Publications

SFB 1102Publications
Häuser, Katja; Kray, Jutta; Borovsky, Arielle

Hedging Bets in Linguistic Prediction: Younger and Older Adults Vary in the Breadth of Predictive Processing Journal Article

Collabra: Psychology, 8(1):36945, 2022.
Language processing is predictive in nature, but it is unknown whether language users generate multiple predictions about upcoming content simultaneously or whether spreading activation from one pre-activated word facilitates other words downstream. Simultaneously, developmental accounts of predictive processing simultaneously highlight potential tension among spreading activation vs. multiple activation accounts.We used self-paced reading to investigate if younger and older readers of German generate (multiple) graded predictions about the grammatical gender of nouns. Gradedness in predictions was operationalized as the difference in cloze probability between the most likely and second-most likely continuation that could complete a sentence. Sentences with a greater probabilistic difference were considered as imbalanced and more biased towards one gender. Sentences with lower probabilistic differences were considered to be more balanced towards multiple genders.Both young and older adults engaged in predictive processing. However, only younger adults activated multiple predictions, with slower reading times (RTs) when gender representations were balanced, but facilitation when one gender was more likely than others. In contrast, older adults’ RTs did not pattern with imbalance but merely with predictability, showing that, while able to generate predictions based on context, older adults did not predict multiple gender continuations. Hence, our findings suggest that (younger) language users generate graded predictions about upcoming content, by weighing possible sentence continuations according to their difference in cloze probability. Compared to younger adults, older adults’ predictions are reduced in scope. The results provide novel theoretical insights into the developmental mechanisms involved in predictive processing.

@article{Haeuseretal22,
title = {Hedging Bets in Linguistic Prediction: Younger and Older Adults Vary in the Breadth of Predictive Processing},
author = {Katja H{\"a}user and Jutta Kray and Arielle Borovsky},
url = {https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/8/1/36945/187814/Hedging-Bets-in-Linguistic-Prediction-Younger-and},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.36945},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
journal = {Collabra: Psychology},
volume = {8(1):36945},
abstract = {

Language processing is predictive in nature, but it is unknown whether language users generate multiple predictions about upcoming content simultaneously or whether spreading activation from one pre-activated word facilitates other words downstream. Simultaneously, developmental accounts of predictive processing simultaneously highlight potential tension among spreading activation vs. multiple activation accounts.We used self-paced reading to investigate if younger and older readers of German generate (multiple) graded predictions about the grammatical gender of nouns. Gradedness in predictions was operationalized as the difference in cloze probability between the most likely and second-most likely continuation that could complete a sentence. Sentences with a greater probabilistic difference were considered as imbalanced and more biased towards one gender. Sentences with lower probabilistic differences were considered to be more balanced towards multiple genders.Both young and older adults engaged in predictive processing. However, only younger adults activated multiple predictions, with slower reading times (RTs) when gender representations were balanced, but facilitation when one gender was more likely than others. In contrast, older adults’ RTs did not pattern with imbalance but merely with predictability, showing that, while able to generate predictions based on context, older adults did not predict multiple gender continuations. Hence, our findings suggest that (younger) language users generate graded predictions about upcoming content, by weighing possible sentence continuations according to their difference in cloze probability. Compared to younger adults, older adults’ predictions are reduced in scope. The results provide novel theoretical insights into the developmental mechanisms involved in predictive processing.
},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Projects:   A4 A5

Häuser, Katja; Kray, Jutta

How odd: Diverging effects of predictability and plausibility violations on sentence reading and word memory Journal Article

Applied Psycholinguistics, 43(5), pp. 1193-1220, 2022.

How do violations of predictability and plausibility affect online language processing? How does it affect longer-term memory and learning when predictions are disconfirmed by plausible or implausible words? We investigated these questions using a self-paced sentence reading and noun recognition task. Critical sentences violated predictability or plausibility or both, for example, “Since Anne is afraid of spiders, she doesn’t like going down into the … basement (predictable, plausible), garden (unpredictable, somewhat plausible), moon (unpredictable, deeply implausible).” Results from sentence reading showed earlier-emerging effects of predictability violations on the critical noun, but later-emerging effects of plausibility violations after the noun. Recognition memory was exclusively enhanced for deeply implausible nouns. The earlier-emerging predictability effect indicates that having word form predictions disconfirmed is registered very early in the processing stream, irrespective of semantics. The later-emerging plausibility effect supports models that argue for a staged architecture of reading comprehension, where plausibility only affects a post-lexical integration stage. Our memory results suggest that, in order to facilitate memory and learning, a certain magnitude of prediction error is required.

@article{HaeuserKray22,
title = {How odd: Diverging effects of predictability and plausibility violations on sentence reading and word memory},
author = {Katja H{\"a}user and Jutta Kray},
url = {https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/applied-psycholinguistics/article/how-odd-diverging-effects-of-predictability-and-plausibility-violations-on-sentence-reading-and-word-memory/D8E12864E47CE24E62297ABF5BA2BED0},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716422000364},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
journal = {Applied Psycholinguistics},
pages = {1193-1220},
volume = {43(5)},
abstract = {How do violations of predictability and plausibility affect online language processing? How does it affect longer-term memory and learning when predictions are disconfirmed by plausible or implausible words? We investigated these questions using a self-paced sentence reading and noun recognition task. Critical sentences violated predictability or plausibility or both, for example, “Since Anne is afraid of spiders, she doesn’t like going down into the … basement (predictable, plausible), garden (unpredictable, somewhat plausible), moon (unpredictable, deeply implausible).” Results from sentence reading showed earlier-emerging effects of predictability violations on the critical noun, but later-emerging effects of plausibility violations after the noun. Recognition memory was exclusively enhanced for deeply implausible nouns. The earlier-emerging predictability effect indicates that having word form predictions disconfirmed is registered very early in the processing stream, irrespective of semantics. The later-emerging plausibility effect supports models that argue for a staged architecture of reading comprehension, where plausibility only affects a post-lexical integration stage. Our memory results suggest that, in order to facilitate memory and learning, a certain magnitude of prediction error is required.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Projects:   A4 A5

van Os, Marjolein; Kray, Jutta; Demberg, Vera

Rational speech comprehension: Interaction between predictability, acoustic signal, and noise Journal Article

Frontiers in Psychology (Sec. Language Sciences), 13:914239, 2022.

During speech comprehension, multiple sources of information are available to listeners, which are combined to guide the recognition process. Models of speech comprehension posit that when the acoustic speech signal is obscured, listeners rely more on information from other sources. However, these models take into account only word frequency information and local contexts (surrounding syllables), but not sentence-level information. To date, empirical studies investigating predictability effects in noise did not carefully control the tested speech sounds, while the literature investigating the effect of background noise on the recognition of speech sounds does not manipulate sentence predictability. Additionally, studies on the effect of background noise show conflicting results regarding which noise type affects speech comprehension most. We address this in the present experiment. We investigate how listeners combine information from different sources when listening to sentences embedded in background noise. We manipulate top-down predictability, type of noise, and characteristics of the acoustic signal, thus creating conditions which differ in the extent to which a specific speech sound is masked in a way that is grounded in prior work on the confusability of speech sounds in noise. Participants complete an online word recognition experiment. The results show that participants rely more on the provided sentence context when the acoustic signal is harder to process. This is the case even when interactions of the background noise and speech sounds lead to small differences in intelligibility. Listeners probabilistically combine top-down predictions based on context with noisy bottom-up information from the acoustic signal, leading to a trade-off between the different types of information that is dependent on the combination of a specific type of background noise and speech sound.

@article{VanOsetal22,
title = {Rational speech comprehension: Interaction between predictability, acoustic signal, and noise},
author = {Marjolein van Os and Jutta Kray and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.914239/full},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.914239},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
journal = {Frontiers in Psychology (Sec. Language Sciences)},
volume = {13:914239},
abstract = {

During speech comprehension, multiple sources of information are available to listeners, which are combined to guide the recognition process. Models of speech comprehension posit that when the acoustic speech signal is obscured, listeners rely more on information from other sources. However, these models take into account only word frequency information and local contexts (surrounding syllables), but not sentence-level information. To date, empirical studies investigating predictability effects in noise did not carefully control the tested speech sounds, while the literature investigating the effect of background noise on the recognition of speech sounds does not manipulate sentence predictability. Additionally, studies on the effect of background noise show conflicting results regarding which noise type affects speech comprehension most. We address this in the present experiment. We investigate how listeners combine information from different sources when listening to sentences embedded in background noise. We manipulate top-down predictability, type of noise, and characteristics of the acoustic signal, thus creating conditions which differ in the extent to which a specific speech sound is masked in a way that is grounded in prior work on the confusability of speech sounds in noise. Participants complete an online word recognition experiment. The results show that participants rely more on the provided sentence context when the acoustic signal is harder to process. This is the case even when interactions of the background noise and speech sounds lead to small differences in intelligibility. Listeners probabilistically combine top-down predictions based on context with noisy bottom-up information from the acoustic signal, leading to a trade-off between the different types of information that is dependent on the combination of a specific type of background noise and speech sound.

},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   A4

Menzel, Katrin

Medical discourse in Late Modern English: Insights from the Royal Society Corpus. Book Chapter

Hiltunen, Turo; Taavitsainen, Irma;  (Ed.): Corpus pragmatic studies on the history of medical discourse (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series; Vol. 330), John Benjamins, pp. 79-104, Amsterdam, 2022.

This chapter demonstrates how the Royal Society Corpus, a richly annotated corpus of around 48,000 English scientific journal articles covering more than 330 years, can be used for lexico-grammatical and pragmatic studies that contribute to a broader understanding of the development of medical research articles. The Late Modern English period together with several decades before and after this time frame was a productive period in the medical output of the Royal Society. This chapter addresses typical linguistic features of scientific journal articles from medical and related sciences from this period demonstrating their special status in the context of other traditional and emerging disciplines in the corpus data. Additionally, language usage and text-type conventions of historical medical research articles will be compared to the features of corpus texts on medical topics from Present-day English.

