Hannah Rohde


2020

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TED-Q: TED Talks and the Questions they Evoke
Matthijs Westera | Laia Mayol | Hannah Rohde
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present a new dataset of TED-talks annotated with the questions they evoke and, where available, the answers to these questions. Evoked questions represent a hitherto mostly unexplored type of linguistic data, which promises to open up important new lines of research, especially related to the Question Under Discussion (QUD)-based approach to discourse structure. In this paper we introduce the method and open the first installment of our data to the public. We summarize and explore the current dataset, illustrate its potential by providing new evidence for the relation between predictability and implicitness – capitalizing on the already existing PDTB-style annotations for the texts we use – and outline its potential for future research. The dataset should be of interest, at its current scale, to researchers on formal and experimental pragmatics, discourse coherence, information structure, discourse expectations and processing. Our data-gathering procedure is designed to scale up, relying on crowdsourcing by non-expert annotators, with its utility for Natural Language Processing in mind (e.g., dialogue systems, conversational question answering).

2018

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Event versus entity co-reference: Effects of context and form of referring expression
Sharid Loáiciga | Luca Bevacqua | Hannah Rohde | Christian Hardmeier
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference

Anaphora resolution systems require both an enumeration of possible candidate antecedents and an identification process of the antecedent. This paper focuses on (i) the impact of the form of referring expression on entity-vs-event preferences and (ii) how properties of the passage interact with referential form. Two crowd-sourced story-continuation experiments were conducted, using constructed and naturally-occurring passages, to see how participants interpret It and This pronouns following a context sentence that makes available event and entity referents. Our participants show a strong, but not categorical, bias to use This to refer to events and It to refer to entities. However, these preferences vary with passage characteristics such as verb class (a proxy in our constructed examples for the number of explicit and implicit entities) and more subtle author intentions regarding subsequent re-mention (the original event-vs-entity re-mention of our corpus items).

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Forms of Anaphoric Reference to Organisational Named Entities: Hoping to widen appeal, they diversified
Christian Hardmeier | Luca Bevacqua | Sharid Loáiciga | Hannah Rohde
Proceedings of the Seventh Named Entities Workshop

Proper names of organisations are a special case of collective nouns. Their meaning can be conceptualised as a collective unit or as a plurality of persons, allowing for different morphological marking of coreferent anaphoric pronouns. This paper explores the variability of references to organisation names with 1) a corpus analysis and 2) two crowd-sourced story continuation experiments. The first shows that the preference for singular vs. plural conceptualisation is dependent on the level of formality of a text. In the second, we observe a strong preference for the plural they otherwise typical of informal speech. Using edited corpus data instead of constructed sentences as stimuli reduces this preference.

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Discourse Coherence: Concurrent Explicit and Implicit Relations
Hannah Rohde | Alexander Johnson | Nathan Schneider | Bonnie Webber
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Theories of discourse coherence posit relations between discourse segments as a key feature of coherent text. Our prior work suggests that multiple discourse relations can be simultaneously operative between two segments for reasons not predicted by the literature. Here we test how this joint presence can lead participants to endorse seemingly divergent conjunctions (e.g., BUT and SO) to express the link they see between two segments. These apparent divergences are not symptomatic of participant naivety or bias, but arise reliably from the concurrent availability of multiple relations between segments – some available through explicit signals and some via inference. We believe that these new results can both inform future progress in theoretical work on discourse coherence and lead to higher levels of performance in discourse parsing.

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Getting to “Hearer-old”: Charting Referring Expressions Across Time
Ieva Staliūnaitė | Hannah Rohde | Bonnie Webber | Annie Louis
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

When a reader is first introduced to an entity, its referring expression must describe the entity. For entities that are widely known, a single word or phrase often suffices. This paper presents the first study of how expressions that refer to the same entity develop over time. We track thousands of person and organization entities over 20 years of New York Times (NYT). As entities move from hearer-new (first introduction to the NYT audience) to hearer-old (common knowledge) status, we show empirically that the referring expressions along this trajectory depend on the type of the entity, and exhibit linguistic properties related to becoming common knowledge (e.g., shorter length, less use of appositives, more definiteness). These properties can also be used to build a model to predict how long it will take for an entity to reach hearer-old status. Our results reach 10-30% absolute improvement over a majority-class baseline.

2017

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Exploring Substitutability through Discourse Adverbials and Multiple Judgments
Hannah Rohde | Anna Dickinson | Nathan Schneider | Annie Louis | Bonnie Webber
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) — Long papers

2016

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Filling in the Blanks in Understanding Discourse Adverbials: Consistency, Conflict, and Context-Dependence in a Crowdsourced Elicitation Task
Hannah Rohde | Anna Dickinson | Nathan Schneider | Christopher N. L. Clark | Annie Louis | Bonnie Webber
Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016)

2015

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Recovering discourse relations: Varying influence of discourse adverbials
Hannah Rohde | Anna Dickinson | Chris Clark | Annie Louis | Bonnie Webber
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linking Computational Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics

2014

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Information Structure Prediction for Visual-world Referring Expressions
Micha Elsner | Hannah Rohde | Alasdair Clarke
Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics