzad | Keisuke Sakaguchi | Nathan Schneider | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present ELQA, a corpus of questions and answers in and about the English language. Collected from two online forums, the >70k questions (from English learners and others) cover wide-ranging topics including grammar, meaning, fluency, and etymology. The answers include descriptions of general properties of English vocabulary and grammar as well as explanations about specific (correct and incorrect) usage examples. Unlike most NLP datasets, this corpus is metalinguistic—it consists of language about language. As such, it can facilitate investigations of the metalinguistic capabilities of NLU models, as well as educational applications in the language learning domain. To study this, we define a free-form question answering task on our dataset and conduct evaluations on multiple LLMs (Large Language Models) to analyze their capacity to generate metalinguistic answers.

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Why Can’t Discourse Parsing Generalize? A Thorough Investigation of the Impact of Data Diversity
Yang Janet Liu | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent advances in discourse parsing performance create the impression that, as in other NLP tasks, performance for high-resource languages such as English is finally becoming reliable. In this paper we demonstrate that this is not the case, and thoroughly investigate the impact of data diversity on RST parsing stability. We show that state-of-the-art architectures trained on the standard English newswire benchmark do not generalize well, even within the news domain. Using the two largest RST corpora of English with text from multiple genres, we quantify the impact of genre diversity in training data for achieving generalization to text types unseen during training. Our results show that a heterogeneous training regime is critical for stable and generalizable models, across parser architectures. We also provide error analyses of model outputs and out-of-domain performance. To our knowledge, this study is the first to fully evaluate cross-corpus RST parsing generalizability on complete trees, examine between-genre degradation within an RST corpus, and investigate the impact of genre diversity in training data composition.

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GENTLE: A Genre-Diverse Multilayer Challenge Set for English NLP and Linguistic Evaluation
Tatsuya Aoyama | Shabnam Behzad | Luke Gessler | Lauren Levine | Jessica Lin | Yang Janet Liu | Siyao Peng | Yilun Zhu | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVII)

We present GENTLE, a new mixed-genre English challenge corpus totaling 17K tokens and consisting of 8 unusual text types for out-of-domain evaluation: dictionary entries, esports commentaries, legal documents, medical notes, poetry, mathematical proofs, syllabuses, and threat letters. GENTLE is manually annotated for a variety of popular NLP tasks, including syntactic dependency parsing, entity recognition, coreference resolution, and discourse parsing. We evaluate state-of-the-art NLP systems on GENTLE and find severe degradation for at least some genres in their performance on all tasks, which indicates GENTLE’s utility as an evaluation dataset for NLP systems.

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Are UD Treebanks Getting More Consistent? A Report Card for English UD
Amir Zeldes | Nathan Schneider
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023)

Recent efforts to consolidate guidelines and treebanks in the Universal Dependencies project raise the expectation that joint training and dataset comparison is increasingly possible for high-resource languages such as English, which have multiple corpora. Focusing on the two largest UD English treebanks, we examine progress in data consolidation and answer several questions: Are UD English treebanks becoming more internally consistent? Are they becoming more like each other and to what extent? Is joint training a good idea, and if so, since which UD version? Our results indicate that while consolidation has made progress, joint models may still suffer from inconsistencies, which hamper their ability to leverage a larger pool of training data.

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Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2023)
Michael Strube | Chloe Braud | Christian Hardmeier | Junyi Jessy Li | Sharid Loaiciga | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2023)

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GUMSum: Multi-Genre Data and Evaluation for English Abstractive Summarization
Yang Janet Liu | Amir Zeldes
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Automatic summarization with pre-trained language models has led to impressively fluent results, but is prone to ‘hallucinations’, low performance on non-news genres, and outputs which are not exactly summaries. Targeting ACL 2023’s ‘Reality Check’ theme, we present GUMSum, a small but carefully crafted dataset of English summaries in 12 written and spoken genres for evaluation of abstractive summarization. Summaries are highly constrained, focusing on substitutive potential, factuality, and faithfulness. We present guidelines and evaluate human agreement as well as subjective judgments on recent system outputs, comparing general-domain untuned approaches, a fine-tuned one, and a prompt-based approach, to human performance. Results show that while GPT3 achieves impressive scores, it still underperforms humans, with varying quality across genres. Human judgments reveal different types of errors in supervised, prompted, and human-generated summaries, shedding light on the challenges of producing a good summary.

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Proceedings of the 3rd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2023)
Chloé Braud | Yang Janet Liu | Eleni Metheniti | Philippe Muller | Laura Rivière | Attapol Rutherford | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 3rd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2023)

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The DISRPT 2023 Shared Task on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification
Chloé Braud | Yang Janet Liu | Eleni Metheniti | Philippe Muller | Laura Rivière | Attapol Rutherford | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 3rd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2023)

In 2023, the third iteration of the DISRPT Shared Task (Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking) was held, dedicated to the underlying units used in discourse parsing across formalisms. Following the success of the 2019and 2021 tasks on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification, this iteration has added 10 new corpora, including 2 new languages (Thai and Italian) and 3 discourse treebanks annotated in the discourse dependency representation in addition to the previously included frameworks: RST, SDRT, and PDTB. In this paper, we review the data included in the Shared Task, which covers 26 datasets across 13 languages, survey and compare submitted systems, and report on system performance on each task for both annotated and plain-tokenized versions of the data.

2022

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Midas Loop: A Prioritized Human-in-the-Loop Annotation for Large Scale Multilayer Data
Luke Gessler | Lauren Levine | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 16th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVI) within LREC2022

Large scale annotation of rich multilayer corpus data is expensive and time consuming, motivating approaches that integrate high quality automatic tools with active learning in order to prioritize human labeling of hard cases. A related challenge in such scenarios is the concurrent management of automatically annotated data and human annotated data, particularly where different subsets of the data have been corrected for different types of annotation and with different levels of confidence. In this paper we present [REDACTED], a collaborative, version-controlled online annotation environment for multilayer corpus data which includes integrated provenance and confidence metadata for each piece of information at the document, sentence, token and annotation level. We present a case study on improving annotation quality in an existing multilayer parse bank of English called AMALGUM, focusing on active learning in corpus preprocessing, at the surprisingly challenging level of sentence segmentation. Our results show improvements to state-of-the-art sentence segmentation and a promising workflow for getting “silver” data to approach gold standard quality.

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Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse
Chloe Braud | Christian Hardmeier | Junyi Jessy Li | Sharid Loaiciga | Michael Strube | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse

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MicroBERT: Effective Training of Low-resource Monolingual BERTs through Parameter Reduction and Multitask Learning
Luke Gessler | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the The 2nd Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning (MRL)

BERT-style contextualized word embedding models are critical for good performance in most NLP tasks, but they are data-hungry and therefore difficult to train for low-resource languages. In this work, we investigate whether a combination of greatly reduced model size and two linguistically rich auxiliary pretraining tasks (part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing) can help produce better BERTs in a low-resource setting. Results from 7 diverse languages indicate that our model, MicroBERT, is able to produce marked improvements in downstream task evaluations, including gains up to 18% for parser LAS and 11% for NER F1 compared to an mBERT baseline, and we achieve these results with less than 1% of the parameter count of a multilingual BERT base–sized model. We conclude that training very small BERTs and leveraging any available labeled data for multitask learning during pretraining can produce models which outperform both their multilingual counterparts and traditional fixed embeddings for low-resource languages.

