Papers with Discourse & Pragmatics
Discourse Analysis and Its Applications (P19-4)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Discourse processing is a suite of NLP tasks to uncover linguistic structures from texts at several levels, which can support many downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They present a set of tasks to uncover linguistic structures from texts at several levels, which can support many downstream applications. |
| Outcome: | The tutorial covers the basic concepts of discourse analysis and linguistic structures in monologue vs. conversation, synchronous v. asynchronous conversation, and key linguistic structure in discourse analysis. |
Si O No, Que Penses? Catalonian Independence and Linguistic Identity on Social Media (N18-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | This study examines the use of Catalan on Twitter in discourse related to the 2017 independence referendum. |
| Approach: | They use code-switching to determine the role of Catalan in political discourse . they corroborate prior findings that pro-independence tweets are more likely to include the local language than anti-independent tweets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method corroborates previous findings that pro-independence tweets are more likely to include the local language than anti-independent tweets. |
Talking Point based Ideological Discourse Analysis in News Events (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Nishanth Sridhar Nakshatri, Nikhil Mehta, Siyi Liu, Sihao Chen, Daniel Hopkins, Dan Roth, Dan Goldwasser
| Challenge: | Existing models of ideological discourse analysis fail to capture the key elements that shape real-world narratives and lack the ability to integrate contextual information required for understanding abstract ideological views. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework motivated by the theory of ideological discourse analysis to analyze news articles related to real-world events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate ideology-specific viewpoints (partisan perspectives) it can be used to generate event snapshots, a visual way of interpreting event discourse. |
Identifying the Periodicity of Information in Natural Language (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect periodicity of information in natural language are based on a canonical periodicity detection algorithm. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect periods in surprisal sequences in natural language . they propose to use this method to identify periods outside the distributions of typical units . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect significant periods in a single document. |
A Survey of QUD Models for Discourse Processing (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Question Under Discussion (QUD) is a linguistic analytic framework for explaining pragmatic phenomena and information structural analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Question Under Discussion (QUD) to model discourse units, such as sentences, as answers to some implicit or explicit questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with RST, PDTB and SDRT . questions that may require further study are suggested. |
EDTC: A Corpus for Discourse-Level Topic Chain Parsing (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Discourse analysis is a fundamental part of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a discourse-level topic chain parsing system which can be automated . they propose lexical cohesion modeling instead of lexically measuring topic structure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is robust and reliable, and can provide high reliability and low confidence scores. |
Toward Fast and Accurate Neural Discourse Segmentation (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing discourse segmenters rely on complicated hand-crafted features and are not practical in actual use. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural segmenter based on BiLSTM-CRF framework that can segment texts fast and accurately using a large corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is significantly faster than previous methods while achieving state-of-the-art performance on the RST-DT corpus. |
Joint Learning of Syntactic Features Helps Discourse Segmentation (2020.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Discourse segmentation is a task of fragmenting text into minimal disjoint chunks of text called Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-lingual discourse segmentation with BERT . they cast the problem as a token classification problem and jointly learn syntactic features like part-of-speech tags and dependency relations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments in English, Dutch, German, Portuguese Brazilian and Basque show that the proposed model performs better across languages. |
Profiling News Discourse Structure Using Explicit Subtopic Structures Guided Critics (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the hierarchical model learns to segment a document into subtopics and improves performance on the news discourse profiling task. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical neural network that models multi-level interaction between sentences, subtopics, and the document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing model on the news discourse profiling task. |
CASIMIR: A Corpus of Scientific Articles Enhanced with Multiple Author-Integrated Revisions (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | CASIMIR dataset contains multiple revisions of 15,646 scientific articles . authors question the relevance of current evaluation methods for text revision . |