@inbook{MedicalDiscourse22,
title = {Medical discourse in Late Modern English: Insights from the Royal Society Corpus.},
author = {Katrin Menzel},
editor = {Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen},
url = {https://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns.330},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Corpus pragmatic studies on the history of medical discourse (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series; Vol. 330)},
pages = {79-104},
publisher = {John Benjamins},
address = {Amsterdam},
abstract = {This chapter demonstrates how the Royal Society Corpus, a richly annotated corpus of around 48,000 English scientific journal articles covering more than 330 years, can be used for lexico-grammatical and pragmatic studies that contribute to a broader understanding of the development of medical research articles. The Late Modern English period together with several decades before and after this time frame was a productive period in the medical output of the Royal Society. This chapter addresses typical linguistic features of scientific journal articles from medical and related sciences from this period demonstrating their special status in the context of other traditional and emerging disciplines in the corpus data. Additionally, language usage and text-type conventions of historical medical research articles will be compared to the features of corpus texts on medical topics from Present-day English.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inbook}
}

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Project:   B1

Höller, Daniel; Wichlacz, Julia; Bercher, Pascal; Behnke, Gregor

Compiling HTN Plan Verification Problems into HTN Planning Problems Inproceedings

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS2022), 32, pp. 145-150, 2022.

Plan Verification is the task of deciding whether a sequence of actions is a solution for a given planning problem. In HTN planning, the task is computationally expensive and may be up to NP-hard. However, there are situations where it needs to be solved, e.g. when a solution is post-processed, in systems using approximation, or just to validate whether a planning system works correctly (e.g. for debugging or in a competition). There are verification systems based on translations to propositional logic and on techniques from parsing. Here we present a third approach and translate HTN plan verification problems into HTN planning problems. These can be solved using any HTN planning system. We collected a new bench-mark set based on models and results of the 2020 International Planning Competition. Our evaluation shows that our compilation outperforms the approaches from the literature.

@inproceedings{Höller_Wichlacz_Bercher_Behnke_2022,
title = {Compiling HTN Plan Verification Problems into HTN Planning Problems},
author = {Daniel H{\"o}ller and Julia Wichlacz and Pascal Bercher and Gregor Behnke},
url = {https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICAPS/article/view/19795/19554},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1609/icaps.v32i1.19795},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS2022)},
pages = {145-150},
abstract = {Plan Verification is the task of deciding whether a sequence of actions is a solution for a given planning problem. In HTN planning, the task is computationally expensive and may be up to NP-hard. However, there are situations where it needs to be solved, e.g. when a solution is post-processed, in systems using approximation, or just to validate whether a planning system works correctly (e.g. for debugging or in a competition). There are verification systems based on translations to propositional logic and on techniques from parsing. Here we present a third approach and translate HTN plan verification problems into HTN planning problems. These can be solved using any HTN planning system. We collected a new bench-mark set based on models and results of the 2020 International Planning Competition. Our evaluation shows that our compilation outperforms the approaches from the literature.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   A7

Wichlacz, Julia; Höller, Daniel; Hoffmann, Jörg

Landmark Heuristics for Lifted Classical Planning Inproceedings

De Raedt, Lud;  (Ed.): Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-22), Vienna, 23-29 July 2022, International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization, pp. 4665-4671, 2022.

While state-of-the-art planning systems need a grounded (propositional) task representation, the input model is provided “lifted”, specifying predicates and action schemas with variables over a finite object universe. The size of the grounded model is exponential in predicate/action-schema arity, limiting applicability to cases where it is small enough. Recent work has taken up this challenge, devising an effective lifted forward search planner as basis for lifted heuristic search, as well as a variety of lifted heuristic functions based on the delete relaxation. Here we add a novel family of lifted heuristic functions, based on landmarks. We design two methods for landmark extraction in the lifted setting. The resulting heuristics exhibit performance advantages over previous heuristics in several benchmark domains. Especially the combination with lifted delete relaxation heuristics to a LAMA-style planner yields good results, beating the previous state of the art in lifted planning.

@inproceedings{ijcai2022p647,
title = {Landmark Heuristics for Lifted Classical Planning},
author = {Julia Wichlacz and Daniel H{\"o}ller and J{\"o}rg Hoffmann},
editor = {Lud De Raedt},
url = {https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/647},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/647},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-22), Vienna, 23-29 July 2022},
pages = {4665-4671},
publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization},
abstract = {While state-of-the-art planning systems need a grounded (propositional) task representation, the input model is provided “lifted”, specifying predicates and action schemas with variables over a finite object universe. The size of the grounded model is exponential in predicate/action-schema arity, limiting applicability to cases where it is small enough. Recent work has taken up this challenge, devising an effective lifted forward search planner as basis for lifted heuristic search, as well as a variety of lifted heuristic functions based on the delete relaxation. Here we add a novel family of lifted heuristic functions, based on landmarks. We design two methods for landmark extraction in the lifted setting. The resulting heuristics exhibit performance advantages over previous heuristics in several benchmark domains. Especially the combination with lifted delete relaxation heuristics to a LAMA-style planner yields good results, beating the previous state of the art in lifted planning.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   A7

Zhai, Fangzhou; Demberg, Vera; Koller, Alexander

Zero-shot Script Parsing Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, International Committee on Computational Linguistics, pp. 4049-4060, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea, 2022.

