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1. Understanding the Semantics of Narratives of Interpersonal Violence through Reader Annotations and Physiological Reactions

   Calderwood, Alexander; Pruett, Elizabeth; Ptucha, Raymond; Homan, Christopher; Alm, Cecilia O (January 2017, Proceedings of the Workshop Computational Semantics Beyond Events and Roles)

   Interpersonal violence (IPV) is a prominent sociological problem that affects people of all demographic backgrounds. By analyzing how readers interpret, perceive, and react to experiences narrated in social media posts, we explore an understudied source for discourse about abuse. We asked readers to annotate Reddit posts about relationships with vs. without IPV for stakeholder roles and emotion, while measuring their galvanic skin response (GSR), pulse, and facial expression. We map annotations to coreference resolution output to obtain a labeled coreference chain for stakeholders in texts, and apply automated semantic role labeling for analyzing IPV discourse. Findings provide insights into how readers process roles and emotion in narratives. For example, abusers tend to be linked with violent actions and certain affect states. We train classifiers to predict stakeholder categories of coreference chains. We also find that subjects' GSR noticeably changed for IPV texts, suggesting that co-collected measurement-based data about annotators can be used to support text annotation. 

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2. Paraguayan Guarani: Tritonal Pitch Accent and Accentual Phrase

   Jun, Sun-Ah; Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (August 2022, Interspeech)

   This paper investigates the intonation system of Paraguayan Guarani in the Autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonational phonology. Previous work on Guarani intonation stated that Guarani has two types of pitch accent, rising (L*+H or LH) and falling (H+L* or HL), and there is no prosodic unit between a word and an Intonational Phrase. But these findings seem to have resulted from the limitation of the data examined. When longer words/sentences and various syntactic structures are examined, it was found that Guarani has one type of pitch accent, a tri-tonal HLH*, and has an Accentual Phrase (AP). The tonal pattern of AP is /H HLH* Ha/, i.e., it has one pitch accent and its edges are marked by a H tone. However, because the pitch accent is tri-tonal, AP edge tones are realized only when an AP is longer than four syllables and stress is not final, suggesting that the function of AP boundary tone is not marking word prominence as in other AP languages. Instead, an important function of Guarani AP seems to mark specific syntactic categories and groupings. These findings are compared with other AP languages and discussed in terms of the typology of word-prominence type. Index Terms: intonation, Paraguayan Guarani, tri-tonal pitch accent, Accentual Phrase, prosodic typology 

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3. Paraguayan Guarani:Tritonal Pitch Accent and Accentual Phrase

   Jun, Sun-Ah; Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (September 2022, International Speech Communication Association)

   This paper investigates the intonation system of Paraguayan Guarani in the Autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonational phonology. Previous work on Guarani intonation stated that Guarani has two types of pitch accent, rising (L*+H or LH) and falling (H+L* or HL), and there is no prosodic unit between a word and an Intonational Phrase. But these findings seem to have resulted from the limitation of the data examined. When longer words/sentences and various syntactic structures are examined, it was found that Guarani has one type of pitch accent, a tri-tonal HLH*, and has an Accentual Phrase (AP). The tonal pattern of AP is /H HLH* Ha/, i.e., it has one pitch accent and its edges are marked by a H tone. However, because the pitch accent is tri-tonal, AP edge tones are realized only when an AP is longer than four syllables and stress is not final, suggesting that the function of AP boundary tone is not marking word prominence as in other AP languages. Instead, an important function of Guarani AP seems to mark specific syntactic categories and groupings. These findings are compared with other AP languages and discussed in terms of the typology of word-prominence type. Index Terms: intonation, Paraguayan Guarani, tri-tonal pitch accent, Accentual Phrase, prosodic typology 

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4. Coreference and discourse coherence in L2: The roles of grammatical aspect and referential form

   https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15011.gru  

   Grüter, Theres; Rohde, Hannah; Schafer, Amy J. (January 2017, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism)

   Discourse-level factors, such as event structure and the form of referential expressions, play an important role in native speakers’ referential processing. This paper presents an experiment with Japanese- and Korean-speaking learners of English, investigating the extent to which discourse-level biases that have gradient effects in L1 speakers are also implicated in L2 speakers’ coreference choices. Results from a story continuation task indicate that biases involving referential form were remarkably similar for L1 and L2 speakers. In contrast, event structure, indicated by perfective versus imperfective aspect, had a more limited effect on L2 speakers’ referential choices. The L2 results are discussed in light of existing accounts of L1 reference processing, which assume that referential choices are shaped by speakers’ continually updated expectations about what is likely to be mentioned next, and argued to reflect L2 speakers’ reduced reliance on expectations. 

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5. Inducing Stereotypical Character Roles from Plot Structure

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.39  

   Jahan, Labiba; Mittal, Rahul; Finlayson, Mark (November 2021, Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Process (EMNLP 2021))

   Stereotypical character roles-also known as archetypes or dramatis personae-play an important function in narratives: they facilitate efficient communication with bundles of default characteristics and associations and ease understanding of those characters’ roles in the overall narrative. We present a fully unsupervised k-means clustering approach for learning stereotypical roles given only structural plot information. We demonstrate the technique on Vladimir Propp’s structural theory of Russian folktales (captured in the extended ProppLearner corpus, with 46 tales), showing that our approach can induce six out of seven of Propp’s dramatis personae with F1 measures of up to 0.70 (0.58 average), with an additional category for minor characters. We have explored various feature sets and variations of a cluster evaluation method. The best-performing feature set comprises plot functions, unigrams, tf-idf weights, and embeddings over coreference chain heads. Roles that are mentioned more often (Hero, Villain), or have clearly distinct plot patterns (Princess) are more strongly differentiated than less frequent or distinct roles (Dispatcher, Helper, Donor). Detailed error analysis suggests that the quality of the coreference chain and plot functions annotations are critical for this task. We provide all our data and code for reproducibility. 

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