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CorefUD 1.0: Coreference Meets Universal Dependencies
Anna Nedoluzhko | Michal Novák | Martin Popel | Zdeněk Žabokrtský | Amir Zeldes | Daniel Zeman
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Recent advances in standardization for annotated language resources have led to successful large scale efforts, such as the Universal Dependencies (UD) project for multilingual syntactically annotated data. By comparison, the important task of coreference resolution, which clusters multiple mentions of entities in a text, has yet to be standardized in terms of data formats or annotation guidelines. In this paper we present CorefUD, a multilingual collection of corpora and a standardized format for coreference resolution, compatible with morphosyntactic annotations in the UD framework and including facilities for related tasks such as named entity recognition, which forms a first step in the direction of convergence for coreference resolution across languages.

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A Second Wave of UD Hebrew Treebanking and Cross-Domain Parsing
Amir Zeldes | Nick Howell | Noam Ordan | Yifat Ben Moshe
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Foundational Hebrew NLP tasks such as segmentation, tagging and parsing, have relied to date on various versions of the Hebrew Treebank (HTB, Sima’an et al. 2001). However, the data in HTB, a single-source newswire corpus, is now over 30 years old, and does not cover many aspects of contemporary Hebrew on the web. This paper presents a new, freely available UD treebank of Hebrew stratified from a range of topics selected from Hebrew Wikipedia. In addition to introducing the corpus and evaluating the quality of its annotations, we deploy automatic validation tools based on grew (Guillaume, 2021), and conduct the first cross domain parsing experiments in Hebrew. We obtain new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on UD NLP tasks, using a combination of the latest language modelling and some incremental improvements to existing transformer based approaches. We also release a new version of the UD HTB matching annotation scheme updates from our new corpus.

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GCDT: A Chinese RST Treebank for Multigenre and Multilingual Discourse Parsing
Siyao Peng | Yang Janet Liu | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

A lack of large-scale human-annotated data has hampered the hierarchical discourse parsing of Chinese. In this paper, we present GCDT, the largest hierarchical discourse treebank for Mandarin Chinese in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). GCDT covers over 60K tokens across five genres of freely available text, using the same relation inventory as contemporary RST treebanks for English. We also report on this dataset’s parsing experiments, including state-of-the-art (SOTA) scores for Chinese RST parsing and RST parsing on the English GUM dataset, using cross-lingual training in Chinese and English with multilingual embeddings.

2021

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Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse
Chloé Braud | Christian Hardmeier | Junyi Jessy Li | Annie Louis | Michael Strube | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse

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Overview of AMALGUM – Large Silver Quality Annotations across English Genres
Luke Gessler | Siyao Peng | Yang Liu | Yilun Zhu | Shabnam Behzad | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2021

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OntoGUM: Evaluating Contextualized SOTA Coreference Resolution on 12 More Genres
Yilun Zhu | Sameer Pradhan | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

SOTA coreference resolution produces increasingly impressive scores on the OntoNotes benchmark. However lack of comparable data following the same scheme for more genres makes it difficult to evaluate generalizability to open domain data. This paper provides a dataset and comprehensive evaluation showing that the latest neural LM based end-to-end systems degrade very substantially out of domain. We make an OntoNotes-like coreference dataset called OntoGUM publicly available, converted from GUM, an English corpus covering 12 genres, using deterministic rules, which we evaluate. Thanks to the rich syntactic and discourse annotations in GUM, we are able to create the largest human-annotated coreference corpus following the OntoNotes guidelines, and the first to be evaluated for consistency with the OntoNotes scheme. Out-of-domain evaluation across 12 genres shows nearly 15-20% degradation for both deterministic and deep learning systems, indicating a lack of generalizability or covert overfitting in existing coreference resolution models.

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WikiGUM: Exhaustive Entity Linking for Wikification in 12 Genres
Jessica Lin | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop

Previous work on Entity Linking has focused on resources targeting non-nested proper named entity mentions, often in data from Wikipedia, i.e. Wikification. In this paper, we present and evaluate WikiGUM, a fully wikified dataset, covering all mentions of named entities, including their non-named and pronominal mentions, as well as mentions nested within other mentions. The dataset covers a broad range of 12 written and spoken genres, most of which have not been included in Entity Linking efforts to date, leading to poor performance by a pretrained SOTA system in our evaluation. The availability of a variety of other annotations for the same data also enables further research on entities in context.

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Anatomy of OntoGUMAdapting GUM to the OntoNotes Scheme to Evaluate Robustness of SOTA Coreference Algorithms
Yilun Zhu | Sameer Pradhan | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference

SOTA coreference resolution produces increasingly impressive scores on the OntoNotes benchmark. However lack of comparable data following the same scheme for more genres makes it difficult to evaluate generalizability to open domain data. Zhu et al. (2021) introduced the creation of the OntoGUM corpus for evaluating geralizability of the latest neural LM-based end-to-end systems. This paper covers details of the mapping process which is a set of deterministic rules applied to the rich syntactic and discourse annotations manually annotated in the GUM corpus. Out-of-domain evaluation across 12 genres shows nearly 15-20% degradation for both deterministic and deep learning systems, indicating a lack of generalizability or covert overfitting in existing coreference resolution models.

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A Balanced and Broadly Targeted Computational Linguistics Curriculum
Emma Manning | Nathan Schneider | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP

This paper describes the primarily-graduate computational linguistics and NLP curriculum at Georgetown University, a U.S. university that has seen significant growth in these areas in recent years. We reflect on the principles behind our curriculum choices, including recognizing the various academic backgrounds and goals of our students; teaching a variety of skills with an emphasis on working directly with data; encouraging collaboration and interdisciplinary work; and including languages beyond English. We reflect on challenges we have encountered, such as the difficulty of teaching programming skills alongside NLP fundamentals, and discuss areas for future growth.

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Proceedings of the 2nd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2021)
Amir Zeldes | Yang Janet Liu | Mikel Iruskieta | Philippe Muller | Chloé Braud | Sonia Badene
Proceedings of the 2nd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2021)

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The DISRPT 2021 Shared Task on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification
Amir Zeldes | Yang Janet Liu | Mikel Iruskieta | Philippe Muller | Chloé Braud | Sonia Badene
Proceedings of the 2nd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2021)

In 2021, we organized the second iteration of a shared task dedicated to the underlying units used in discourse parsing across formalisms: the DISRPT Shared Task (Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking). Adding to the 2019 tasks on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection, this iteration of the Shared Task included for the first time a track on discourse relation classification across three formalisms: RST, SDRT, and PDTB. In this paper we review the data included in the Shared Task, which covers nearly 3 million manually annotated tokens from 16 datasets in 11 languages, survey and compare submitted systems and report on system performance on each task for both annotated and plain-tokenized versions of the data.

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DisCoDisCo at the DISRPT2021 Shared Task: A System for Discourse Segmentation, Classification, and Connective Detection
Luke Gessler | Shabnam Behzad | Yang Janet Liu | Siyao Peng | Yilun Zhu | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 2nd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2021)

This paper describes our submission to the DISRPT2021 Shared Task on Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification. Our system, called DisCoDisCo, is a Transformer-based neural classifier which enhances contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) with hand-crafted features, relying on tokenwise sequence tagging for discourse segmentation and connective detection, and a feature-rich, encoder-less sentence pair classifier for relation classification. Our results for the first two tasks outperform SOTA scores from the previous 2019 shared task, and results on relation classification suggest strong performance on the new 2021 benchmark. Ablation tests show that including features beyond CWEs are helpful for both tasks, and a partial evaluation of multiple pretrained Transformer-based language models indicates that models pre-trained on the Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) task are optimal for relation classification.