Script knowledge (Schank and Abelson, 1977) is useful for a variety of NLP tasks. However, existing resources only cover a small number of activities, limiting its practical usefulness. In this work, we propose a zero-shot learning approach to script parsing, the task of tagging texts with scenario-specific event and participant types, which enables us to acquire script knowledge without domain-specific annotations. We (1) learn representations of potential event and participant mentions by promoting class consistency according to the annotated data; (2) perform clustering on the event /participant candidates from unannotated texts that belongs to an unseen scenario. The model achieves 68.1/74.4 average F1 for event / participant parsing, respectively, outperforming a previous CRF model that, in contrast, has access to scenario-specific supervision. We also evaluate the model by testing on a different corpus, where it achieved 55.5/54.0 average F1 for event / participant parsing.

@inproceedings{zhai-etal-2022-zero,
title = {Zero-shot Script Parsing},
author = {Fangzhou Zhai and Vera Demberg and Alexander Koller},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.356},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
pages = {4049-4060},
publisher = {International Committee on Computational Linguistics},
address = {Gyeongju, Republic of Korea},
abstract = {Script knowledge (Schank and Abelson, 1977) is useful for a variety of NLP tasks. However, existing resources only cover a small number of activities, limiting its practical usefulness. In this work, we propose a zero-shot learning approach to script parsing, the task of tagging texts with scenario-specific event and participant types, which enables us to acquire script knowledge without domain-specific annotations. We (1) learn representations of potential event and participant mentions by promoting class consistency according to the annotated data; (2) perform clustering on the event /participant candidates from unannotated texts that belongs to an unseen scenario. The model achieves 68.1/74.4 average F1 for event / participant parsing, respectively, outperforming a previous CRF model that, in contrast, has access to scenario-specific supervision. We also evaluate the model by testing on a different corpus, where it achieved 55.5/54.0 average F1 for event / participant parsing.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Projects:   A3 A8

Żygis, Marzena; Beňuš, Štefan; Andreeva, Bistra

Intonation: Other pragmatic functions and phonetic / phonological effects Book Chapter

Bermel, Neil; Fellerer, Jan;  (Ed.): The Oxford Guide to the Slavonic Languages, Oxford University Press, 2022.

@inbook{Zygis2021intonation,
title = {Intonation: Other pragmatic functions and phonetic / phonological effects},
author = {Marzena Żygis and Štefan Beňuš and Bistra Andreeva},
editor = {Neil Bermel and Jan Fellerer},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {The Oxford Guide to the Slavonic Languages},
publisher = {Oxford University Press},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inbook}
}

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Project:   C1

Andreeva, Bistra; Dimitrova, Snezhina

Intonation and information structure Book Chapter Forthcoming

Bermel, Neil; Fellerer, Jan;  (Ed.): The Oxford Guide to the Slavonic Languages, Oxford University Press, 2022.

@inbook{Andreeva2022intonation,
title = {Intonation and information structure},
author = {Bistra Andreeva and Snezhina Dimitrova},
editor = {Neil Bermel and Jan Fellerer},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {The Oxford Guide to the Slavonic Languages},
publisher = {Oxford University Press},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inbook}
}

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Project:   C1

Voigtmann, Sophia

Informational aspects of the extraposition of relative clauses Inproceedings

Coniglio, Marco; de Bastiani, Chiara; Catasso, Nicholas (Ed.): Language Change at the Interfaces. Intrasentential and intersentential phenomena, 2022.

One reason why intertwined clauses are harder to perceive than their counterparts might be information structure (IS). The current idea is that speakers choose extraposition of new information to help the audience perceive their text and to distribute information evenly across a discourse (Levy and Jaeger 2007). The purpose of this paper is to verify the relation between IS and extraposition or
adjacency of relative clauses (RC).

@inproceedings{voigtmanninprint,
title = {Informational aspects of the extraposition of relative clauses},
author = {Sophia Voigtmann},
editor = {Marco Coniglio and Chiara de Bastiani and Nicholas Catasso},
url = {http://www.dgfs2019.uni-bremen.de/abstracts/ag7/Voigtmann.pdf},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Language Change at the Interfaces. Intrasentential and intersentential phenomena},
abstract = {One reason why intertwined clauses are harder to perceive than their counterparts might be information structure (IS). The current idea is that speakers choose extraposition of new information to help the audience perceive their text and to distribute information evenly across a discourse (Levy and Jaeger 2007). The purpose of this paper is to verify the relation between IS and extraposition or adjacency of relative clauses (RC).},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   C6

Lemke, Tyll Robin; Schäfer, Lisa; Reich, Ingo

Can identity conditions on ellipsis be explained by processing principles? Inproceedings

Hörnig, Robin; von Wietersheim, Sophie; Konietzko, Andreas; Featherston, Sam;  (Ed.): Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2020: Linguistic Theory Enriched by Experimental Data, University of Tübingen, pp. 541-561, Tübingen, Germany, 2022.

