Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce texts that appear coherent and credible, even when their factual reliability is uncertain.This paper investigates whether such perceived credibility correlates with the pervasive use of generics-generalizations without explicit quantification.We introduce a text-level genericity score derived from clause-level annotations and apply it to argumentative essays produced by humans and LLMs.To analyze how generics are realized in discourse, we employ Rhetorical Structure Theory to examine coherence relations across varying levels of genericity.Results show that according to our genericity metric, human texts are less generic than LLM-produced texts.As regards discourse, higher genericity correlates with less structured, paratactic structures, while for some models coherence is maintained through ELABORA-TION relations.Our findings suggest that some LLMs maintain well-structured coherence even in highly generic texts, which might enable them to "camouflage" argumentative texts as informative, enhancing their perceived credibility and persuasiveness.

We explore the use of discourse parsers for extracting a particular discourse structure in a real-world social media scenario. Specifically, we focus on enhancing parser performance through the integration of synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs). We conduct experiments using a newly developed dataset of 1,170 local RST discourse structures, including 900 synthetic and 270 gold examples, covering three social media platforms: online news comments sections, a discussion forum (Reddit), and a social media messaging platform (Twitter). Our primary goal is to assess the impact of LLM-generated synthetic training data on parser performance in a raw text setting without pre-identified discourse units. While both top-down and bottom-up RST architectures greatly benefit from synthetic data, challenges remain in classifying evaluative discourse structures.

Fiona Anting Tan, Hansi Hettiarachchi, Ali Hürriyetoğlu, Nelleke Oostdijk, Tommaso Caselli, Tadashi Nomoto, Onur Uca, Farhana Ferdousi Liza, See-Kiong Ng. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Despite the importance of understanding causality, corpora addressing causal relations are limited. There is a discrepancy between existing annotation guidelines of event causality and conventional causality corpora that focus more on linguistics. Many guidelines restrict themselves to include only explicit relations or clause-based arguments. Therefore, we propose an annotation schema for event causality that addresses these concerns. We annotated 3,559 event sentences from protest event news with labels on whether it contains causal relations or not. Our corpus is known as the Causal News Corpus (CNC). A neural network built upon a state-of-the-art pre-trained language model performed well with 81.20% F1 score on test set, and 83.46% in 5-folds cross-validation. CNC is transferable across two external corpora: CausalTimeBank (CTB) and Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB). Leveraging each of these external datasets for training, we achieved up to approximately 64% F1 on the CNC test set without additional fine-tuning. CNC also served as an effective training and pre-training dataset for the two external corpora. Lastly, we demonstrate the difficulty of our task to the layman in a crowd-sourced annotation exercise. Our annotated corpus is publicly available, providing a valuable resource for causal text mining researchers.

This paper introduces a new CLARIN Knowledge Center which is the K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (ACE for short) which has been established at the Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST) at Radboud University. Atypical communication is an umbrella term used here to denote language use by second language learners, people with language disorders or those suffering from language disabilities, but also more broadly by bilinguals and users of sign languages. It involves multiple modalities (text, speech, sign, gesture) and encompasses different developmental stages. ACE closely collaborates with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in order to safeguard GDPR-compliant data storage and access. We explain the mission of ACE and show its potential on a number of showcases and a use case.

We report on a case study of text and images that reveals the inadequacy of simplistic assumptions about their connection and interplay. The context of our work is a larger effort to create automatic systems that can extract event information from online news articles about flooding disasters. We carry out a manual analysis of 1000 articles containing a keyword related to flooding. The analysis reveals that the articles in our data set cluster into seven categories related to different topical aspects of flooding, and that the images accompanying the articles cluster into five categories related to the content they depict. The results demonstrate that flood-related news articles do not consistently report on a single, currently unfolding flooding event and we should also not assume that a flood-related image will directly relate to a flooding-event described in the corresponding article. In particular, spatiotemporal distance is important. We validate the manual analysis with an automatic classifier demonstrating the technical feasibility of multimedia analysis approaches that admit more realistic relationships between text and images. In sum, our case study confirms that closer attention to the connection between text and images has the potential to improve the collection of multimodal information from news articles.

In this paper, we investigate the recognition of threats in Dutch tweets. As tweets often display irregular grammatical form and deviant orthography, analysis by standard means is problematic. Therefore, we have implemented a new shallow parsing mechanism which is driven by handcrafted rules. Experimental results are encouraging, with an F-measure of about 40% on a random sample of Dutch tweets. Moreover, the error analysis shows some clear avenues for further improvement.

While developing an approach to why-QA, we extended a passage retrieval system that uses off-the-shelf retrieval technology with a re-ranking step incorporating structural information. We get significantly higher scores in terms of MRR@150 (from 0.25 to 0.34) and success@10. The 23% improvement that we reach in terms of MRR is comparable to the improvement reached on different QA tasks by other researchers in the field, although our re-ranking approach is based on relatively lightweight overlap measures incorporating syntactic constituents, cue words, and document structure.

No abstract available.