TIE-ML (Temporal Information Event Markup Language) first proposed by Cavar et al. (2021) provides a radically simplified temporal annotation schema for event sequencing and clause level temporal properties even in complex sentences. TIE-ML facilitates rapid annotation of essential tense features at the clause level by labeling simple or periphrastic tense properties, as well as scope relations between clauses, and temporal interpretation at the sentence level. This paper presents the first annotation samples and empirical results. The application of the TIE-ML strategy on the sentences in the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al., 1993) and other non-English language data is discussed in detail. The motivation, insights, and future directions for TIE-ML are discussed, too. The aim is to develop a more efficient annotation strategy and a formalism for clause-level tense and aspect labeling, event sequencing, and tense scope relations that boosts the productivity of tense and event-level corpus annotation. The central goal is to facilitate the production of large data sets for machine learning and quantitative linguistic studies of intra- and cross-linguistic semantic properties of temporal and event logic.

We investigate methods to develop a parser for Martinican Creole, a highly under-resourced language, using a French treebank. We compare transfer learning and multi-task learning models and examine different input features and strategies to handle the massive size imbalance between the treebanks. Surprisingly, we find that a simple concatenated (French + Martinican Creole) baseline yields optimal results even though it has access to only 80 Martinican Creole sentences. POS embeddings work better than lexical ones, but they suffer from negative transfer.

Conspiracy theories have found a new channel on the internet and spread by bringing together like-minded people, thus functioning as an echo chamber. The new 88-million word corpus Language of Conspiracy (LOCO) was created with the intention to provide a text collection to study how the language of conspiracy differs from mainstream language. We use this corpus to develop a robust annotation scheme that will allow us to distinguish between documents containing conspiracy language and documents that do not contain any conspiracy content or that propagate conspiracy theories via misinformation (which we explicitly disregard in our work). We find that focusing on indicators of a belief in a conspiracy combined with textual cues of conspiracy language allows us to reach a substantial agreement (based on Fleiss’ kappa and Krippendorff’s alpha). We also find that the automatic retrieval methods used to collect the corpus work well in finding mainstream documents, but include some documents in the conspiracy category that would not belong there based on our definition.