In the theoretical literature, the unacceptability of (some) structural mismatches between the antecedent and the target of ellipsis have been taken to indicate that ellipsis is subject to syntactic identity conditions. Such constraints have been defended for verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) (Arregui et al., 2006; Merchant, 2013) and sluicing (Chung, 2006, 2013). The assumption of syntactic identity conditions increases the complexity of the grammar, because conditions which are specific to particular ellipses must be added to a system of more general rules. If the data that apparently support syntactic identity conditions could be explained by independently motivated principles, this would consequently reduce the complexity of the syntactic system. In this article we investigate syntactic identity conditions proposed by Chung (2006, 2013) for sluicing, i.e. the ellipsis of the TP in a wh-question, which is survived only by the wh-phrase (1a) (Ross, 1969). Our study shows that apparent grammaticality contrasts can be accounted for by a probabilistic processing account, which is supported by an acceptability rating, a production and a self-paced reading experiment. In contrast, Chung’s constraints lead to predictions which are not supported by our data.

@inproceedings{lemke.etalidentity,
title = {Can identity conditions on ellipsis be explained by processing principles?},
author = {Tyll Robin Lemke and Lisa Sch{\"a}fer and Ingo Reich},
editor = {Robin H{\"o}rnig and Sophie von Wietersheim and Andreas Konietzko and Sam Featherston},
url = {https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/119301},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2020: Linguistic Theory Enriched by Experimental Data},
pages = {541-561},
publisher = {University of T{\"u}bingen},
address = {T{\"u}bingen, Germany},
abstract = {In the theoretical literature, the unacceptability of (some) structural mismatches between the antecedent and the target of ellipsis have been taken to indicate that ellipsis is subject to syntactic identity conditions. Such constraints have been defended for verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) (Arregui et al., 2006; Merchant, 2013) and sluicing (Chung, 2006, 2013). The assumption of syntactic identity conditions increases the complexity of the grammar, because conditions which are specific to particular ellipses must be added to a system of more general rules. If the data that apparently support syntactic identity conditions could be explained by independently motivated principles, this would consequently reduce the complexity of the syntactic system. In this article we investigate syntactic identity conditions proposed by Chung (2006, 2013) for sluicing, i.e. the ellipsis of the TP in a wh-question, which is survived only by the wh-phrase (1a) (Ross, 1969). Our study shows that apparent grammaticality contrasts can be accounted for by a probabilistic processing account, which is supported by an acceptability rating, a production and a self-paced reading experiment. In contrast, Chung’s constraints lead to predictions which are not supported by our data.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B3

Lemke, Tyll Robin; Reich, Ingo; Schäfer, Lisa

Questions under discussion, salience and the acceptability of fragments Incollection Forthcoming

Konietzko, Andreas; Winkler, Susanne;  (Ed.): Information Structure and Discourse in Generative Grammar: Mechanisms and Processes, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin; Boston, 2022.

@incollection{lemke.etalquestions,
title = {Questions under discussion, salience and the acceptability of fragments},
author = {Tyll Robin Lemke and Ingo Reich and Lisa Sch{\"a}fer},
editor = {Andreas Konietzko and Susanne Winkler},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Information Structure and Discourse in Generative Grammar: Mechanisms and Processes},
publisher = {De Gruyter Mouton},
address = {Berlin; Boston},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {incollection}
}

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Project:   B3

Calvillo, Jesús; Brouwer, Harm; Crocker, Matthew W.

Semantic Systematicity in Connectionist Language Production Journal Article

Information (Special issue on Neural Natural Language Generation), 12, pp. 329, 2021.

Decades of studies trying to define the extent to which artificial neural networks can exhibit systematicity suggest that systematicity can be achieved by connectionist models but not by default. Here we present a novel connectionist model of sentence production that employs rich situation model representations originally proposed for modeling systematicity in comprehension. The high performance of our model demonstrates that such representations are also well suited to model language production. Furthermore, the model can produce multiple novel sentences for previously unseen situations, including in a different voice (actives vs. passive) and with words in new syntactic roles, thus demonstrating semantic and syntactic generalization and arguably systematicity. Our results provide yet further evidence that such connectionist approaches can achieve systematicity, in production as well as comprehension. We propose our positive results to be a consequence of the regularities of the microworld from which the semantic representations are derived, which provides a sufficient structure from which the neural network can interpret novel inputs.

