Kristina Gligorić

Also published as: Kristina Gligoric


2024

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AnthroScore: A Computational Linguistic Measure of Anthropomorphism
Myra Cheng | Kristina Gligoric | Tiziano Piccardi | Dan Jurafsky
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human entities, has shaped conversations about the impacts and possibilities of technology. We present AnthroScore, an automatic metric of implicit anthropomorphism in language. We use a masked language model to quantify how non-human entities are implicitly framed as human by the surrounding context. We show that AnthroScore corresponds with human judgments of anthropomorphism and dimensions of anthropomorphism described in social science literature. Motivated by concerns of misleading anthropomorphism in computer science discourse, we use AnthroScore to analyze 15 years of research papers and downstream news articles. In research papers, we find that anthropomorphism has steadily increased over time, and that papers related to language models have the most anthropomorphism. Within ACL papers, temporal increases in anthropomorphism are correlated with key neural advancements. Building upon concerns of scientific misinformation in mass media, we identify higher levels of anthropomorphism in news headlines compared to the research papers they cite. Since AnthroScore is lexicon-free, it can be directly applied to a wide range of text sources.

2019

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Comparing and Developing Tools to Measure the Readability of Domain-Specific Texts
Elissa Redmiles | Lisa Maszkiewicz | Emily Hwang | Dhruv Kuchhal | Everest Liu | Miraida Morales | Denis Peskov | Sudha Rao | Rock Stevens | Kristina Gligorić | Sean Kross | Michelle Mazurek | Hal Daumé III
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

The readability of a digital text can influence people’s ability to learn new things about a range topics from digital resources (e.g., Wikipedia, WebMD). Readability also impacts search rankings, and is used to evaluate the performance of NLP systems. Despite this, we lack a thorough understanding of how to validly measure readability at scale, especially for domain-specific texts. In this work, we present a comparison of the validity of well-known readability measures and introduce a novel approach, Smart Cloze, which is designed to address shortcomings of existing measures. We compare these approaches across four different corpora: crowdworker-generated stories, Wikipedia articles, security and privacy advice, and health information. On these corpora, we evaluate the convergent and content validity of each measure, and detail tradeoffs in score precision, domain-specificity, and participant burden. These results provide a foundation for more accurate readability measurements and better evaluation of new natural-language-processing systems and tools.