| Approach: | They propose a textual resource on the revision step of the writing process of scientific articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains the multiple revised versions of 15,646 scientific articles from OpenReview, along with their peer reviews. |
Pártélet: A Hungarian Corpus of Propaganda Texts from the Hungarian Socialist Era (2020.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a digitized corpus of Communist propaganda texts is presented in this paper . it represents the direct political agitation and propaganda of the dictatorial system . |
| Approach: | They present a digitized Hungarian corpus of Communist propaganda texts . they use a database to compile a large database of articles from the journal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides a unique opportunity for conducting research on Hungarian propaganda discourse . it also provides enables analysis of changes in the political discourse over a 35-year period . |
A «Portrait» Approach to Multichannel Discourse (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new study examines the multichannel discourse analysis of human communication . we examine the individual variation in multichannel behavior . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multichannel resource to study multichannel discourses . they propose to analyze verbal structure, prosody, gesticulation, facial expression, eye gaze . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is crucially important for fine-grained annotation procedures and statistical analyses of multichannel data. |
DiscoGeM 2.0: A Parallel Corpus of English, German, French and Czech Implicit Discourse Relations (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | DiscoGeM 2.0 is a crowdsourced, parallel corpus of 12,834 implicit discourse relations . implicit discourse relationships are highly ambiguous and can have various interpretations . |
| Approach: | They propose a crowdsourced annotation method that can be extended to other languages . they propose to annotate 12,834 implicit discourse relations in German, German, French and Czech data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be extended to other languages and reveals that implicit relations inferred in one language may differ from those inferted in the translation. |
Extending AZee with Non-manual Gesture Rules for French Sign Language (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, Sign Languages (SLs) are under-resourced and are difficult to develop. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend AZee to formally represent Sign Language discourses, but also to animate them with a virtual signer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model allows to formally represent Sign Language discourses, but also to animate them with a virtual signer. |
Improving Crowdsourcing-Based Annotation of Japanese Discourse Relations (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Discourse parsing is an important task in natural language processing, but few languages have corpora annotated with discourse relations . crowdsourcing-based annotations are of poor quality and require expensive and time-consuming . et al. (2009) evaluated the quality of annotations using expert annotations. |
| Approach: | They construct a Japanese corpus with discourse annotations through crowdsourcing . they propose improvement techniques based on language tests . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the quality of the annotations, and will make them publicly available. |
Paying Attention to Deflections: Mining Pragmatic Nuances for Whataboutism Detection in Online Discourse (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on whataboutism have focused on tracking "what about" phrases, but they neglect the unique challenges to its detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to use attention weights to distinguish the ‘what about’ lexical construct from whataboutism by using Twitter/X and YouTube datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves by 4% and 10% over previous state-of-the-art methods in Twitter and YouTube datasets. |
IsraParlTweet: The Israeli Parliamentary and Twitter Resource (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | IsraParlTweet is a linked corpus of parliamentary discussions from the Knesset between 1992-2023 and Twitter posts made by Members of the Kneset between 2008-2023. |
| Approach: | They propose a linked corpus of parliamentary discussions from the Knesset between 1992-2023 and Twitter posts made by Members of the Kneset between 2008-2023. |
| Outcome: | IsraParlTweet can be used to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses and provide valuable insights into political discourse in Israel. |
Born Pragmatic, Trained to Hallucinate? Quantifying the Origins of Contextual Bias in LLMs via the PaCE Benchmark (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models excel at capturing communicative intent, but they have a side effect: pragmatic hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to quantify the impact of pragmatic hallucination on large language models . they propose RLHF and SFT to induce a strong tendency for pragmatic over-attribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in predicting pragmatic hallucinations . the evaluations show that current alignment paradigms lack precise control over pragmatic boundaries . |
Stories and Personal Experiences in the COVID-19 Discourse (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | 'storytelling' is a human strategy to use personal experiences to back-up one's position in debates about controversial topics. |
| Approach: | They analyse the use of storytelling in the COVID-19 discourse by automatically annotating three publicly available Reddit datasets for a total of 367K comments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis on three publicly available Reddit datasets shows that storytelling is a powerful argumentative tool. |