@article{Calvillo2021semantic,
title = {Semantic Systematicity in Connectionist Language Production},
author = {Jesús Calvillo and Harm Brouwer and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://doi.org/10.3390/info12080329},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.3390/info12080329},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
journal = {Information (Special issue on Neural Natural Language Generation)},
pages = {329},
volume = {12},
number = {8},
abstract = {Decades of studies trying to define the extent to which artificial neural networks can exhibit systematicity suggest that systematicity can be achieved by connectionist models but not by default. Here we present a novel connectionist model of sentence production that employs rich situation model representations originally proposed for modeling systematicity in comprehension. The high performance of our model demonstrates that such representations are also well suited to model language production. Furthermore, the model can produce multiple novel sentences for previously unseen situations, including in a different voice (actives vs. passive) and with words in new syntactic roles, thus demonstrating semantic and syntactic generalization and arguably systematicity. Our results provide yet further evidence that such connectionist approaches can achieve systematicity, in production as well as comprehension. We propose our positive results to be a consequence of the regularities of the microworld from which the semantic representations are derived, which provides a sufficient structure from which the neural network can interpret novel inputs.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   C3

Yuen, Ivan; Xu Rattanasone, Nan; Schmidt, Elaine; Macdonald, Gretel; Holt, Rebecca; Demuth, Katherine

Five-year-olds produce prosodic cues to distinguish compounds from lists in Australian English Journal Article

Journal of Child Language, 48, Cambridge University Press, pp. 110-128, 2021.

Although previous research has indicated that five-year-olds can use acoustic cues to disambiguate compounds (N1 + N2) from lists (N1, N2) (e.g., ‘ice–cream’ vs. ‘ice, cream’) (Yoshida & Katz, 2004, 2006), their productions are not yet fully adult-like (Wells, Peppé & Goulandris, 2004). The goal of this study was to examine this issue in Australian English-speaking children, with a focus on their use of F0, word duration, and pauses. Twenty-four five-year-olds and 20 adults participated in an elicited production experiment. Like adults, children produced distinct F0 patterns for the two structures. They also used longer word durations and more pauses in lists compared to compounds, indicating the presence of a boundary in lists. However, unlike adults, they also inappropriately inserted more pauses within the compound, suggesting the presence of a boundary in compounds as well. The implications for understanding children’s developing knowledge of how to map acoustic cues to prosodic structures are discussed.

@article{YUENetal2020cues,
title = {Five-year-olds produce prosodic cues to distinguish compounds from lists in Australian English},
author = {Ivan Yuen and Nan Xu Rattanasone and Elaine Schmidt and Gretel Macdonald and Rebecca Holt and Katherine Demuth},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000920000227},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000920000227},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
journal = {Journal of Child Language},
pages = {110-128},
publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
volume = {48},
number = {1},
abstract = {

Although previous research has indicated that five-year-olds can use acoustic cues to disambiguate compounds (N1 + N2) from lists (N1, N2) (e.g., ‘ice-cream’ vs. ‘ice, cream’) (Yoshida & Katz, 2004, 2006), their productions are not yet fully adult-like (Wells, Pepp{\'e} & Goulandris, 2004). The goal of this study was to examine this issue in Australian English-speaking children, with a focus on their use of F0, word duration, and pauses. Twenty-four five-year-olds and 20 adults participated in an elicited production experiment. Like adults, children produced distinct F0 patterns for the two structures. They also used longer word durations and more pauses in lists compared to compounds, indicating the presence of a boundary in lists. However, unlike adults, they also inappropriately inserted more pauses within the compound, suggesting the presence of a boundary in compounds as well. The implications for understanding children's developing knowledge of how to map acoustic cues to prosodic structures are discussed.
},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   C1

Gessinger, Iona; Möbius, Bernd; Le Maguer, Sébastien; Raveh, Eran; Steiner, Ingmar

Phonetic accommodation in interaction with a virtual language learning tutor: A Wizard-of-Oz study Journal Article

Journal of Phonetics, 86, pp. 101029, 2021.

We present a Wizard-of-Oz experiment examining phonetic accommodation of human interlocutors in the context of human-computer interaction. Forty-two native speakers of German engaged in dynamic spoken interaction with a simulated virtual tutor for learning the German language called Mirabella. Mirabella was controlled by the experimenter and used either natural or hidden Markov model-based synthetic speech to communicate with the participants. In the course of four tasks, the participants’ accommodating behavior with respect to wh-question realization and allophonic variation in German was tested. The participants converged to Mirabella with respect to modified wh-question intonation, i.e., rising F0 contour and nuclear pitch accent on the interrogative pronoun, and the allophonic contrast [ɪç] vs. [ɪk] occurring in the word ending 〈-ig〉. They did not accommodate to the allophonic contrast [ɛː] vs. [eː] as a realization of the long vowel 〈-ä-〉. The results did not differ between the experimental groups that communicated with either the natural or the synthetic speech version of Mirabella. Testing the influence of the “Big Five” personality traits on the accommodating behavior revealed a tendency for neuroticism to influence the convergence of question intonation. On the level of individual speakers, we found considerable variation with respect to the degree and direction of accommodation. We conclude that phonetic accommodation on the level of local prosody and segmental pronunciation occurs in users of spoken dialog systems, which could be exploited in the context of computer-assisted language learning.

