Transcript Slide 1

Computational
Models of
Discourse Analysis
Carolyn Penstein Rosé
Language Technologies Institute/
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Warm-Up Discussion
What is social causality and what
aspect of discourse analysis does it
most naturally
Student
idea:connect to?
I guess I don't understand how social
What
WhatI is
the
connection
think might
be between
causality
is different, in the way they're
Girju’s approach
and
presenting
it, from ordinary causality in
interesting
to do
withEngagement?


How would you characterize Girju’s
sentences. Does it just require that both
Engagement,
is
maybe to
approach?
targeted objects in each event are people?
 What was
she They
trying
to good-bad
do and
somehow
apply
thismake
thewhy?
claim that studying
 What can
used
causality
noveltoit
in computational
distinction
tothisit.approach
I'm notbeissure
learn?
linguistics. This is just wrong on the face of
would be useful,
but it could be
it. I'm not really
 Student Comment:
interesting
sure how tototiesee
any ifofcontracting
this into
really
is "worse"
than
engagement,
other
than the fact that
They claimed that he is a
the paper confirms
that affective
expanding
(wrt affective
value,
stellar PhD student
although they correctly
values aren't very useful in
polarity).
determining the sentiment of
sentences.
acknowledged not having
any proof.
Student
Objection
What is the function of reported events in a blog?
I'm also confused about how the author
thinks this analysis has predictive power for
people's
actions.
I
guess
if
we
assume
that
What is the implication that event
events, as reported by others, are not
mentioned
generalize
over
tens
and
biased and are not overly reported (likely
modality?
due to social influences), then we could use
something like this to predict others'
reactions?...I'm
not sure.
My somethingWhat would it do with
something
like “Those
fishy-is-happening
alarm
Pakis [they] should be
boiledisingoing
hot oiloff.
for Or am
they some
did.” from
the Indian
blog.
Iwhat
missing
important
part
of the
analysis?

Student Comment

I think Iris is right that the problem here is
that it doesn't actually do much to identify
facts about gender. Rather, it identifies
ascribed behavior in reported events, and
not even particularly generic reported
events - only those events which would be
reported in a very strictly structured way
that only includes pronouns (and proper
nouns?
Student Question

I'll buy that their way of identifying relations (using
pronoun templates) works. It seems like a very fast
algorithm with high precision (they suggest 97%, though
probably with extraordinarily low recall). Also, what does it
mean to "represent" 56% of the data?
Student Question

Any ideas on how this could be
On page 68, I'm not quite sure how they got from
extended
to the
case
you use
pronouns
to clauses
and
howwhere
they merged
parts 2 and 4
arbitrary
entities
or arbitrary
in with
the rest named
(if they did
at all; this
seems slightly
different
their approach
on page
nounfrom
phrases
rather than
just69, but I might just
be wildly
confused).
pronouns?
P 69 is the next step – once you have
the pair of clauses, you decide whether
they are reciprocal or not.
Reciprocity
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Reciprocal context: if a temporal order is
indicated within C1 or C2 using discourse
markers like “still”, “then”, etc., then it can’t be
symmetric
Type of eventuality [state versus event]: eventive
version might sound symmetric, but it are not –
“They chased each other” implies a sequencing
Modality: would, should could – markers of
events
Temporal order of eventualities: Part 3 might
indicate an ordering
StudentI'mQuestion
not all that enamored of their machine

learning for symmetry. 84% accuracy with
78/22 split is probably around a 0.2-0.3
kappa, which is... okay? I guess? It's
awkward that the features they describe
were used, especially F1, since they're
only using examples from the ambiguous
patterns (I think). Similarly, 51% on a 3way classification task doesn't look that Reduction in error rate:
great. I'm not sure what the set of classes100 - 78.33 = 21.67
Z is supposed to represent in their HMM.100 – 84.33 = 15.67
Then on the intentionality section they don't
21.67-15.67 = 6
even attempt to automate it - presumably6 / 21.67 = 27.7
because they tried, and performance was
even worse than the other two classifiers.But:
I 6/15.67 is around
don't at all like that the different dimensions
37, so maybe the
are being treated with such enormous divided by the wrong
differences between them.
thing?
I'm also slightly confused about their
symmetry results on the top of page 71; it
seems that 84-37 = 47, not 78.
Student Question

I also don't understand how a HMM is
useful for their purposes and also how the
affective value works more than what I
implemented for assignment 3.
•Intuition: based on what you know from
the sentiment lexicon, you can notice
tendencies in ordering of positive and
negative sentiment in eventualities, and
you can use those regularities to learn
sentiment associations for words where
the sentiment is not known.
•Note that it was not very accurate
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Eric: explain how this connects with what
you did for assignment 3.
Student question
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The author's final paragraph failed to convince me that
social causality has much use if any at all because there
is no way to normalize the affective aspects of causality.
I could see potential use in suicide prevention--trying to
understand blogs of people who have attempted or are at
risk of attempting suicide before the blog's respective
author is thrown overboard.
Questions?