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Mischievous nominal constructions in Universal Dependencies
Nathan Schneider | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2021)

2020

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Exhaustive Entity Recognition for Coptic: Challenges and Solutions
Amir Zeldes | Lance Martin | Sichang Tu
Proceedings of the The 4th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

Entity recognition provides semantic access to ancient materials in the Digital Humanities: it exposes people and places of interest in texts that cannot be read exhaustively, facilitates linking resources and can provide a window into text contents, even for texts with no translations. In this paper we present entity recognition for Coptic, the language of Hellenistic era Egypt. We evaluate NLP approaches to the task and lay out difficulties in applying them to a low-resource, morphologically complex language. We present solutions for named and non-named nested entity recognition and semi-automatic entity linking to Wikipedia, relying on robust dependency parsing, feature-based CRF models, and hand-crafted knowledge base resources, enabling high accuracy NER with orders of magnitude less data than those used for high resource languages. The results suggest avenues for research on other languages in similar settings.

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A Cross-Genre Ensemble Approach to Robust Reddit Part of Speech Tagging
Shabnam Behzad | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 12th Web as Corpus Workshop

Part of speech tagging is a fundamental NLP task often regarded as solved for high-resource languages such as English. Current state-of-the-art models have achieved high accuracy, especially on the news domain. However, when these models are applied to other corpora with different genres, and especially user-generated data from the Web, we see substantial drops in performance. In this work, we study how a state-of-the-art tagging model trained on different genres performs on Web content from unfiltered Reddit forum discussions. We report the results when training on different splits of the data, tested on Reddit. Our results show that even small amounts of in-domain data can outperform the contribution of data an order of magnitude larger coming from other Web domains. To make progress on out-of-domain tagging, we also evaluate an ensemble approach using multiple single-genre taggers as input features to a meta-classifier. We present state of the art performance on tagging Reddit data, as well as error analysis of the results of these models, and offer a typology of the most common error types among them, broken down by training corpus.

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Proceedings of the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop
Stefanie Dipper | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

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Treebanking User-Generated Content: A Proposal for a Unified Representation in Universal Dependencies
Manuela Sanguinetti | Cristina Bosco | Lauren Cassidy | Özlem Çetinoğlu | Alessandra Teresa Cignarella | Teresa Lynn | Ines Rehbein | Josef Ruppenhofer | Djamé Seddah | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The paper presents a discussion on the main linguistic phenomena of user-generated texts found in web and social media, and proposes a set of annotation guidelines for their treatment within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework. Given on the one hand the increasing number of treebanks featuring user-generated content, and its somewhat inconsistent treatment in these resources on the other, the aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to provide a short, though comprehensive, overview of such treebanks - based on available literature - along with their main features and a comparative analysis of their annotation criteria, and (2) to propose a set of tentative UD-based annotation guidelines, to promote consistent treatment of the particular phenomena found in these types of texts. The main goal of this paper is to provide a common framework for those teams interested in developing similar resources in UD, thus enabling cross-linguistic consistency, which is a principle that has always been in the spirit of UD.

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AMALGUM – A Free, Balanced, Multilayer English Web Corpus
Luke Gessler | Siyao Peng | Yang Liu | Yilun Zhu | Shabnam Behzad | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present a freely available, genre-balanced English web corpus totaling 4M tokens and featuring a large number of high-quality automatic annotation layers, including dependency trees, non-named entity annotations, coreference resolution, and discourse trees in Rhetorical Structure Theory. By tapping open online data sources the corpus is meant to offer a more sizable alternative to smaller manually created annotated data sets, while avoiding pitfalls such as imbalanced or unknown composition, licensing problems, and low-quality natural language processing. We harness knowledge from multiple annotation layers in order to achieve a “better than NLP” benchmark and evaluate the accuracy of the resulting resource.

2019

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The Making of Coptic Wordnet
Laura Slaughter | Luis Morgado Da Costa | So Miyagawa | Marco Büchler | Amir Zeldes | Heike Behlmer
Proceedings of the 10th Global Wordnet Conference

With the increasing availability of wordnets for ancient languages, such as Ancient Greek and Latin, gaps remain in the coverage of less studied languages of antiquity. This paper reports on the construction and evaluation of a new wordnet for Coptic, the language of Late Roman, Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt in the first millenium CE. We present our approach to constructing the wordnet which uses multilingual Coptic dictionaries and wordnets for five different languages. We further discuss the results of this effort and outline our on-going/future work.