@article{Gessinger/etal:2021a,
title = {Phonetic accommodation in interaction with a virtual language learning tutor: A Wizard-of-Oz study},
author = {Iona Gessinger and Bernd M{\"o}bius and S{\'e}bastien Le Maguer and Eran Raveh and Ingmar Steiner},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101029},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101029},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
journal = {Journal of Phonetics},
pages = {101029},
volume = {86},
abstract = {We present a Wizard-of-Oz experiment examining phonetic accommodation of human interlocutors in the context of human-computer interaction. Forty-two native speakers of German engaged in dynamic spoken interaction with a simulated virtual tutor for learning the German language called Mirabella. Mirabella was controlled by the experimenter and used either natural or hidden Markov model-based synthetic speech to communicate with the participants. In the course of four tasks, the participants’ accommodating behavior with respect to wh-question realization and allophonic variation in German was tested. The participants converged to Mirabella with respect to modified wh-question intonation, i.e., rising F0 contour and nuclear pitch accent on the interrogative pronoun, and the allophonic contrast [ɪç] vs. [ɪk] occurring in the word ending 〈-ig〉. They did not accommodate to the allophonic contrast [ɛː] vs. [eː] as a realization of the long vowel 〈-{\"a}-〉. The results did not differ between the experimental groups that communicated with either the natural or the synthetic speech version of Mirabella. Testing the influence of the “Big Five” personality traits on the accommodating behavior revealed a tendency for neuroticism to influence the convergence of question intonation. On the level of individual speakers, we found considerable variation with respect to the degree and direction of accommodation. We conclude that phonetic accommodation on the level of local prosody and segmental pronunciation occurs in users of spoken dialog systems, which could be exploited in the context of computer-assisted language learning.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   C1

Proceedings for the First Workshop on Modelling Translation: Translatology in the Digital Age Proceeding

Bizzoni, Yuri; Teich, Elke; España-Bonet, Cristina; van Genabith, Josef;  (Ed.): Association for Computational Linguistics, online, 2021.

@proceeding{motra-2021-modelling,
title = {Proceedings for the First Workshop on Modelling Translation: Translatology in the Digital Age},
author = {},
editor = {Yuri Bizzoni and Elke Teich and Cristina Espa{\~n}a-Bonet and Josef van Genabith},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.motra-1.0/},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {online},
pubstate = {published},
type = {proceeding}
}

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Project:   B7

Karakanta, Alina; Przybyl, Heike; Teich, Elke

Exploring variation in translation with probabilistic language models Incollection

Lavid-López, Julia; Maíz-Arévalo, Carmen; Zamorano-Mansilla, Juan Rafael;  (Ed.): Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age: Recent advances and explorations, 158, Benjamins, pp. 308-323, Amsterdam, 2021.

While some authors have suggested that translationese fingerprints are universal, others have shown that there is a fair amount of variation among translations due to source language shining through, translation type or translation mode. In our work, we attempt to gain empirical insights into variation in translation, focusing here on translation mode (translation vs. interpreting). Our goal is to discover features of translationese and interpretese that distinguish translated and interpreted output from comparable original text/speech as well as from each other at different linguistic levels. We use relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler Divergence) and visualization with word clouds. Our analysis shows differences in typical words between originals vs. non-originals as well as between translation modes both at lexical and grammatical levels.

@incollection{KarakantaEtAl2021,
title = {Exploring variation in translation with probabilistic language models},
author = {Alina Karakanta and Heike Przybyl and Elke Teich},
editor = {Julia Lavid-López and Carmen Ma{\'i}z-Ar{\'e}valo and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.12kar},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.12kar},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
booktitle = {Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age: Recent advances and explorations},
pages = {308-323},
publisher = {Benjamins},
address = {Amsterdam},
abstract = {While some authors have suggested that translationese fingerprints are universal, others have shown that there is a fair amount of variation among translations due to source language shining through, translation type or translation mode. In our work, we attempt to gain empirical insights into variation in translation, focusing here on translation mode (translation vs. interpreting). Our goal is to discover features of translationese and interpretese that distinguish translated and interpreted output from comparable original text/speech as well as from each other at different linguistic levels. We use relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler Divergence) and visualization with word clouds. Our analysis shows differences in typical words between originals vs. non-originals as well as between translation modes both at lexical and grammatical levels.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {incollection}
}

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Project:   B7

Lapshinova-Koltunski, Ekaterina; Przybyl, Heike; Bizzoni, Yuri

Tracing variation in discourse connectives in translation and interpreting through neural semantic spaces Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse CODI, pp. 134-142, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and Online, 2021.

In the present paper, we explore lexical contexts of discourse markers in translation and interpreting on the basis of word embeddings. Our special interest is on contextual variation of the same discourse markers in (written) translation vs. (simultaneous) interpreting. To explore this variation at the lexical level, we use a data-driven approach: we compare bilingual neural word embeddings trained on source-to- translation and source-tointerpreting aligned corpora. Our results show more variation of semantically related items in translation spaces vs. interpreting ones and a more consistent use of fewer connectives in interpreting. We also observe different trends with regard to the discourse relation types.

@inproceedings{LapshinovaEtAl2021codi,
title = {Tracing variation in discourse connectives in translation and interpreting through neural semantic spaces},
author = {Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Heike Przybyl and Yuri Bizzoni},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.codi-main.13/},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse CODI},
pages = {134-142},
address = {Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and Online},
abstract = {In the present paper, we explore lexical contexts of discourse markers in translation and interpreting on the basis of word embeddings. Our special interest is on contextual variation of the same discourse markers in (written) translation vs. (simultaneous) interpreting. To explore this variation at the lexical level, we use a data-driven approach: we compare bilingual neural word embeddings trained on source-to- translation and source-tointerpreting aligned corpora. Our results show more variation of semantically related items in translation spaces vs. interpreting ones and a more consistent use of fewer connectives in interpreting. We also observe different trends with regard to the discourse relation types.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B7

Amponsah-Kaakyire, Kwabena; Pylypenko, Daria; España-Bonet, Cristina; van Genabith, Josef

Do not Rely on Relay Translations: Multilingual Parallel Direct Europarl Inproceedings

Proceedings of the Workshop on Modelling Translation: Translatology in the Digital Age (MoTra21), International Committee on Computational Linguistics, pp. 1-7, Iceland (Online), 2021.

Translationese data is a scarce and valuable resource. Traditionally, the proceedings of the European Parliament have been used for studying translationese phenomena since their metadata allows to distinguish between original and translated texts. However, translations are not always direct and we hypothesise that a pivot (also called ”relay”) language might alter the conclusions on translationese effects. In this work, we (i) isolate translations that have been done without an intermediate language in the Europarl proceedings from those that might have used a pivot language, and (ii) build comparable and parallel corpora with data aligned across multiple languages that therefore can be used for both machine translation and translation studies.

@inproceedings{AmposahEtal:MOTRA:2021,
title = {Do not Rely on Relay Translations: Multilingual Parallel Direct Europarl},
author = {Kwabena Amponsah-Kaakyire and Daria Pylypenko and Cristina Espa{\~n}a-Bonet and Josef van Genabith},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.motra-1.1/},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Modelling Translation: Translatology in the Digital Age (MoTra21)},
pages = {1-7},
publisher = {International Committee on Computational Linguistics},
address = {Iceland (Online)},
abstract = {Translationese data is a scarce and valuable resource. Traditionally, the proceedings of the European Parliament have been used for studying translationese phenomena since their metadata allows to distinguish between original and translated texts. However, translations are not always direct and we hypothesise that a pivot (also called ”relay”) language might alter the conclusions on translationese effects. In this work, we (i) isolate translations that have been done without an intermediate language in the Europarl proceedings from those that might have used a pivot language, and (ii) build comparable and parallel corpora with data aligned across multiple languages that therefore can be used for both machine translation and translation studies.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B6

Zhu, Dawei; Mogadala, Aditya; Klakow, Dietrich

Image manipulation with natural language using Two-sided Attentive Conditional Generative Adversarial Network Journal Article

Neural Networks, 136, pp. 207-217, 2021, ISSN 0893-6080.

Altering the content of an image with photo editing tools is a tedious task for an inexperienced user. Especially, when modifying the visual attributes of a specific object in an image without affecting other constituents such as background etc. To simplify the process of image manipulation and to provide more control to users, it is better to utilize a simpler interface like natural language. Therefore, in this paper, we address the challenge of manipulating images using natural language description. We propose the Two-sidEd Attentive conditional Generative Adversarial Network (TEA-cGAN) to generate semantically manipulated images while preserving other contents such as background intact. TEA-cGAN uses fine-grained attention both in the generator and discriminator of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based framework at different scales. Experimental results show that TEA-cGAN which generates 128×128 and 256×256 resolution images outperforms existing methods on CUB and Oxford-102 datasets both quantitatively and qualitatively.

@article{zhumogadala:2020,
title = {Image manipulation with natural language using Two-sided Attentive Conditional Generative Adversarial Network},
author = {Dawei Zhu and Aditya Mogadala and Dietrich Klakow},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608020303257},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2020.09.002},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
journal = {Neural Networks},
pages = {207-217},
volume = {136},
abstract = {Altering the content of an image with photo editing tools is a tedious task for an inexperienced user. Especially, when modifying the visual attributes of a specific object in an image without affecting other constituents such as background etc. To simplify the process of image manipulation and to provide more control to users, it is better to utilize a simpler interface like natural language. Therefore, in this paper, we address the challenge of manipulating images using natural language description. We propose the Two-sidEd Attentive conditional Generative Adversarial Network (TEA-cGAN) to generate semantically manipulated images while preserving other contents such as background intact. TEA-cGAN uses fine-grained attention both in the generator and discriminator of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based framework at different scales. Experimental results show that TEA-cGAN which generates 128x128 and 256x256 resolution images outperforms existing methods on CUB and Oxford-102 datasets both quantitatively and qualitatively.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B4

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