Automatic Focus Annotation: Bringing Formal Pragmatics Alive in Analyzing the Information Structure of Authentic Data

Ramon Ziai, Detmar Meurers


Abstract
Analyzing language in context, both from a theoretical and from a computational perspective, is receiving increased interest. Complementing the research in linguistics on discourse and information structure, in computational linguistics identifying discourse concepts was also shown to improve the performance of certain applications, for example, Short Answer Assessment systems (Ziai and Meurers, 2014). Building on the research that established detailed annotation guidelines for manual annotation of information structural concepts for written (Dipper et al., 2007; Ziai and Meurers, 2014) and spoken language data (Calhoun et al., 2010), this paper presents the first approach automating the analysis of focus in authentic written data. Our classification approach combines a range of lexical, syntactic, and semantic features to achieve an accuracy of 78.1% for identifying focus.
Anthology ID:
N18-1011
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
117–128
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1011
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1011
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ramon Ziai and Detmar Meurers. 2018. Automatic Focus Annotation: Bringing Formal Pragmatics Alive in Analyzing the Information Structure of Authentic Data. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 117–128, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Focus Annotation: Bringing Formal Pragmatics Alive in Analyzing the Information Structure of Authentic Data (Ziai & Meurers, NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1011.pdf