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019
Amir Zeldes | Debopam Das | Erick Maziero Galani | Juliano Desiderato Antonio | Mikel Iruskieta
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

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Introduction to Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT): 7th Workshop on Rhetorical Structure Theory and Related Formalisms
Amir Zeldes | Debopam Das | Erick Galani Maziero | Juliano Antonio | Mikel Iruskieta
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

This overview summarizes the main contributions of the accepted papers at the 2019 workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2019). Co-located with NAACL 2019 in Minneapolis, the workshop’s aim was to bring together researchers working on corpus-based and computational approaches to discourse relations. In addition to an invited talk, eighteen papers outlined below were presented, four of which were submitted as part of a shared task on elementary discourse unit segmentation and connective detection.

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A Discourse Signal Annotation System for RST Trees
Luke Gessler | Yang Liu | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

This paper presents a new system for open-ended discourse relation signal annotation in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), implemented on top of an online tool for RST annotation. We discuss existing projects annotating textual signals of discourse relations, which have so far not allowed simultaneously structuring and annotating words signaling hierarchical discourse trees, and demonstrate the design and applications of our interface by extending existing RST annotations in the freely available GUM corpus.

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The DISRPT 2019 Shared Task on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection
Amir Zeldes | Debopam Das | Erick Galani Maziero | Juliano Antonio | Mikel Iruskieta
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

In 2019, we organized the first iteration of a shared task dedicated to the underlying units used in discourse parsing across formalisms: the DISRPT Shared Task on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection. In this paper we review the data included in the task, which cover 2.6 million manually annotated tokens from 15 datasets in 10 languages, survey and compare submitted systems and report on system performance on each task for both annotated and plain-tokenized versions of the data.

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GumDrop at the DISRPT2019 Shared Task: A Model Stacking Approach to Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection
Yue Yu | Yilun Zhu | Yang Liu | Yan Liu | Siyao Peng | Mackenzie Gong | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

In this paper we present GumDrop, Georgetown University’s entry at the DISRPT 2019 Shared Task on automatic discourse unit segmentation and connective detection. Our approach relies on model stacking, creating a heterogeneous ensemble of classifiers, which feed into a metalearner for each final task. The system encompasses three trainable component stacks: one for sentence splitting, one for discourse unit segmentation and one for connective detection. The flexibility of each ensemble allows the system to generalize well to datasets of different sizes and with varying levels of homogeneity.

2018

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A Predictive Model for Notional Anaphora in English
Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference

Notional anaphors are pronouns which disagree with their antecedents’ grammatical categories for notional reasons, such as plural to singular agreement in: “the government ... they”. Since such cases are rare and conflict with evidence from strictly agreeing cases (“the government ... it”), they present a substantial challenge to both coreference resolution and referring expression generation. Using the OntoNotes corpus, this paper takes an ensemble approach to predicting English notional anaphora in context on the basis of the largest empirical data to date. In addition to state of the art prediction accuracy, the results suggest that theoretical approaches positing a plural construal at the antecedent’s utterance are insufficient, and that circumstances at the anaphor’s utterance location, as well as global factors such as genre, have a strong effect on the choice of referring expression.

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A Linked Coptic Dictionary Online
Frank Feder | Maxim Kupreyev | Emma Manning | Caroline T. Schroeder | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The dictionary encompasses comprehensive cross-referencing mechanisms, including linking entries to an online scanned edition of Crum’s Coptic Dictionary, internal cross-references and etymological information, translated searchable definitions in English, French and German, and linked corpus data which provides frequencies and corpus look-up for headwords and multiword expressions. Headwords are available for linking in external projects using a REST API. We describe the challenges in encoding our dictionary using TEI XML and implementing linking mechanisms to construct a Web interface querying frequency information, which draw on NLP tools to recognize inflected forms in context. We evaluate our dictionary’s coverage using digital corpora of Coptic available online.

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All Roads Lead to UD: Converting Stanford and Penn Parses to English Universal Dependencies with Multilayer Annotations
Siyao Peng | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018)

We describe and evaluate different approaches to the conversion of gold standard corpus data from Stanford Typed Dependencies (SD) and Penn-style constituent trees to the latest English Universal Dependencies representation (UD 2.2). Our results indicate that pure SD to UD conversion is highly accurate across multiple genres, resulting in around 1.5% errors, but can be improved further to fewer than 0.5% errors given access to annotations beyond the pure syntax tree, such as entity types and coreference resolution, which are necessary for correct generation of several UD relations. We show that constituent-based conversion using CoreNLP (with automatic NER) performs substantially worse in all genres, including when using gold constituent trees, primarily due to underspecification of phrasal grammatical functions.

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A Characterwise Windowed Approach to Hebrew Morphological Segmentation
Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

This paper presents a novel approach to the segmentation of orthographic word forms in contemporary Hebrew, focusing purely on splitting without carrying out morphological analysis or disambiguation. Casting the analysis task as character-wise binary classification and using adjacent character and word-based lexicon-lookup features, this approach achieves over 98% accuracy on the benchmark SPMRL shared task data for Hebrew, and 97% accuracy on a new out of domain Wikipedia dataset, an improvement of ≈4% and 5% over previous state of the art performance.

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The Coptic Universal Dependency Treebank
Amir Zeldes | Mitchell Abrams
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018)

This paper presents the Coptic Universal Dependency Treebank, the first dependency treebank within the Egyptian subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages. We discuss the composition of the corpus, challenges in adapting the UD annotation scheme to existing conventions for annotating Coptic, and evaluate inter-annotator agreement on UD annotation for the language. Some specific constructions are taken as a starting point for discussing several more general UD annotation guidelines, in particular for appositions, ambiguous passivization, incorporation and object-doubling.

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A Deeper Look into Dependency-Based Word Embeddings
Sean MacAvaney | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

We investigate the effect of various dependency-based word embeddings on distinguishing between functional and domain similarity, word similarity rankings, and two downstream tasks in English. Variations include word embeddings trained using context windows from Stanford and Universal dependencies at several levels of enhancement (ranging from unlabeled, to Enhanced++ dependencies). Results are compared to basic linear contexts and evaluated on several datasets. We found that embeddings trained with Universal and Stanford dependency contexts excel at different tasks, and that enhanced dependencies often improve performance.

2017

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A Distributional View of Discourse Encapsulation: Multifactorial Prediction of Coreference Density in RST
Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Recent Advances in RST and Related Formalisms

2016

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rstWeb - A Browser-based Annotation Interface for Rhetorical Structure Theory and Discourse Relations
Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations

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When Annotation Schemes Change Rules Help: A Configurable Approach to Coreference Resolution beyond OntoNotes
Amir Zeldes | Shuo Zhang
Proceedings of the Workshop on Coreference Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2016)

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Different Flavors of GUM: Evaluating Genre and Sentence Type Effects on Multilayer Corpus Annotation Quality
Amir Zeldes | Dan Simonson
Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016)

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An NLP Pipeline for Coptic
Amir Zeldes | Caroline T. Schroeder
Proceedings of the 10th SIGHUM Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities

2009

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Information Structure in African Languages: Corpora and Tools
Christian Chiarcos | Ines Fiedler | Mira Grubic | Andreas Haida | Katharina Hartmann | Julia Ritz | Anne Schwarz | Amir Zeldes | Malte Zimmermann
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technologies for African Languages

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Quantifying Constructional Productivity with Unseen Slot Members
Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity