Erik Cambria

Understanding
Natural
Language
Understanding
Understanding Natural Language Understanding
Erik Cambria

Understanding Natural
Language Understanding
Erik Cambria
College of Computing and Data Science
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore, Singapore

ISBN 978-3-031-73973-6 ISBN 978-3-031-73974-3 (eBook)

[Link]

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland
AG 2025
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Cover illustration created by the author using Adobe Firefly

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

If disposing of this product, please recycle the paper.

 To Marvin Minsky,
A wonderful mentor and a visionary
pioneer whose brilliance and curiosity have
paved the way for generations of dreamers
and thinkers. Your groundbreaking work in
artificial intelligence has not only expanded
the horizons of human knowledge but also
inspired us to imagine a future where
machines understand and enrich our lives.
In gratitude for your relentless pursuit of
understanding and your unwavering belief in
the potential of the human mind.

MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, United States, 2008

Preface

About half a century ago, artificial intelligence (AI) pioneers like Marvin Minsky
embarked on the ambitious project of emulating how the human mind encodes and
decodes meaning. While today we have a better understanding of the brain thanks to
neuroscience, we are still far from unlocking the secrets of the mind. Especially when
it comes to language, the prime example of human intelligence, we face enormous
difficulties in replicating how the human mind processes it. “Understanding natural
language understanding”, i.e., understanding how the mind encodes and decodes
meaning through language, is a significant milestone in our journey towards creating
machines that genuinely comprehend human language.
Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have astounded us with their
ability to generate coherent, contextually relevant text, seemingly bridging the gap
between human and machine communication. Yet, despite their impressive capabil-
ities, these models operate on statistical patterns rather than true comprehension.
This textbook delves into the nuanced differences between these two paradigms and
explores the future of AI as we strive to achieve true natural language understand-
ing (NLU). LLMs excel at identifying and replicating patterns within vast datasets,
producing responses that appear intelligent and meaningful. They can generate text
that mimics human writing styles, provide summaries of complex documents, and
even engage in extended dialogues with users. However, their limitations become
evident when they encounter tasks that require deeper understanding, reasoning, and
contextual knowledge. LLMs can produce plausible-sounding but incorrect answers,
struggle with ambiguous queries, and often lack the ability to generalize knowledge
across different domains effectively.
Instead, an NLU system that deconstructs meaning leveraging linguistics and
semiotics (on top of statistical analysis) represents a more profound level of language
comprehension. It involves understanding context in a manner similar to human
cognition, discerning subtle meanings, implications, and nuances that current LLMs
might miss or misinterpret. NLU grasps the semantics behind words and sentences,
comprehending synonyms, metaphors, idioms, and abstract concepts with precision.
This deeper comprehension allows for consistent accuracy and robustness, enabling
AI systems to handle ambiguous, incomplete, or novel queries more effectively.

vii
viii Preface

One of the key advantages of cognitive-inspired NLU systems is their ability to

learn and adapt from interactions meaningfully. Unlike LLMs, which remain static
once trained, NLU systems can incorporate new knowledge dynamically, correcting
misunderstandings and adapting to new contexts. This adaptability is crucial in
fields where information is rapidly evolving, such as technology and medicine.
Moreover, NLU systems can generalize knowledge from one domain to another,
providing more reliable and versatile applications across interdisciplinary fields.
Ethical considerations also play a significant role in the development of NLU systems,
as these are more transparent and can better recognize and mitigate biases, ensuring
fair and ethical responses. They understand the potential impact of their responses,
avoiding harmful or inappropriate content more reliably. This understanding of
ethical implications and societal norms is crucial for building trustworthy AI systems
in sensitive areas like mental health, education, and decision-making.
Achieving true NLU involves advanced knowledge representation, such as incor-
porating symbolic reasoning and structured knowledge bases. This includes ontolo-
gies, semantic networks, and rule-based systems that explicitly encode relationships
and rules. Combining symbolic AI with machine learning creates hybrid systems that
leverage both structured knowledge and the pattern recognition strengths of LLMs.
Neurosymbolic integration, which merges neural networks with symbolic reasoning
systems, is a promising approach to understanding and generating more accurate
and contextually appropriate responses. Embedding real-world knowledge and com-
monsense reasoning into AI systems is also crucial for NLU. Training on diverse
data sources and integrating world models that simulate real-world scenarios enable
these systems to maintain context over long conversations, understand intents and
sentiments, and manage turn-taking effectively. Furthermore, NLU systems should
emulate human-like learning and adaptation, continuously learning from human
interaction, feedback, and correction.
In this textbook, we explore the current state of LLMs, their capabilities, and
limitations, and contrast them with the aspirational goals of NLU. We delve into the
technical foundations required for achieving true NLU, including advanced knowl-
edge representation, hybrid AI systems, and neurosymbolic integration. We also
examine some ethical implications and societal impacts of developing AI systems
that genuinely understand human language. The textbook features multiple exercises
at the end of each chapter, along with a group assignment and a final quiz. It evolved
out of the author’s own teaching course SC4021 (NTU CCDS course on information
retrieval) but it can be used for many other courses, e.g., natural language processing
(NLP), AI, data analytics, data mining, etc., at NTU and universities worldwide.
We will explore different ways of encoding and decoding meaning, which can be
used for knowledge representation and reasoning in several downstream applications.
As we embark on this exploration, we are reminded of the pioneering work of
visionaries like Marvin Minsky, whose relentless pursuit of understanding and belief
in the potential of the human mind have inspired us to dream of a future where
machines not only mimic human language but truly comprehend it. This textbook
is dedicated to those who continue to push the boundaries of AI, striving to create
systems that enrich our lives with genuine understanding and insight.
Acknowledgements

This work would have never been possible without the help of my wonderful re-
search group, the Sentic Team ([Link] who have helped me
translate my silly ideas into concrete research works over the last ten years. Special
thanks go to my awesome postdocs Drs. Rui Mao, Qian Liu, and Xulang Zhang, who
were instrumental in organizing and refining the materials of this textbook. Last but
not least, I thank my beautiful wife, Jocelyn Choong, for often forcing me to focus
on finishing this book despite the many distractions life has to offer.

Sentic Team, NTU CCDS, 2024

ix
Contents

1 Natural Language Understanding & AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Towards More Reliable AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.1 Multidisciplinarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.2 Task Decomposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.3 Parallel Analogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2.4 Symbol Grounding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.2.5 Similarity Measure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2.6 Intention Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.2.7 Trustworthiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3 Towards More Responsible AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.3.1 Impact of AI on Economy and Humans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.3.2 Towards Human-like Recommender Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.3.3 Responsible Recommender Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.3.4 What Next . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.3.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.4 Towards More Personalized AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.4.1 Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.4.2 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
1.4.3 Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.4.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.6 Learning Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

2 Syntactics Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.2 Microtext Normalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.2.1 Linguistic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.2.2 Statistical Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.2.3 Neural Network Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
2.2.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

xi
xii Contents

2.3 Sentence Boundary Disambiguation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

2.3.1 Word-based Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.3.2 Syntax-based Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.3.3 Prosody-based Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
2.3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
2.4 POS Tagging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.4.1 Tagging Schemas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.4.2 Feature Engineering Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
2.4.3 Deep Learning Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
2.4.4 Semi-Supervised Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
2.4.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
2.5 Text Chunking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
2.5.1 Tagging Schemas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
2.5.2 Feature Engineering Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
2.5.3 Deep Learning Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
2.5.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
2.6 Lemmatization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
2.6.1 Transformation Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
2.6.2 Statistical Transduction Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
2.6.3 Neural Transduction Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
2.6.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
2.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
2.8 Learning Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

3 Semantics Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
3.2.1 Theoretical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
3.2.2 Annotation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3.2.3 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3.2.4 Knowledge Bases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
3.2.5 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
3.2.6 Annotation Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
3.2.7 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
3.2.8 Downstream Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
3.2.9 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
3.3 Named Entity Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
3.3.1 Theoretical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
3.3.2 Annotation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
3.3.3 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
3.3.4 Knowledge Bases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
3.3.5 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
3.3.6 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
3.3.7 Downstream Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
3.3.8 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

[Link]
Contents xiii

3.4 Concept Extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

3.4.1 Theoretical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
3.4.2 Annotation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
3.4.3 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
3.4.4 Knowledge Bases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
3.4.5 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
3.4.6 Annotation Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
3.4.7 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
3.4.8 Downstream Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
3.4.9 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
3.5 Anaphora Resolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
3.5.1 Theoretical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
3.5.2 Annotation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
3.5.3 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
3.5.4 Knowledge Bases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
3.5.5 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
3.5.6 Annotation Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
3.5.7 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
3.5.8 Downstream Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
3.5.9 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
3.6 Subjectivity Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
3.6.1 Theoretical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
3.6.2 Annotation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
3.6.3 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
3.6.4 Knowledge Bases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
3.6.5 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
3.6.6 Annotation Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
3.6.7 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
3.6.8 Downstream Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
3.6.9 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
3.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
3.8 Learning Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

4 Pragmatics Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
4.2 Metaphor Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
4.2.1 Theoretical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
4.2.2 Annotation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
4.2.3 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
4.2.4 Knowledge Bases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
4.2.5 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
4.2.6 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
4.2.7 Downstream Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
4.2.8 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
4.3 Sarcasm Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

[Link]
xiv Contents

4.3.1 Theoretical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

4.3.2 Annotation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
4.3.3 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
4.3.4 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
4.3.5 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
4.3.6 Downstream Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
4.3.7 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
4.4 Personality Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
4.4.1 Theoretical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
4.4.2 Annotation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
4.4.3 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
4.4.4 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
4.4.5 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
4.4.6 Downstream Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
4.4.7 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
4.5 Aspect Extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
4.5.1 Theoretical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
4.5.2 Annotation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
4.5.3 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298
4.5.4 Knowledge Bases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
4.5.5 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
4.5.6 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
4.5.7 Downstream Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
4.5.8 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
4.6 Downstream Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
4.6.1 Theoretical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
4.6.2 Annotation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
4.6.3 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
4.6.4 Knowledge Bases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
4.6.5 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
4.6.6 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
4.6.7 Downstream Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
4.6.8 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
4.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
4.8 Learning Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339

5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
5.2 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
5.2.1 Theory of Conceptual Primitives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
5.2.2 Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
5.2.3 Related Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
5.3 Overall Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
5.3.1 Task Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
5.3.2 Overall Framework of PrimeNet Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . 353

[Link]
Contents xv

5.4 Knowledge Graph Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355

5.4.1 Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
5.4.2 Knowledge Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356
5.4.3 Graph Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
5.4.4 Exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358
5.5 Concept Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
5.5.1 Preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
5.5.2 Conceptualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
5.6 Primitive Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
5.6.1 Concept Clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
5.6.2 Primitive Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
5.7 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
5.7.1 Statistics and Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
5.7.2 Case Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372
5.8 Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373
5.8.1 Logical Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374
5.8.2 Implicit Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
5.8.3 Neurosymbolic AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
5.9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
5.10 Learning Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377

6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
6.1 Learning Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
6.1.1 Assignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
6.1.2 Quiz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400

[Link]
Acronyms

ABOM Aspect-Based Opinion Mining

ABSA Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
ACE Automatic Content Extraction
AI Artificial Intelligence
ALM Anomalous Language Modeling
AMT Amazon Mechanical Turk
ASR Automatic Speech Recognition
AZP Anaphoric Zero Pronoun
AZPR Anaphoric Zero Pronoun Resolution
BERT Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer
BGRNN Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Neural Network
BLEU Bi-Lingual Evaluation Understudy
CEG Commonsense Explanation Generation
CNN Convolutional Neural Network
CRF Conditional Random Field
CMT Conceptual Metaphor Theory
DAG Directed Acyclic Graph
DRL Deep Reinforcement Learning
FFM Five Factor Model
FOL First-Order Logic
GBN Gaussian Bayesian Network
GCN Graph Convolutional Network
GRU Gated Recurrent Unit
GPT Generative Pretrained Transformer
HAN Hierarchical Attention Network
HCI Human-Computer Interaction
HMM Hidden Markov Model
IPA International Phonetic Alphabet
JERE Joint Entity and Relation Extraction
KGC Knowledge Graph Construction
LCS Longest Common Subsequence

xvii
[Link]
xviii Acronyms

LDA Latent Dirichlet Allocation

LLM Large Language Model
LSTM Long Short-Term Memory
MAE Mean Absolute Error
MAP Mean Average Precision
MBTI Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
MLP Multi-Layer Perceptron
MRC Machine-Reading Comprehension
MRD Machine-Readable Dictionary
MRF Markov Random Field
MSE Mean Squared Error
MTL Multi-Task Learning
MUC Message Understanding Conference
MWE Multi-Word Expression
NER Named Entity Recognition
NLP Natural Language Processing
NLU Natural Language Understanding
NMF Non-negative Matrix Factorization
NMT Neural Machine Translation
NTN Neural Tensor Network
OCR Optical Character Recognition
OMCS Open Mind Common Sense
OOV Out Of Vocabulary
PCA Principal Component Analysis
POS Part Of Speech
PLM Pretrained Language Model
PMI Pointwise Mutual Information
PSA Position-aware Self Attention
QA Question Answering
RDR Ripple Down Rule
RNN Recurrent Neural Network
ROC Receiver Operation Characteristic
RRS Responsible Recommender System
SBD Sentence Boundary Disambiguation
SES Shortest Edit Script
SMO Sequential Minimal Optimization
SMS Short Message Service
SMT Statistical Machine Translation
SRL Semantic Role Labeling
SSL Semi Supervised Learning
STM Syntactic Tree Matching
SVD Singular Value Decomposition
SVM Support Vector Machine
UGC User-Generated Content
WSD Word Sense Disambiguation

[Link]
Chapter 1
Natural Language Understanding & AI

Abstract In this chapter, we delve into the critical role that natural language un-
derstanding (NLU) plays in shaping the future of artificial intelligence (AI). To set
the stage, we begin by defining what constitutes an NLU system. Next, we explore
how NLU can drive the evolution of next-generation AI systems, which promise to
be more reliable, responsible, and personalized. To this end, we introduce the seven
pillars for the future of AI, which represent the foundational elements necessary
to advance AI technology in a way that is more transparent and reliable. Next, we
propose the concept of responsible recommender systems, which incorporate ethi-
cal guidelines and user-centric principles to ensure recommendations are not only
relevant but also fair, unbiased, and respectful of user privacy. Lastly, we present a
framework for personalized sentiment analysis, which aims at making AI systems
more responsive and attuned to the needs and emotions of each user.

Key words: Natural Language Understanding, Reliable AI, Responsible AI, Per-
sonalized AI

1.1 Introduction

We define an NLU system as a brain-inspired modular framework that deconstructs

meaning through explicitly modeling the cognitive processes that the human mind
leverages to encode and decode language. While large language models (LLMs)
like GPT-4 have demonstrated significant advancements in generating coherent and
contextually relevant text, they fundamentally lack genuine comprehension. This
distinction between statistical pattern recognition and actual understanding marks the
critical difference between natural language processing (NLP) and the aspirational
goal of NLU.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 1

E. Cambria, Understanding Natural Language Understanding,
[Link]
2 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

NLU involves an understanding of context that mirrors human comprehension.

It discerns subtle meanings, implications, and nuances that LLMs might miss or
misinterpret. For example, understanding the sentence “The bank is on the river
bank” requires recognizing that “bank” refers to two different concepts based on
context. While LLMs use statistical patterns to guess meanings, NLU comprehends
these distinctions inherently. This comprehension extends to more complex con-
structs like sarcasm, irony, and humor, which often elude LLMs. Moreover, NLU
goes beyond mere word associations to grasp the semantics behind sentences. This
includes understanding synonyms, metaphors, idioms, and abstract concepts. For
instance, interpreting a metaphor like “Time is a thief” involves recognizing the
abstract concept that time, like a thief, can take things away from us. LLMs might
recognize this phrase as common but would not truly understand the conceptual com-
parison without extensive training data on similar metaphors. Similarly, idiomatic
expressions like “kick the bucket” (meaning “to die”) require an understanding of
cultural context and figurative language that NLU can provide.
NLU ensures consistent accuracy by providing precise and reliable responses.
This capability stems from an understanding that enables the system to handle am-
biguous, incomplete, or novel queries effectively through reasoning. LLMs, in con-
trast, sometimes generate plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers
due to their reliance on probabilistic models. For instance, when asked a complex
question involving multiple steps of logic, an LLM might provide an answer that
fits part of the question but does not fully resolve the complexity. An example might
be a multi-part medical diagnosis where the system needs to integrate symptoms,
patient history, and current medical knowledge to provide an accurate assessment.
The robustness of NLU means it can interpret and respond accurately even when the
input is vague or requires additional contextual knowledge. For example, if a user
says, “I need a place to stay near the event,” NLU can infer that the user is looking for
accommodations close to a specific location, while an LLM might provide generic
information about lodging without understanding the specific requirement. NLU can
also handle evolving conversations where the context shifts, maintaining coherence
and relevance in its responses.
NLU systems are capable of generalizing knowledge from one domain to another
effectively. While LLMs are proficient at recognizing patterns within their training
data, they often struggle to apply knowledge across vastly different contexts. NLU,
however, can transfer learning and apply relevant information dynamically. For in-
stance, an NLU system could use its understanding of medical terminology to assist
in a legal context where medical information is relevant. This cross-domain gener-
alization is crucial for applications in interdisciplinary fields such as bioinformatics,
where knowledge of both biology and data science is necessary. Furthermore, NLU
systems learn and adapt from interactions in a meaningful way. They can incorpo-
rate new knowledge and correct misunderstandings dynamically, similar to human
learning processes. This contrasts with LLMs, which are static once trained. For
example, if an NLU system encounters a new scientific discovery, it can integrate
this information into its knowledge base and apply it in future interactions.
1.1 Introduction 3

NLU can better recognize and avoid biases, leading to more fair and ethical
responses. LLMs can inadvertently reinforce biases present in their training data
because they lack the deeper understanding necessary to critically evaluate and
mitigate such biases. For example, an LLM trained on biased data might perpetuate
stereotypes, whereas NLU would recognize and avoid such biases. This capability is
essential in applications such as hiring processes, where unbiased decision-making is
crucial for fairness. Moreover, NLU understands the potential impact of its responses,
avoiding harmful or inappropriate content more reliably. It comprehends the ethical
implications and societal norms guiding human interactions, ensuring safer and
more responsible AI behavior. For instance, an NLU system would avoid making
insensitive comments about sensitive topics, understanding the context and potential
repercussions. This understanding helps in creating AI systems that can be trusted
in sensitive applications like mental health support and education.
Achieving true NLU involves advanced knowledge representation, such as incor-
porating symbolic reasoning and structured knowledge bases. This includes ontolo-
gies, semantic networks, and rule-based systems that explicitly encode relationships
and rules. For example, an NLU system could use an ontology to understand the
relationship between different medical conditions and treatments. This structured
approach allows the system to make logical inferences and provide reasoned answers
based on a deep understanding of the subject matter. Combining symbolic AI with
machine learning creates hybrid systems that leverage both structured knowledge
and the pattern recognition strengths of LLMs. Neurosymbolic integration, which
merges neural networks with symbolic reasoning systems, helps in understanding
and generating more accurate and contextually appropriate responses. For instance, a
neurosymbolic system might use neural networks to process natural language input
and symbolic reasoning to deduce the appropriate response based on an internal
knowledge base. This hybrid approach allows for more sophisticated and reliable AI
systems that can handle complex queries and tasks. NLU also requires embedding
real-world knowledge and commonsense reasoning into AI systems. This involves
training on diverse data sources and integrating world models that simulate real-world
scenarios. Advanced dialogue systems can maintain context over long conversations,
understand intents and sentiments, and manage turn-taking effectively. For example,
a customer service chatbot with NLU would handle a multi-step customer query
seamlessly, maintaining context and providing accurate solutions throughout the
interaction. This capability is essential for creating AI systems that can engage in
meaningful and productive conversations with users. Techniques like meta-learning
and analogical reasoning enable systems to adapt quickly to new information and
contexts, transferring knowledge from known situations to new, similar ones. This
continuous learning and adaptation make AI systems more resilient and effective in
dynamic environments.
In summary, NLU systems go beyond the mere statistical analysis of language
and, hence, have the potential to be the enablers of next-generation AI systems that
are reliable, responsible and personalized. We discuss this in more detail in the next
three sections.
4 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

1.2 Towards More Reliable AI

In 2022, the world was stunned by ChatGPT, a chatbot that relies on an LLM built by
means of generative pretraining transformers (GPT). The performance capabilities
of GPT-based LLMs enable chatbots to generate detailed, original, and plausible
responses to prompts. GPT-4 and other LLMs are pretrained on a large dataset (self-
supervised and at scale), before being adapted for a variety of downstream tasks
through fine-tuning. Pretraining is time-intensive and never repeated, whereas fine-
tuning is conducted in a regular fashion. The behavior of GPT-based chatbots arises
through fine-tuning. The performance capabilities of LLMs have been attributed to
at least two factors: pretraining and scale (Bommasani et al., 2021). Pretraining, an
instance of transfer learning in which LLMs use knowledge acquired from one task
and transfer it to another, makes LLMs possible. Scale, including better computer
hardware, the transformer architecture, the availability of more and higher-quality
training data, makes LLMs powerful. Although these capabilities are not insub-
stantial, they do not yet rise to the level of NLU (Bender and Koller, 2020; Amin
et al., 2024, 2023). In addition, LLMs are prone to hallucination: ChatGPT may
produce linguistic responses that, though syntactically and semantically fine and
credible-sounding, are ultimately incorrect (Shen et al., 2023b). Furthermore, we
may distinguish between the capabilities of LLMs (acquired through pretraining)
and the behavior (affected by fine-tuning, which happens after pretraining) of LLMs.
Fine-tuning can have unintended effects, including behavioral drift on certain tasks.
ChatGPT, in fact, seems prone to the ‘short blanket dilemma’: while trying to im-
prove its accuracy on some tasks, OpenAI researchers inadvertently made ChatGPT
worse for tasks which it previously excelled at (Chen et al., 2023a).
AI research has slowly been drifting away from what its forefathers envisioned
back in the 1960s. Instead of evolving towards the emulation of human intelligence,
AI research has regressed into the mimicking of intelligent behavior in the past decade
or so. The main goal of most tech companies is not designing the building blocks of
intelligence but simply creating products that existing and potential customers deem
intelligent. In this context, instead of labeling it as ‘artificial’ intelligence, it may
be more apt to characterize such research as ‘pareidoliac’ intelligence. This term
highlights the development of expert systems while raising questions about their
claim to possess genuine intelligence. We feel there is a need for an AI refocus on
humanity, an Anti-Copernican revolution of sorts: like Copernicus demoted humans
from their privileged spot at the center of the universe, in fact, deep learning has
removed humans from the equation of learning. In traditional neural networks,
especially those with a shallow architecture (few hidden layers), humans were at
the center of the technological universe as they had to carefully design the input
features, select appropriate hyperparameters, adjust learning rates, etc. Instead, due
to their increased complexity and capacity to automatically learn features from
data, deep neural networks do not require manual feature engineering and, hence,
have effectively removed humans from the loop of learning. While this is good in
terms of cost, time, and effectiveness, it is bad for several other reasons, including
transparency, accountability, and bias.
1.2 Towards More Reliable AI 5

In the deep learning era, humans no longer have control on how the learning
process takes place. To save on cost and time, we delegated the important task of
selecting which features are important for classification to deep neural networks.
These, however, are mathematical models with no commonsense whatsoever: they
do not know how to properly choose features. For example, in selecting candidates
for a job opening, deep neural networks may decide that gender is an important
feature to take into account simply because more men are present in the training data
as positive samples.
The issue is not only that deep nets may accidentally choose unimportant or even
wrong features, but that we have no way of knowing this because of their black-box
nature (Yeo et al., 2024b). In other words, not only humans have been taken out of
the picture but they have also been blindfolded. For these reasons, we feel there is a
need to bring human-centered capabilities back at the center of AI, e.g., by having
human-in-the-loop or human-in-command systems that ensure AI outputs and rea-
soning steps are human-readable and human-editable. To this end, we propose seven
pillars for the future of AI (Cambria et al., 2023), namely: Multidisciplinarity, Task
Decomposition, Parallel Analogy, Symbol Grounding, Similarity Measure, Intention
Awareness, and Trustworthiness (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1: Seven pillars for the future of AI.

6 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

1.2.1 Multidisciplinarity

Due to the complex and multifaceted nature of modern AI technologies and appli-
cations, Multidisciplinarity is of increasing importance for the future of AI. The
integration of knowledge from disciplines like mathematics, semiotics, logic, lin-
guistics, psychology, sociology, and ethics allows for a more holistic understanding
of AI’s capabilities and limitations. Mathematical principles such as linear alge-
bra, calculus, probability theory, and optimization underpin the design of AI al-
gorithms. Maths alone, however, is not enough for designing intelligent systems,
because mathematical approaches excel at capturing predominant linguistic patterns
but often struggle with addressing ‘long tail’ issues such as less common or niche
linguistic phenomena. Disciplines like semiotics can help AI systems understand the
nuances of language, including metaphors, idioms, sarcasm, and cultural references,
whether they fall within the more frequent or rarer occurrences across the spectrum
of everyday human language.
Logic also plays a fundamental and enduring role in the development and advance-
ment of AI, as it provides a rigorous framework for reasoning, problem-solving, and
knowledge representation. Word embeddings, which essentially replace words with
numbers, have made most AI researchers forget about the importance of linguistics.
Concepts from syntax, semantics, phonetics, and morphology (see next section),
however, are crucial for interpreting the intended meaning of natural language. Psy-
chology will play an essential role in creating systems that enhance well-being, foster
human relationships, and provide meaningful and empathetic interactions (Fei et al.,
2024). By addressing issues related to inequality and cultural diversity, sociology
will guide AI development in ways that promote positive societal outcomes and
responsible innovation. The arts are also going to be key for the future of AI, as
highlighted by recent STEAM (STEM + Art) initiatives, in order to ‘humanize’
AI through computational creativity, cultural and social understanding, and the en-
hancement of AI usability (Sorensen et al., 2022). Finally, ethics are paramount to
ensure that AI technologies are developed, deployed, and used in ways that align
with human values and promote accountability (Floridi et al., 2018).

1.2.2 Task Decomposition

Like Multidisciplinarity, Task Decomposition aims to better handle the complex and
multifaceted nature of AI problems. It is a method commonly used in psychology,
instructional design, and project management to break down a complex task or
activity into its individual components. Task Decomposition is one of the key points
of this textbook: no matter what kind of downstream task we are handling, if we do
not deconstruct it into its constituent subtasks, we are practically forcing our model
to implicitly solve a lot of subtasks it has never been trained for. The ‘sentiment
suitcase model’ (Cambria et al., 2017), for example, lists 15 NLU subtasks that need
to be solved separately before sentiment analysis can be accomplished.
1.2 Towards More Reliable AI 7

Firstly, a Syntactics Layer preprocesses text so that informal and inflected expres-
sions are reduced to plain standard text (Zhang et al., 2023a). This is done through
subtasks such as microtext normalization, for refining and standardizing informal
text, part of speech (POS) tagging, for assigning grammatical categories (such as
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) to each word in a sentence, and lemmatization,
for reducing words to their base or dictionary form (lemmas).
Secondly, a Semantics Layer deconstructs normalized text into concepts, resolves
references, and filters out neutral content from the input (Mao et al., 2024c). This is
done through subtasks such as word sense disambiguation (WSD), for determining
the correct meaning of a word within a given context, named entity recognition
(NER), for identifying and classifying names of people, places, organizations, and
dates, and subjectivity detection, to distinguish between factual information and
subjective content.
Finally, the Pragmatics Layer extracts meaning from both sentence structure and
semantics obtained from the previous layers. This is done through subtasks such as
personality recognition, to infer traits, characteristics, preferences, and behavioral
tendencies of the speaker, metaphor understanding, for interpreting figurative lan-
guage in text, and aspect extraction, for identifying and extracting specific facets,
features, or components mentioned in text and, hence, enabling a more fine-grained
analysis. Only after handling all these subtasks, which we humans take care of al-
most subconsciously during reading or communication, the downstream task, e.g.,
polarity detection, can be effectively processed.

1.2.3 Parallel Analogy

Similar to Multidisciplinarity and Task Decomposition, Parallel Analogy looks at

AI problems in a multifaceted way. Engineers and computer scientists have always
been obsessed with optimization. In the development of AI systems, this translates
into finding the ‘best’ knowledge representation, the ‘best’ reasoning algorithm, the
‘best’ way of doing things. This, however, results in only having one way of solving a
problem. Instead, several analogous representations of the same problem should be
maintained in parallel while trying to solve it so that, when problem-solving begins
to fail while using one representation, the system can switch to one of the others.
Parallel Analogy, or ‘panalogy’ (Minsky, 2006), is key to solving highly complex
AI problems, but also simpler problems in which a change of perspective is required.
In affective computing tasks, for example, sometimes it is useful to see emotion
concepts from a semantic point of view, e.g., ‘joy’ and ‘sadness’ are similar because
they are both emotions, or a polarity point of view, e.g., ‘joy’ and ‘sadness’ are op-
posite because the former is positive and the latter is negative (Cambria et al., 2012).
Similarly, we could say that words like ‘joyful’, ‘joyfully’, ‘enjoy’, and ‘enjoyment’
are similar because they all share the same root word ‘joy’, but totally different in a
POS tagging sense (adjective versus adverb versus verb versus noun, respectively).
8 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Fig. 1.2: An example of ‘panalogy’ where the same data is ‘redundantly’ represented
as a knowledge graph, as a matrix, and as embeddings (Cambria et al., 2012).

For more general NLU tasks, it could be useful to have the same data ‘redundantly’
represented both as a knowledge graph and as embeddings (Fig. 1.2). The knowledge
graph could be more useful for solving problems requiring Symbol Grounding, e.g.,
answering questions like ‘what is what?’ (see next section). Embeddings, instead,
could be more useful for Similarity Measure, e.g., answering questions like ‘what is
similar to what?’ (explained later).

1.2.4 Symbol Grounding

Symbol Grounding is a key concept of this textbook and a major distinguishing

factor between NLP and NLU. It deals with how symbols, which are abstract repre-
sentations, acquire meaning and connection to the real world. In human cognition,
we understand the meanings of symbols through a process known as ‘grounding’.
When we see or hear a word, for example, our brains associate it with the sensory
experiences and interactions we have had with the objects or concepts that such a
word represents, thus providing a foundation for our understanding of its meaning.
This sensory experience provides a foundation for our understanding of the symbol’s
meaning.
1.2 Towards More Reliable AI 9

In the context of AI, the Symbol Grounding problem arises because computers
lack the inherent sensory experiences that humans possess. They process symbols
as strings of characters or digital information without a direct connection to the real
world, raising the question of how they can truly understand the meanings of symbols
in a way that is equivalent to human understanding. For instance, consider the word
‘apple’. Humans understand this word not just as a sequence of letters, but as a fruit
with certain sensory qualities like color, taste, texture, and smell, all of which are
grounded in our experiences with actual apples. Current AI systems are unable to
grasp the richness of meaning behind the word ‘apple’ without having those sensory
experiences.
To solve this, we may have to take a step back in order to move forward. Old-
school (symbolic) AI was better at Symbol Grounding but it was not scalable nor
flexible. New deep-learning-based (subsymbolic) AI, instead, is very scalable and
flexible but it does not handle symbols. The best of both worlds could be achieved
through a hybrid (neurosymbolic) AI that leverages the strengths of both symbolic
and subsymbolic models to overcome their respective limitations and achieve a
more comprehensive understanding of the world. In NLU research, this can be
implemented in several ways, e.g., by injecting external knowledge into a deep
neural neural network (Liang et al., 2022b) in the form of embeddings (Fig. 1.3).

Fig. 1.3: An example of neurosymbolic AI where (symbolic) commonsense knowl-

edge is injected into a (subsymbolic) graph convolutional network (Liang et al.,
2022b).
10 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Another recent neurosymbolic approach consists in a three-step normalization

process (Cambria et al., 2024) that first leverages linguistics to replace expressions
like shopping_for, bought, and purchasing with their lemmas, e.g., shop_for,
buy, and purchase, respectively. Next, deep learning models are used to cluster the
resulting lemmas into primitives, e.g., BUY(x) is the cluster representing shop_for,
buy, and purchase and the likes of them (where x is the direct object acted upon
by the primitive). Finally, first-order logic (FOL) is used to ground such primitives,
e.g., BUY is defined in terms of GET and GIVE, which in turn are specified in terms
of other superprimitives defining transfer of ownership.
In robotics, some researchers have emphasized the importance of physical em-
bodiment and sensorimotor experiences in the development of intelligent systems.
Such approaches, which go under the name of Embodied AI, are promising but they
are still limited to very basic sensory experiences such as object manipulation. A
similar approach can be taken in virtual worlds or in the metaverse, where AI could
learn social commonsense, based on how people interact, and some sort of physical
or spatial commonsense, such as gravity or the fact that you cannot go through walls.
Additionally, an AI system could generate real-time virtual simulations to better per-
form causal reasoning and narrative understanding by grouding words into virtual
objects and actions on the fly.

1.2.5 Similarity Measure

Because we have no better way of performing grounding, in computer science we

use embeddings to represent data, e.g., text, audio, images, and videos, as vectors
or data points in a multi-dimensional space. This mapping is learned from large
amounts of data during a training process and it is usually focused on just one kind
of similarity (usually semantic similarity based on word co-occurrence frequency).
In order to enable Parallel Analogy (explained earlier), we need to generate different
representations for the same data based on different kinds of similarities.
Another problem is that we are still using very basic metrics to quantify the sim-
ilarity between pairs of embeddings and, hence, perform classification and pattern
recognition. All such similarity metrics, e.g., Jaccard coefficient, Euclidean distance,
and cosine similarity, blindly calculate distances in a multi-dimensional vector space
without considering its topology (Steck et al., 2024). In the future, we need to adopt
more topology-aware methods for calculating similarity in multi-dimensional vector
spaces, e.g., Mahalanobis, Minkowski or Wasserstein distances and principal path
methods (Ferrarotti et al., 2019). These kernel methods are designed to discover
smooth paths between objects in space by traversing a series of waypoints. One of
their standout features is their ability to seek paths that pass through high-probability
regions of the space, effectively navigating through geodesics influenced by the prob-
ability distribution of the sampled data. These methods also emulate the cognitive
process where thinking involves transitioning from one concept to another while
traversing regions of space with a high likelihood of encountering related concepts.
1.2 Towards More Reliable AI 11

1.2.6 Intention Awareness

Intention Awareness refers to the ability to recognize and understand the intentions
or goals of oneself or others. It plays a crucial role in human social interactions and
communication, as it enables individuals to anticipate and interpret the actions and
behaviors of others, leading to more effective and empathetic interactions. Current
AI models provide one-fits-all solutions without taking into account user beliefs,
goals and preferences.
Theory of mind should always be applied to better understand user’s actions
and queries. When this is not possible, user profiling in the form of persona or
personality recognition should be employed to generate more relevant actions or
answers (Zhu et al., 2023). For the same reason, AI should also have enough com-
monsense knowledge, including a model of fundamental human beliefs, desires, and
intentions, in order to minimize miscommunication and avoid unintended conse-
quences (e.g., apocalyptic scenarios like accidentally wiping out humanity in the
attempt to solve climate change). In other words, future AI systems should always
try to understand what users are doing and why they are doing it. For instance,
recent hybrid frameworks have tried to improve human-robot interaction by model-
ing Intention Awareness in terms of motivational and affective processes based on
conceptual dependency theory (Ho et al., 2023).
Finally, recent attempts to augment the human decision-making process, espe-
cially in dynamic and time-sensitive scenarios such as military command and control,
game theory, home automation, and swarm robotics, have focused primarily on envi-
ronmental details such as positions, orientations, and other characteristics of objects
and actors of an operating environment (situation awareness). However, a significant
factor in such environments is the intentions of the actors involved (Howard and
Cambria, 2013). While creating systems that can shoulder a greater portion of this
decision-making burden is a computationally intensive task, performance advances
in modern computer hardware bring us closer to this goal.

1.2.7 Trustworthiness

Last but not least, Trustworthiness is a key pillar that measures the degree to which
AI systems, models, and algorithms can be relied upon to perform as intended, make
accurate and ethical decisions, and avoid harmful consequences. It is a concept
closely related to Intention Awareness, but also explainability and interpretability.
Explainability allows an AI model to generate descriptions of its decision-making
processes in order to enable the user to make informed modifications to the outputs
or even to the model itself in a human-in-the-loop fashion. Interpretability, in turn,
enables users to understand the inner workings of an AI model, e.g., by identifying
which input features have the most impact on its output or by assessing how changes
in input variables affect the model’s predictions or by leveraging a confidence score
to gauge how confident the AI model is about its own output.
12 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

According to one theory of trust, trust is grounded in probabilities that a trustor

A attributes to his/her own beliefs about the behavior and competences of a trustee
B with respect to the performance of some action relevant to a goal G. Where n
denotes the probability threshold value and m denotes the probability value that A
attributes to his/her trust-relevant beliefs, there will be a trust relation between A
and B if and only if m n. It is at least arguable that this probability threshold value
will be met, given the twin phenomena of hallucination and behavioral drift. In any
case, we believe that trust is more than a matter of satisfying probability threshold
conditions (i.e., m n). We can define Trustworthiness as a 5-ary relation R(A, B,
, , G), consisting of five relata: the trustor A, a trustee B, some action to be
performed, some G-relevant attribute that may be judged by A as absent or present
in B during B’s performance of , and a goal G that makes the performance of
desirable (Chen, 2021). Indeed, trust is a mental state that A holds toward B with
respect to the performance of some G-relevant .
If the goal G is NLU, actions i are typical NLU tasks such as sentiment anal-
ysis and dialogue generation, and G-relevant attributes i are qualities such as
explainability and interpretability. All other things being equal, if B1 possesses each
G-relevant attribute i in greater abundance than B2 , we have pro tanto reasons
to have greater trust in the former than the latter. Intuitively, even if real parrots
or stochastic ones (LLMs) produce appropriate linguistic responses to task-related
i prompts, we would not deem their linguistic behavior trustworthy unless they
possess the relevant NLU. Meaning involves a relation between the linguistic form
of data and an extralinguistic reality that is distinct from language. Where M denotes
meaning, E denotes the form of natural language expressions, and I denotes com-
municative intent, this relation may be formally represented as M ✓ E ⇥ I (Bender
and Koller, 2020). M contains ordered pairs (e, i) of natural language expressions
(e) and communicative intents (i). Understanding may be interpreted as the process
of retrieving i, given e.
Since LLMs are pretrained on large datasets and meaning cannot be learnt from
linguistic form (e) alone, however impressive their transformer architecture might
be, LLMs will necessarily lack the relevant intentionality. Such a limit can result
in hallucinatory responses from LLMs, if e and i are not directly associated in the
pertaining datasets. Hence, humans have to watch over them and correct them in
mission-critical tasks. Ensuring Trustworthiness requires collaboration among AI
developers, domain experts, ethicists, and policymakers. It involves a combination
of technical measures, ethical considerations, and transparency initiatives. As AI
continues to play an increasing role in various aspects of society, building and
maintaining trust in AI technologies is essential for their responsible and sustainable
integration.
1.3 Towards More Responsible AI 13

1.3 Towards More Responsible AI

One of the best examples of the pervasiveness of AI are recommender systems,

which enhance user experience through personalized content delivery, utilizing ad-
vanced algorithms to process vast amounts of data, continuously learn and adapt to
user preferences, operate in real-time, and provide tangible benefits across various
industries such as e-commerce, streaming services, and social media. NLU is cru-
cial for the future of recommender systems as it improves user interaction, context
awareness, sentiment analysis, multilingual capabilities, and the extraction of in-
sights from unstructured data, leading to more accurate, personalized, and effective
recommendations.
Recommender systems have revolutionized our online experiences by offering
personalized recommendations tailored to individual preferences and behaviors (Li
et al., 2024). While undoubtedly advantageous in numerous aspects, it is crucial
to recognize the inherent drawbacks in their design. One notable concern is that
these algorithms often prioritize the interests of the deploying company, aiming to
maximize profits and user engagement rather than solely focusing on enhancing user
experience. Consequently, there is a risk that the recommendations provided may
not consistently align with users’ best interests, potentially leading to the formation
of echo chambers, filter bubbles, or even manipulation of user behavior.
Despite their undeniable usefulness, it is essential to approach recommender sys-
tems with a critical perspective, advocating for transparency, ethical considerations,
and user empowerment to ensure that they function as tools for enrichment rather
than exploitation. Most of the evaluations and metrics of recommender systems focus
on validation of the optimization process while finding the items of user interest in
very large item collections. In most recommendation cases, we commonly have two
players: (1) users who are advised with some items and (2) item providers. In business
recommender system applications, users are a weaker partner, as they do not design,
control, or understand the limitations of the recommendation engines. Reciprocity
or fairness mechanisms could address these concerns, but they are relatively rarely
considered in the context of corporate recommender systems.
Companies are driven by business objectives, such as greater profit, market size
occupied, as well as user time or attention gained. For them, human needs and sat-
isfaction are, then, only auxiliary goals. This means that companies must respect
their customers, but only to the extent that it enables them to achieve their objec-
tives and earn money. Accordingly, they employ recommender systems to support
their customers in decision-making processes resulting in purchases, reviews, etc.,
which directly impact their income (Fig. 1.4). Then, can we claim that recommender
systems just simply provide a recommendation list, satisfying users? They primarily
satisfy companies themselves, then users. Moreover, the evaluation measures com-
monly used in scientific papers are being adapted in practical implementations to
the business models used. Obviously, it does not mean that companies are against
their customers. They just focus on their business. In summary, commercial rec-
ommender systems are driven by business interests rather than the interests of their
users. Therefore, they are commonly beyond the control and awareness of customers.
 14 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Fig. 1.4: Recommender systems have both positive and long-term negative effects
on their users and economy.

1.3.1 Impact of AI on Economy and Humans

The main goals of recommender systems and their positive impact on the economy
and humans (Fig. 1.4) are:

PI1: Positive economic impact on companies using recommender systems (De Biasio
et al., 2024), i.e., personalization provided by recommender systems can be a
competitive advantage over market rivals;
PI2: Better user experience, which directly results from support of recommender
systems in navigation and communication with the system;
PI3: Better user satisfaction can be one of the measured feature of recommender
systems making users utilize them (He et al., 2024b);
PI4: Time-saving is a consequence of PI2, i.e., faster navigation through online services
and large item collections (Tembhare et al., 2023);
PI5: Broadening of horizons – some recommender system suggestion of items beyond
known user preferences (Liang and Willemsen, 2023). It is also addressed using
quite well known concepts and measures: diversity, coverage, novelty, unexpect-
edness, and serendipity (Fu et al., 2023);
PI6: Nudging users towards their positive decisions and behavior, e.g., related to
unhealthy eating (Castiglia et al., 2022) or news diversity.
 1.3 Towards More Responsible AI 15

Most research related to recommender systems focuses on better immediate rec-

ommendations, i.e., more precisely infer about user needs while directly fulfilling
business goals. However, users exposed to recommender systems can experience
some long-term effects, including negative ones (Fig. 1.4). In particular, we would
like to highlight six of them that we believe require further investigation:
NI1: Information bubble – greater user confinement;
NI2: Addiction to very good prompts that excellently meet user needs; excessive use
of recommender systems;
NI3: Lower critical thinking ability due to better and better recommendations (why
seek anything else?);
NI4: Less user autonomy to make their own choices.
NI5: Replacing human advisors who become inferior and more expensive;
NI6: Weaker human relationships as more and more user needs are filled by systems.

All the above-mentioned effects may lead to other effects like decreased well-
being or physical and mental health. There are also other adverse effects on humans,
which often directly result from the contradictory goals of sellers and customers, like
nudging user moods to induce unplanned purchases (Ho and Lim, 2018). The phe-
nomenon commonly called information bubble (NI1) stems from human to consume
increasingly similar items over time even without any recommendation. However,
recommender systems can reinforce this effect, even if the user may sometimes feel
bored or less satisfied (Areeb et al., 2023). On the other hand, there are recommender
system solutions going in the opposite direction, i.e., broadening user horizons (PI3).
Unfortunately, however, are not commonly used in commercial applications. User
autonomy (NI4) refers to the user’s ability to undertake their free choices (Krook and
Blockx, 2023), i.e., possibly without any manipulation. This is also closely related
to user control over their decisions and recommendation mechanisms (Harambam
et al., 2019). The loss of such control may partially result from being in the informa-
tion bubble (NI1), excessive recommender system use (NI2), and loss of criticism
(NI3).

1.3.2 Towards Human-like Recommender Systems

Recently, companies and other stakeholders can collect large amounts of data about
their users. More data potentially leads to more accurate and friendly recommender
systems. This is additionally supported by multimodal recommender systems that
process diverse information about the environment, recommended items, and also
user social networks. Besides, recommender systems can make use of the general
data about users like their personality traits, cognitive abilities or more temporal
affective states like emotions (Dhelim et al., 2022). As a result, current recommender
systems, and future recommender system in particular, will increasingly resemble
human advisors.
16 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Fig. 1.5: Recommender systems become more and more human-like. Includes a
Midjourney-generated image.

It will be boosted by a great progress in generative AI, which enhance recom-

mender system interaction capability, and leading to conversational recommender
system (Li et al., 2023a). This, in turn, is likely to be soon combined with virtual
or augmented reality making the user experience with recommender system even
more immersive and mimicking human beings (Xue et al., 2024). This means that
the development of LLM and other multimodal generative AI systems and virtual
reality will make recommender systems more capable of personalizing multimodal
and immersive interaction, while benefiting from the general human profile (per-
sonality traits, beliefs, general taste), temporal state (emotions, mood, attention) and
more comprehensive behavioral user data. As a result, recommender systems will
be developed towards human-like assistants rather than simple recommendation list
generators (Fig. 1.5). Such interactive recommender systems may substitute for real
human advisors (NI5). This means that users will tend to replace their natural in-
terpersonal communication with virtual assistants, thus reducing their interpersonal
contacts, which may eventually cause greater isolation from real life (Fig. 1.6).
Moreover, such recommender systems may know the user better than other people.
Going further, users may establish a kind of relationship with virtual advisors. The
case of Replika is a good and recent example of such a virtual engagement (Pentina
et al., 2023). Perhaps future recommender systems will become more like our friends
imitating and substituting for human friends? This, however, may be harmful and
dangerous to the users (Zimmerman et al., 2023) and negatively affect their interper-
sonal relationships (NI6). At the same time, this may dovetail with another general
social phenomenon: less face-to-face contacts that directly decrease life satisfac-
tion (Hall et al., 2023).
1.3 Towards More Responsible AI 17

Fig. 1.6: Present and future relationships between the user, recommender system and
other humans.

Simultaneously, high quality and effectiveness of recommender systems may pro-

vide excessive use and addiction (NI2) to various digital services such as online video
streaming services (Hasan et al., 2018). It means that users are becoming increasingly
dependent on recommender system suggestions, thus, losing their critical thinking
ability (NI3), and are even susceptible to changing their personal identity (Bonicalzi
et al., 2023). This is also due to the exhibit of confirmation bias by many people,
that is, the tendency to actively seek information that confirms initial preferences.
However, typical recommender systems do little to avoid this bias, since they suggest
items that are in line with user’s preferences.
To demonstrate the problem of contradictory business goals of recommender
system providers and human objectives we would like to consider two examples: (1)
streaming services, especially VoD (Video on Demand) like Netflix or Disney+, and
(2) dating services like Tinder1. Typically, streaming services that provide movie
series jump from one episode to another without any break. This is further supported
by cliffhangers at the end of the episode, i.e., suspending the action of the film so
that the viewers are left in a very exciting or scary moment to encourage them to
continue watching. This will be even more challenging for users in the future due
to more immersive virtual reality solutions and personalization exploiting human
emotions. As a result, the user can be kept in the service for many hours. However,
is spending a long time like this the intention and need of the user? When launching
the service, would the user consciously choose such a scenario?

1 Note that we are not analyzing any particular service, but only want to indicate some of the
potential risks and directions for further studies.
18 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

It means that, in many cases, user and business goals may be opposed. This
is closely related to the negative long-term impacts: NI1 and NI2. If the business
model of dating services relies on monthly subscriptions, then recommender system
in such a service can be optimized to achieve business goals, i.e., to retain paying
users. This may result in matching people to short-term human relationships rather
than long-term ones. This, in turn, may not be in line with the long-term goals of
many users seeking a more permanent relationships.

1.3.3 Responsible Recommender Systems

In general, commercial recommender systems focus on (1) meeting users’ temporary

needs (by suggesting potentially useful items), (2) while simultaneously accomplish-
ing business goals. On the other hand, we should be aware of risks of negative impact
(NI1-NI6), and challenges arising from human-like recommender systems. There-
fore, in the landscape of rapid and continuous development of recommender systems,
we would like also to consider: (3) the life goals and values of each individual, and (4)
general, agreed society-wide recommendations related to health and well-being, e.g.,
physical and mental health guidelines. This leads us to the concept of Responsible
Recommender System (RRS) (Kazienko and Cambria, 2024).
Previous work referring to the term Responsible Recommender System actually
focused on some of its features such as trustworthiness, fairness, accountability,
explainability, and transparency. Most of these topics are covered among others,
by papers presented at the series of The FAccTRec Workshop: Responsible Rec-
ommendation collocated at the RecSys conference. All of them are very important
components of RRS.
In this chapter, however, we go further and postulate to additionally respect new
issues not much considered before (Fig. 1.7), in particular:

1) human values and user personal goals (especially related to long-term impact on
them), and
2) societal recommendations (related to lifestyle or health like physical activities,
sleep, the need for breaks in online activity, etc.)

All of the above should be taken into account while maintaining user auton-
omy (Krook and Blockx, 2023) and non-conflict with business objectives. Preserving
user autonomy is a crucial component of RRS mitigating the long-term negative im-
pact NI4. It enforces that the recommender system designer should strive to keep the
user free: free to change their choices, free to make new ones, or even to disable the
system altogether. Our RRS concept adheres to the principles of digital humanism,
emphasizing the importance of norms to ensure that technology is developed and
used in a manner that is more ethical and driven by human values (Prem et al., 2023).
Please note that we focus primarily on recommender systems’ impact on individual
users. However, the social effect can be considered as well.
1.3 Towards More Responsible AI 19

Fig. 1.7: Idea of RRS in a market environment. It respects: (1) individual user goals
and values, especially long-term ones, (2) societal goals, e.g., lifestyle or health
recommendations, and (3) business goals. RRS also (4) preserves trustworthiness,
fairness, accountability, and explainability leading to better transparency.

Defining, identifying, and measuring long-term impact on humans is a great

challenge for research. It means we need to establish new procedures and measures
suitable for (1) different kinds of recommender systems like content (news, videos)
delivery or online trade, (2) different personalities, e.g., people who are more suscep-
tible to influence and manipulation, (3) different social groups and cultures sharing
the same values, e.g., religious ones.
Another challenge is to analyze and quantify the emotional engagement of users.
it is important since recommender system providers may be tempted to exploit user
emotions to achieve their business goals. This, however, may be in opposition to the
user goals, values, and even health restrictions (e.g., for people with heart diseases).
As a result, users should both be aware and consciously decide to what extent they
want their emotions to be evoked.
The implementation of the RRS concept requires new methods and reasoning ar-
chitectures that would integrate contradictory goals: business vs. personal vs. societal
ones. In particular, we need to develop how to combine general and uncontroversial
health recommendations in the form of incentives with personal preferences while
maintaining benefits for recommender system operators2.

2 Please note that existing nudging solutions (PI6) focus on single positive nudging objectives rather
than on integration and alignment with other targets, e.g., through multi-criteria inference.
20 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Additionally, there is a demand for new methods to identify future, especially

non-obvious consequences of recommendations on humans, e.g., many user fea-
tures can be derived from their activities, e.g., simple Facebook likes, which was
observed many years ago (Kosinski et al., 2013). Moreover, these consequences
(possible impact and risks) should be presented to the user in an understandable and
editable form – preferable in the interaction, which again requires new technologies.
Recommender systems especially if combined with generative AI models provide
users with successive portions of new information. This, in turn, leads to information
overload and potential information pollution, resulting in harm to the user, which
also requires new solutions and maybe even legal regulations (Ho≥yst et al., 2024).
Overall, some of the risks with a long-term effect, perhaps should be addressed
through solutions similar to smoking and perhaps even investing in the stock mar-
ket, e.g., increase awareness among users regarding the potential hazards of using
recommender systems.

1.3.4 What Next

AI and recommender systems are poised to revolutionize the fabric of societal inter-
actions, offering unprecedented opportunities to reshape the way individuals connect,
communicate, and collaborate. While they can facilitate connections by matching
individuals with shared interests and preferences, there is concern that these medi-
ated interactions may lack the depth and authenticity of face-to-face communication.
Over-reliance on algorithmic recommendations may contribute to the formation of
echo chambers, limiting exposure to diverse perspectives and potentially weakening
interpersonal bonds. Moreover, the increasing integration of AI and recommender
systems into daily life raises questions about individual autonomy. While these sys-
tems aim to streamline decision-making by offering tailored suggestions, there is
a risk of subtle influence on user behavior. This raises ethical concerns about the
manipulation of human autonomy and the potential erosion of free will in the face
of algorithmic determinism. On the one hand, AI and recommender systems provide
access to vast amounts of information and support data-driven decision-making, em-
powering individuals to make more informed choices. Simultaneously, the reliance
on algorithmic recommendations may reduce individuals’ inclination to critically
evaluate information and exercise independent judgment. Moreover, the lack of
transparency in recommendation processes may hinder users’ understanding of how
decisions are made, potentially undermining trust in the information presented.
In the near future, it will be increasingly important to raise awareness among users
about the potential risks associated with recommender systems, drawing parallels to
other contexts such as smoking and investing in the stock market. Just as education
campaigns have been instrumental in informing the public about the health hazards
of smoking and the financial risks of stock market investments, a similar approach
is needed to highlight the potential pitfalls of relying blindly on recommendation
algorithms.
1.3 Towards More Responsible AI 21

By elucidating the possible consequences, including the formation of echo cham-

bers, filter bubbles, and the manipulation of user behavior, individuals can make more
informed decisions about their online interactions. Moreover, fostering a culture of
critical thinking and digital literacy can empower users to navigate recommender
systems responsibly, mitigating the adverse effects and ensuring that they serve
as tools for enrichment rather than exploitation. A key element of RRSs will be
explainability. When users are presented with recommendations, they often desire
insight into the rationale behind the suggestions. Explainability offers transparency
into the underlying mechanisms and criteria employed by the system to generate
these recommendations. Firstly, explainable recommender systems foster trust by
providing users with visibility into how recommendations are formulated. Users are
more likely to trust recommendations if they comprehend the reasoning behind them,
which consequently enhances engagement and satisfaction. Secondly, explainability
aids users in understanding why specific recommendations are presented to them,
resulting in a more meaningful and personalized experience. With a grasp of the
factors influencing recommendations, users can better evaluate and interpret them,
thereby enabling more informed decision-making.
Moreover, explainability plays a crucial role in mitigating undesired biases. By
unveiling the factors considered by the recommender system, users can identify and
address potential biases related to demographics, preferences, or historical interac-
tions. RRSs will empower users to provide feedback and adjust their preferences
based on the recommendations they receive. When users comprehend the reasoning
behind recommendations, they can offer valuable feedback, thereby contributing to
the improvement of recommendations over time. Additionally, in industries such
as finance or healthcare, regulatory requirements often mandate transparency and
accountability in recommendation systems. Explainability ensures compliance with
regulations and standards by offering clear explanations of recommendations and
decision-making processes. Finally, RRSs will facilitate the identification and res-
olution of potential ethical concerns, such as privacy violations or manipulation of
user behavior.

1.3.5 Summary

So, are recommender systems friends, foes, or frenemies? They can be friends when
they provide transparent and personalized recommendations that genuinely enhance
user experiences. For instance, on streaming platforms like Netflix or Spotify, rec-
ommender systems recommend movies, shows, or music tailored to users’ tastes and
preferences, helping them discover content they might enjoy. They can be foes when
they prioritize the interests of businesses or other stakeholders over those of users,
which can lead to a proliferation of sponsored content or biased recommendations,
potentially undermining user trust and satisfaction. Given the pervasive influence of
recommender systems on various aspects of human life, it is crucial to study their
mechanisms, effects, and implications more comprehensively.
22 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Understanding how recommender systems operate, the algorithms they employ,

and the biases they may exhibit is essential for addressing potential ethical concerns,
ensuring transparency, and promoting user empowerment. Finally, studying the im-
pact of recommender systems on society can inform the development of regulatory
frameworks, awareness campaigns, industry standards, and best practices to mitigate
negative consequences and maximize the benefits of these systems for individuals
and communities alike. We are convinced that the concept of RRS presented in this
chapter will inspire the emergence of new commercial solutions that support both
the well-being, goals and values of users and pursue necessary business objectives.

1.4 Towards More Personalized AI

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into various aspects of daily life, the de-
mand for more tailored and individualized experiences is growing. Personalization
enhances the relevance, efficiency, and effectiveness of AI applications, leading to
numerous benefits across different sectors. Firstly, personalization significantly im-
proves user experience by allowing AI systems to cater to the unique preferences,
needs, and behaviors of individual users. This leads to more intuitive and engag-
ing interactions, enhancing user satisfaction and loyalty. For example, personalized
recommendation systems in e-commerce and streaming services help users discover
products and content that align with their tastes, thereby improving their overall
experience. Secondly, personalized AI systems increase efficiency and productivity
by streamlining workflows and automating tasks in ways that are specifically tai-
lored to the user’s habits and requirements. In professional settings, personalized AI
assistants can manage schedules, prioritize tasks, and provide relevant information,
thereby boosting productivity and efficiency.
In this chapter, we focus on the task of personalized sentiment analysis, which
aims to analyze individual sentiment perceptions. This approach is motivated by the
observation that different individuals may perceive an identical statement differently
regarding its sentiment polarity. In contrast, conventional sentiment analysis aims
to predict the semantic sentiment of a statement, where the sentiment prediction
remains the same for an identical statement. For instance, an introverted person may
have a negative sentiment towards performing in front of a large audience, while
an extroverted person may view the same situation positively (see Fig. 1.8). This
variation in sentiment perception can be attributed to personality traits. While the
distinction between introversion and extroversion is from personality theory, the
variability in sentiment perception among individuals can also be influenced by
other factors. The inconsistency in sentimental perception between individuals may
originate from multiple sources. For example, as the adage suggests, “the enemy of
my enemy is my friend”, the sentimental perception of a person can be driven by the
relationship or the context of the situation. In this case, personalized sentiment analy-
sis extends beyond traditional semantic and pragmatic understanding, incorporating
a broader range of human subjective factors, such as persona information.
1.4 Towards More Personalized AI 23

Let's celebrate this

Conventional Sentiment Analysis:
special reunion by
putting on a dance for The semantic sentiment of the text
our classmates! is positive.

Personalized Sentiment Analysis:

The sentiment perception of the boy

is negative.
This image is generated by Microsoft AI image generator.

Fig. 1.8: Conventional sentiment analysis vs. personalized sentiment analysis.

To this end, we propose a novel neurosymbolic AI framework Zhu et al. (2024b)

that leverages seven levels of personalization for personalized sentiment analysis (see
Fig. 1.9). In particular, such a framework initially targets identifying whether the user
is a human (e.g., male or female) or other intelligent agent, determining whether to
consider typical human needs and beliefs. Secondly, the framework aims to identify
the user’s cultural background to discern whether a given concept is perceived as
positive or negative based on different cultural beliefs. Next, a similar mechanism
is applied to Religion. Vocation is considered an important factor in shaping users’
views based on their job and education level. Following, the user’s ideologies are
modeled to consider political beliefs and social, economic, or philosophical view-
points. Next, Personality is detected in order to better classify certain concepts as
positive or negative based on the user’s personality traits. Finally, Subjectivity aims
to consider specific user preferences learned from historical or training data.
This work aims to evaluate whether the framework of the identified seven levels
of personalization can help improve the accuracy of sentiment analysis. We evaluate
the framework based on a dialogue dataset (Chen et al., 2023b) that originated from
Harry Potter novels and LLMs. The dataset contains conversations between different
characters in the Harry Potter novels and the associated sentiment perceptions be-
tween characters. Considering the advancement of LLMs in diverse domains (Mao
et al., 2024a), we leverage ChatGPT and GPT-4 to generate the seven-level persona
information for each character by well-designed prompts. Finally, the utility of the
persona information is evaluated with a neurosymbolic AI paradigm.
The persona information is structured as tailored prompts, feeding into LLMs
together with the conversations of the employed dataset. We analyze the variations
in the sentiment analysis accuracy of AI after the inclusion or exclusion of different
prompts. We find that in the context of the conversations of Harry Potter, Culture,
Vocation, and Ideology present the highest utility, resulting in the most accuracy
gains in our research domain. All the seven aspects have positive utilities to the
neurosymbolic AI system.
24 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Fig. 1.9: Personalized Sentiment Analysis Pyramid.

Integration of personalized neurosymbolic knowledge into LLMs leads to biases

towards the object and the subject on sentiment analysis task. It is reasonable that
different types of persona information have different utilities in a specific domain
because different individuals may prioritize certain aspects of persona information
based on the context or the domain they are in. The sentiment perception reasoning
may rely on different background knowledge in different scenarios. The contribution
of this work is threefold. (1) It introduces the novel concept of personalized sentiment
analysis, designed to enhance AI’s understanding of the varied sentiment perceptions
between individuals. (2) It presents a comprehensive framework derived from an
analysis of literature, delineating seven levels of personalization for personalized
sentiment analysis. (3) It performs an empirical study to assess the effectiveness of
various persona information types within a conversational domain.

1.4.1 Literature Review

[Link] Sentiment Analysis with AI

Recently, there have been notable advancements in sentiment analysis, characterized

by several key trends. Initially, the focus was on lexicon-based approaches to identify
sentiment polarities such as positive, negative, and neutral in sentences or documents.
The field then evolved by introducing concept-level sentiment analysis systems like
pSenti (Mudinas et al., 2012) and SenticNet (Cambria et al., 2024). These systems
represented a shift towards more advanced methods that combined lexicon-based
and learning-based approaches. They presented greater accuracy in tasks such as
sentiment polarity classification and sentiment intensity prediction, surpassing the
capabilities of traditional lexicon-based systems (Medhat et al., 2014).
1.4 Towards More Personalized AI 25

With the development of neural networks, the research focus of sentiment analysis
shifted towards developing different learning frameworks to improve accuracy. Sev-
eral algorithms were proposed for sentiment analysis including convolutional neural
network (CNN)-based supervised learning (Kim, 2014), transfer learning (Dong and
De Melo, 2018), adversarial training (Fedus et al., 2018), meta-learning (He et al.,
2023b), and prompt-based (Mao et al., 2023c). These research efforts address learn-
ing challenges in sentiment analysis, e.g., pattern discovery with label data, efficient
learning from few-shot examples, robust representations, and domain adaption. Dur-
ing this period, research in multimodal (Zadeh et al., 2017) or cross-lingual (Zhang
et al., 2024b) sentiment analysis was dynamic because it expanded the scope of
sentiment analysis beyond English text. Recently, there has been a significant en-
richment in the task setups of sentiment analysis. Researchers are no longer satisfied
with simply predicting a sentiment polarity for an input text; they are extending the
scope of sentiment analysis to include different levels of granularity and contextual
awareness, e.g., aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) (Mao and Li, 2021) and
opinion mining (Marrese-Taylor et al., 2014), emotion detection (Abdul-Mageed
and Ungar, 2017), conversational sentiment analysis (Li et al., 2023b), sentiment
analysis from electroencephalography (EEG) signals (Kumar et al., 2019b), facial
expressions (Dagar et al., 2016) or speech (Lu et al., 2020). Another trend in senti-
ment analysis is that researchers paid more attention to the linguistic phenomena that
likely affect sentiment analysis, e.g., metaphors (Mao et al., 2023b), sarcasm (Yue
et al., 2023), and ambiguous word senses (Zhang et al., 2023b). Considering the
impact of sentiment in broad domains, there are research papers studying sentiment
analysis in different science domains, e.g., nature disaster (Duong et al., 2024), men-
tal health (Ji et al., 2022), finance (Ma et al., 2023, 2024), legislation (Proksch et al.,
2019) and education (Altrabsheh et al., 2013).
To sum up, previous research has addressed sentiment analysis by tackling learn-
ing challenges, enhancing sentiment analysis granularity, improving NLU in learning
systems, and grounding sentiment analysis in different downstream tasks. However,
sentiment perception can vary subjectively in different contexts. There is limited
research on personalized sentiment analysis that integrates various types of persona
information. This motivates us to bridge this gap by forming a framework to identify
the sources of subjectivity in sentiment analysis and developing a neurosymbolic
system to process the task of personalized sentiment analysis.

[Link] Sources of Diversity in Sentiment Perception

Theory of mind suggests that individuals understand that others may hold beliefs,
desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts that differ from their own (Apperly and
Butterfill, 2009). Thus, we believe that multiple factors can influence individual sen-
timent perceptions. According to the theory of appraisal (Martin and White, 2003),
opinions and sentiments arise not as direct responses to stimuli but as complicated
evaluations incorporating subjective judgments across multiple levels.
26 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

We assume that the factors influencing sentiment perception are hierarchically

structured. This hierarchical structure ranges from general factors affecting large pop-
ulations to specific factors influencing individuals. To explore this idea further in the
context of sentiment analysis, we reviewed the following theoretical research. Theory
of mind research is subject to humans and other species or intelligent agents. Early
research found that chimpanzees may possess a preliminary form of theory of mind.
The ability allows them to infer the mental states of others, like humans (Premack and
Woodruff, 1978). This ability to attribute intentions, knowledge, and beliefs to others
suggests that chimpanzees possess the basic forms of social cognition. However, the
following research has shown that there are great differences between humans and
animals in terms of the depth and complexity of theory of mind (Call and Tomasello,
2008). For example, while chimpanzees can understand others by a perception-goal
psychology, they do not have a fully developed belief-desire psychology like hu-
mans. With the development of LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, researchers also extended
theory of mind tests to AI. ChatGPT and GPT-4 were tasked with difficult questions
that required inferring the counterfactual effects of actions on mental states (Bubeck
et al., 2023). The findings show that GPT-4 demonstrated strong abilities in these
scenarios, possessing an advanced level of theory of mind.
Cultural norms, values, and beliefs significantly impact how people perceive and
understand the world. Researchers compared students from Western (American) and
Eastern (Indian) cultural backgrounds and discovered that Western participants had
an independent self-construal and saw themselves as considerably more different
from others (Markus and Kitayama, 2014). Indian participants, on the other hand,
perceived themselves as somewhat more alike to others, suggesting an interdependent
self-perception. Additionally, studies show that different languages have different
conceptions of emotion, with variations in the causes, evaluations, outcomes, modes
of management and display, and even physiological responses linked to particular
notions (Pavlenko, 2008). Sentiment perception can also be impacted by religious
factors. The theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that individuals might adjust
their opinions to match their religious beliefs in order to mitigate psychological
discomfort (Festinger, 1957). This process can strengthen existing beliefs while
eliminating conflicting opinions. Affirming religious beliefs can reduce the negative
affect and emotional discomfort that occurs when individuals experience cognitive
dissonance (Burris et al., 1997).
Individuals gain a sense of identity and self-esteem from association with various
groups, including those based on occupational and educational backgrounds (Tajfel
et al., 1979). To maintain a positive social identity, individuals often adopt perspec-
tives consistent with the norms and values of these groups. Related research also
shows that people in high-status occupations tend to show more liberal attitudes to-
ward social issues than people in low-status occupations (Lipset, 1987). Individuals
may interpret information in a way that is consistent with their beliefs and values.
This bias may lead individuals to view information that aligns with their ideology
as more credible and trustworthy, while ignoring conflicting information (Kunda,
1990). Individuals with different ideologies may interpret identical information in
divergent ways, thus delivering different opinions on the same target.
1.4 Towards More Personalized AI 27

For example, those with conservative ideologies often emphasize individual re-
sponsibility and individual rights, influencing their stance on welfare and healthcare-
related policies (Taber and Lodge, 2006). In contrast, individuals with liberal ideolo-
gies often prioritize social justice and equality, leading to opposing opinions. The way
people construct their ideas is also influenced by certain personality traits (Jansen
et al., 2022b). For example, people who are open to new experiences are more likely
to be receptive to new ideas and have flexible, open-minded perspectives (McCrae
and Costa, 1987). On the other hand, those with higher conscientiousness typically
base their beliefs on carefully analyzing the available data, leading to more thought-
ful viewpoints. Sometimes, sentiment perceptions can be influenced by individuals’
subjectivity, e.g., individuals who have had positive interactions with dogs are more
likely to view dogs positively, contrasting with those whose experiences have been
negative (Tyrer et al., 2015). People tend to focus on information that aligns with
their personal preferences and beliefs, potentially distorting their perception of emo-
tions (Bower, 1981).
This tendency, termed confirmation bias, can impact how individuals interpret
emotional events. Moreover, varied experiences and subjective feelings can influence
using metaphorical language among individuals to express their opinions (Lakoff
and Johnson, 1980). For example, financial analysts may employ different metaphors
in their reports under different market conditions (Mao et al., 2023a). The public’s
perception of different types of weather disasters is also reflected in their metaphor-
ical expressions (Mao et al., 2024d). To sum up, theoretical research and empirical
studies support that individuals’ sentiment perceptions are subject to multiple factors,
including entity diversity that distinguishes between humans and other intelligent
agents like animals and AI; culture, religion, vocation, ideology, personality, and
subjectivity. These factors may impact personalized sentiment analysis in different
scenarios. However, their collective impacts generally represent the complex inter-
play of individual characteristics and contextual influences on sentiment perception.
These factors not only influence how individuals perceive and interpret the senti-
ment of a target but also alter the language they use to express subjective feelings.
In sentiment analysis, understanding these factors is necessary for developing more
personalized and context-sensitive systems.

1.4.2 Methodology

After reviewing relevant literature in psychology and cognitive science in the pre-
vious section, we define a hierarchical framework, termed Personalized Sentiment
Analysis Pyramid (see Fig. 1.9), which encompasses seven factors that can influence
individual sentiment perception. By considering each factor, such framework aims
to enable more accurate and personalized sentiment analysis, tailoring sentiment
detection to the unique characteristics and contexts of each individual. This hierar-
chical framework is shaped as a layered structure that includes seven persona aspects,
namely: entity, culture, religion, vocation, ideology, personality, and subjectivity.
28 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Entity refers to the differentiation between human genders and other intelligent
agents. Culture represents how various cultures perceive concepts as positive or
negative. Religion involves considering how specific religious beliefs can influence
an individual’s opinions on certain topics. Vocation aids in understanding people’s
opinions based on their occupation and educational background. Ideology involves
political beliefs and social, economic, or philosophical viewpoints. Personality assists
in categorizing concepts as positive or negative based on personality traits. Finally,
subjectivity considers personal preferences and experiences. At the bottom of the
pyramid, personalization is more general, e.g., entities of the same gender and
species, such as males, females, AI, or other creatures, can share the same persona
information. Personalization is more specific at the top layer, e.g., subjectivity level.
Next, we use GPT-4 Turbo to analyze the persona information of our subjects related
to the above seven aspects. LLMs have shown superior knowledge in diverse domains,
including multilingual capabilities and scientific task processing (Mao et al., 2024a).
They were also suggested as a useful tool for survey research and persona information
generation (Jansen et al., 2023). Thus, it is eligible for analyzing the personalities of
a subject from different aspects.
Finally, we test LLM performance on personalized sentiment analysis tasks. The
obtained persona information in the former step is used as symbolic knowledge, guid-
ing the sentiment inference of an LLM. Since we combine the symbolic knowledge
and the reasoning ability of neural network-based LLMs together, the methodology
is neurosymbolic. The structured symbolic knowledge provides a clear and under-
standable reasoning basis, enhancing the interpretability and explainability of the
system’s decisions (Yeo et al., 2024a). The testing data were sourced from novels,
including dialogues with multi-turns. The task is to predict a speaker’s sentiment
perceptions towards another speaker involved in the conversation. We hypothesize
that the additional persona information has different utilities in this scenario because
the intensity of the influence of personal characteristics on sentiment perception
changes as the scene changes. We aim to evaluate the utilities of the ensemble and
each type of persona information.
The overall workflow of our method can be viewed in Fig. 1.10. Our task setup
and computing pipeline represent a novel approach for several reasons. First, we do
not focus on analyzing the sentiment of a conversation based solely on its semantic
content. Instead, our goal is to analyze how one person perceives another’s senti-
ments. This means that even in a conversation that may seem neutral, there could
still be negative sentiment if the individuals involved in the conversation do not
like each other. Second, unlike traditional personalized AI techniques, such as user
preference-based dialogue systems (Zhu et al., 2023, 2024a), personality trait-based
recommender systems (Yang and Huang, 2019), or annotation-subjectivity-driven
sentiment analysis (Zhang et al., 2024c), our approach considers persona information
from multiple aspects. This allows our system to incorporate a broader range of fac-
tors that may be informative for personalized sentiment analysis. Finally, our system
prioritizes user subjectivity by generating personalized outputs based on different
types of persona information, even when presented with the same dialogue input.
This approach to human-computer interaction (HCI) is more human-centric.
1.4 Towards More Personalized AI 29

Fig. 1.10: Personalized sentiment analysis workflow. denotes textual concatenation.

[Link] Persona Information Acquisition

Since we have defined seven aspects for persona analysis and our analytical subjects
are characters from Harry Potter novels, we can consult the persona information for
GPT-4 directly. We formulate the query template as follows.
[Goal]: I want to categorize the given object according to their {aspect_term} in the Harry
Potter book series. Please suggest a description, one in a line, starting with “-” and surrounded
by quotes “”. For example: - “{example_category}”
Do not output anything else.
You may choose only one {aspect_term} from the following list: {category_list}
Please categorize {sample_in_prompt} into one {aspect_term} according to their
{aspect_term} in the Harry Potter book series.

Table 1.1 shows the aspect terms for the seven aspects used to analyze the characters in
the Harry Potter book series. To prevent overlap among the seven aspects and ensure
that the LLM fully understands the meanings of the aspect terms, we provide a list of
categories for the first six aspects (shown as follows) for the LLM to reference during
inference. For “subjectivity”, we provide examples such as “Quidditch Seeker” and
“Painting”, allowing the LLM to generate relevant answers openly.

• Entity: [specie type] Wizards and Witches, Muggles, Werewolves, Dragons, Hip-
pogriffs, Basilisks, Trolls, Hags, Giants, Ghosts, House-elves, Goblins, Centaurs,
Veela, Merpeople, Dementors, Vampires. [gender] male, female, or, inapplicable.
• Culture: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, England, Scotland, Wales,
Irish, French, Bulgarian, India, African, Romani, Middle Eastern, USA.
• Vocation: Auror, Healer, Transfigurers, Charms Experts, Diviners, Professor,
Magizoologist, Potion Master, Curse Breaker, Metamorphmagi, Animagi, Oc-
clumens, Legilimens, Runes Experts, Patronus Charm Casters, Quidditch Player,
Journalist, Shop Owner, Ministry Official, Librarian, Herbologist, Arithmancer,
Servants, Metalworkers, Bankers, Underwater Dwellers, Companions or Pets.
30 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Table 1.1: Persona aspect term for analyzing the characters in Harry Potter novels.

Aspect Aspect Term

Entity specie type and gender
Culture cultural background
Religion religious beliefs
Vocation strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation
Ideology ideologies from aspects of political, social, epistemological, and ethical
Personality MBTI personality type
Subjectivity preferences and hobbies

• Religion: Good vs. Evil, Love vs. Indifference, Acceptance_Death vs. Fear_ Death
vs. Bravery_Death vs. Denial_Death vs. Honor_Death, Sacrifice vs. Selfishness,
Redemption vs. Condemnation, Impartiality vs. Prejudice, Tolerance vs. Intoler-
ance, Courage vs. Cowardice, Faith vs. Skepticism, Responsibility vs. Irrespon-
sibility.
• Ideology: Equality and Inclusivity vs. inequality and exclusivity, Reform vs. Satus
Quo, Utilitarianism vs. Moral Absolutism, Knowledge vs. Ignorance, Loyalty and
Community vs. disloyalty and individualism, Pragmatism vs. Idealism.
• Personality: ESTJ, ENTJ, ESFJ, ENFJ, ISTJ, ISFJ, INTJ, INFJ, ESTP, ESFP,
ENTP, ENFP, ISTP, ISFP, INTP, INFP.

[Link] Personalized Sentiment Analysis

We conduct personalized sentiment analyses using the information obtained from

the persona and an LLM. Given the collection of the persona information (pi )
of a person related to the seven aspects (p = {p1, p2, ... , pi, ... , p7 }), the scene
illustration (e) where the conversation happens, the dialogues with multi-turns (d),
the interlocutors (m, n), and task description (t), the task aims to predict the mutual
sentiment perceptions, e.g., the sentiment perception of m (a perceiving subject)
towards n (a perceiving object) (s(m!n) ) and the sentiment perception of n towards
m (s(n!m) ). We fit all the aforementioned textual information into a prompt template
(template(·)), then ask an LLM to predict the sentiment perceptions (LL M(·)) from
the prompt (prompt).

prompt (m$n) = template(e(m,n), d (m,n), p(m), p(n), m, n, t) (1.1)

s (m!n)
,s (m n)
= LL M(prompt (m$n)
) (1.2)

The prompt template (prompt (m!n) ) for inferring the sentiment perception of m
towards n can be viewed below. In the prompt box, the content after [Goal] refers to
the task description (t) that directs an LLM to deliver desired predictions, following
a fixed structure. scene (e) is the background illustration in which the conversation
takes place.
1.4 Towards More Personalized AI 31

dialogue_sample is the dialogue with multi-turns (d). character_1 and

character_2 correspond to the interlocutors (m, n). persona_1 and persona_2
denote their persona information p(m) and p(n) that was obtained in Section [Link].
[Goal] I want to classify the sentiment scores between the two characters in the Harry Potter
book series based on their dialogue and persona.
Please suggest a sentiment score, one in a line, starting with “-” and surrounded by quotes
“”. For example:
- “<Harry to Hermione> 1”
- “<Hermione to Harry> 2”
The following shows the different meanings of the sentiment scores.
Please select the sentiment score from the following options: -5: Vendetta; -4: Intentionally
inflict harm; -3: Maliciously targeting and harm; -2: Deliberately bullying/deliberately target-
ing; -1: Rude/Frivolous/Mean characters; 0: Stranger/Neutral; 1: Normal/Polite; 2: Friendly;
3: Kind; 4: Close; 5: Devoted.
[Scene] {scene}
[Dialogue] {dialogue_sample}
[Persona] {character_1}: {persona_1}. {character_2}: {persona_2}.
Please classify the sentiment scores between the two characters {character_1} and
{character_2} based on the given dialogue and their personas.

1.4.3 Experiment

[Link] Research Questions

In this chapter, we aim to explore the following research questions:

1) What is the utility of using the ensemble of the seven levels of personalization?
2) What is the utility of using individual personalization?
3) How does personalization impact sentiment analysis accuracy across different
types of entity and culture factors?
These research questions are explored in Sections [Link]–[Link], respectively.

[Link] Dataset

Our personalized sentiment analysis uses the Harry Potter Dataset (HPD) (Chen
et al., 2023b). It was developed to enhance the alignment of conversation agents with
fictional characters from Harry Potter novels. It includes annotating relationships and
character attributes that evolve over the storyline. HPD includes background infor-
mation, such as conversation scenes, speaker identities, and character attributes, to
enable dialogue agents to generate replies consistent with the Harry Potter universe.
In contrast to our structured persona analysis, the character attributes in the dataset
were not derived from the same set of analytical aspects. Thus, we did not use their
character attribute descriptions.
32 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Item No. of samples

Dialogues 1,191
Positive sentiment 4,932
Negative sentiment 730
Neutral sentiment 8
Interlocutors 94

Fig. 1.11: Dataset statistics and sentiment intensity distribution.

We leverage their affection labels that indicate the sentiment intensity of a per-
ceiving subject to another perceiving object as our sentiment intensity labels. In
our classification task, positive labels correspond to the sentiment intensity ranging
from 5 to 1, and negative labels correspond to the sentiment intensity ranging
from 1 to 5. A neutral label corresponds to the sentiment intensity of 0. Our method
is evaluated using the English version of the original HPD. The statistics of our
employed data and the sentiment intensity distribution are shown in Fig. 1.11.

[Link] Large Language Models

The persona information was queried from GPT-4 Turbo. The personalized senti-
ment analysis was evaluated with GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-3.5 Turbo (i.e., ChatGPT),
respectively. GPT-4 Turbo is an upgraded version of GPT-3.5 Turbo. Both LLMs
were developed by Open AI, pretrained with Transformer-based deep neural net-
works and a large number of corpus resources. By a preliminary test, we found that
these LLMs have rich knowledge about Harry Potter novels.

[Link] Evaluation Metrics

We evaluate the personalized sentiment analysis performance using two types of

metrics. The F1 score and accuracy are used to evaluate the accuracy of sentiment
polarity classification. In this task, LLMs aim to predict whether the sentiment
perception is positive, negative, or neutral. Mean squared error (MSE) is used to
evaluate the accuracy of sentiment intensity prediction. Considering the potential
failure of LLMs to respond in the required format, the Answer Rate is also integrated
into the evaluation. It measures the percentage of queries successfully answered by
the LLM. In this task, LLMs aim to predict the sentiment intensity, ranging from
5 to 5. Since the sentiment intensity between the same perceiving subject and
perceiving object is identical across all dialogues in the dataset, we combine all
dialogues between two identical interlocutors as a united input. A correct prediction
is defined as the predicted sentiment label (either a sentiment polarity or a sentiment
intensity score) of a perceiving subject towards a perceiving object matching the
ground truth label.
1.4 Towards More Personalized AI 33

[Link] Ensemble Utility of the Seven Levels of Personalization

We compared the sentiment analysis results of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 with and without
the ensembled seven levels of personalization in Table 1.2. The ensemble utility of
seven levels of personalization improved the performance of GPT-3.5 on sentiment
analysis. For GPT-4, the inclusion of the seven levels of personalization seems
to contribute to a slight improvement in F1 (p:=pos) and accuracy and MSE or
even a marginal decrease in F1 (p:neg) and Macro F1 . Taking into consideration the
answer rate, however, we found the accuracy of GPT-4 on the whole dataset turns into
0.8977⇥0.8155 = 0.7321 while the one of GPT-4 w/ p1:7 becomes 0.9058⇥09492 =
0.8598. Thus, the adjusted accuracy increase of 0.1277 demonstrates the ensemble
effectiveness of the seven levels of personalization on sentiment analysis task.

Table 1.2: Personalized sentiment analysis. p:=pos means positive sentiment is de-
fined as positive labels for computing F1 ; p:=neg means negative sentiment is defined
as positive labels for computing F1 .

F1 F1
Macro. F1 Acc MSE Answer Rate
(p:=pos) (p:=neg)
GPT-3.5 0.9381 0.5340 0.4907 0.8686 0.3586 0.6522
w/ p1:7 0.9484 0.5859 0.5114 0.8936 0.3293 0.6860
Delta 0.0103 0.0519 0.0207 0.0250 -0.2036 0.0338
GPT-4 0.9569 0.7372 0.5704 0.8977 0.1860 0.8155
w/ p1:7 0.9631 0.7092 0.5630 0.9058 0.1812 0.9492
Delta 0.0062 -0.028 -0.0074 0.0081 -0.0048 0.1337

[Link] Utility Analysis of the Individual Personalization

Table 1.3 shows the positive influence of each individual personalization on the
performance of GPT-3.5 in the personalized sentiment analysis tasks. Among them,
Culture, Vocation, Ideology, and Subjectivity strengthened the performance of GPT-
3.5 by a significant margin, while Entity, Religion, and Personality contributed less.
There may be a thought-provoking rationale for such a discrepancy. The Harry Potter
book series is deeply rooted in a rich culture, ideology, and subjectivity backdrops,
thereby offering a rich tapestry of themes and narratives that resonate deeply with
readers’ or even sentiment intensity annotators’ own values. For example, someone
who values loyalty and friendship may possibly echo characters like Harry and Ron.
Hence, they may easily capture Harry’s negative sentiment towards Peter Pettigrew,
who betrayed his friends, James and Lily Potter. Consequently, an LLM knowing
these factors (culture, ideology, and subjectivity) may understand characters’ senti-
ments more precisely by resonating with characters’ values.
34 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Table 1.3: Personalized sentiment analysis by persona types.

F1 F1
Macro. F1 Acc-all MSE Answer Rate
(pos=pos) (pos=neg)
GPT-3.5 0.9381 0.5340 0.4907 0.8686 0.3586 0.6522
w/ p1 0.9478 0.5553 0.5010 0.8825 0.3200 0.6769
w/ p2 0.9508 0.5793 0.5138 0.8926 0.2941 0.6801
w/ p3 0.9413 0.5403 0.4939 0.8841 0.3736 0.6713
w/ p4 0.9504 0.5542 0.5015 0.8886 0.3055 0.7171
w/ p5 0.9456 0.5532 0.4996 0.8884 0.3419 0.6938
w/ p6 0.9490 0.5619 0.5073 0.8868 0.3108 0.6667
w/ p7 0.9502 0.5722 0.5074 0.8897 0.3046 0.6780

[Link] Personalization Utility Analysis by Entity and Culture

The results presented in Section [Link] are readily comparable, as the growths in
F1 , Macro. F1 , accuracy, and answer rate are consistent. Unlike Sections [Link]
and [Link], performance summarized by different categories of entity and culture
aspects is more sensitive to the answer rate, since we investigate the results by
breaking down the characters into finer-grained groups instead of treating them as a
whole. Therefore, we calculated the evaluation metrics based on several query sam-
ples, by setting the missing result with a fixed value out of the scope of ground-truth
labels (Zhu et al., 2024b). Moreover, we detailed the sentiment analysis results by
presenting the metrics of each category group, both as subjects (conveying senti-
ments to Harry) and objects (receiving sentiments from Harry).
In general, including seven levels of personalization completely enhanced the
performance of groups Ghosts, Acromantula, Veela, Centaurs, and French. For entity
breakdowns, the negative effects on GPT-4 of including seven aspects occur only in
the cases where the entity groups (Muggles, Wizards and Witches, House-elves, and
Goblins) play as an object. For culture breakdowns, the negative impacts of including
seven aspects on GPT-4 are primarily observed when the entity groups (England,
Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Slytherin, and Hufflepuff) function as objects. However,
effects related to these breakdowns are observed in only two cases (Ravenclaw and
Hufflepuff) when they serve as subjects. For both breakdowns (entity and culture),
the negative effects on GPT-3.5 of including seven aspects occur relatively more
often and mainly when the entity group plays as a subject. The above observation
highlights the bias of LLMs (such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) towards the subject and
the object on sentiment analysis, especially when these models address personalized
neurosymbolic knowledge. Additionally, comparing the results of GPT-3.5 and GPT-
4, we observed that GPT-3.5, when integrated with personalized neurosymbolic
knowledge, achieved comparable or even superior performance to GPT-4. This is
validated by the results from several Entity or Culture groups including Muggles,
Ghosts, Acromantula, Veela, and England.
1.5 Conclusion 35

1.4.4 Summary

In this section, we studied the task of personalized sentiment analysis. Personas were
widely studied in commercial domains and web research (Jansen, 2022; Jansen et al.,
2022a). Unlike conventional sentiment analysis tasks that aim to analyze sentiment
by the meanings of the text, personalized sentiment analysis targets to analyzing the
individual sentiment perception. The difference is that an identical statement can
yield the same sentiment prediction by its meaning. In contrast, different people may
perceive the message differently based on their own personal preferences, personality
traits, beliefs, background, etc. To this end, we devised a framework, termed the
Personalized Sentiment Analysis Pyramid, for tackling all these different facets
through seven different levels of personalization, namely: Entity, Culture, Religion,
Vocation, Ideology, Personality, and Subjectivity.
We evaluated the framework with a dialogue dataset sourced from Harry Pot-
ter novels. The evaluation showed that personalized neurosymbolic knowledge, i.e.,
seven levels of personalization, augmented LLMs’ performance on sentiment analy-
sis. We also analyzed the utility of each persona aspect and found that each individual
persona aspect can augment sentiment intensity classification results. Finally, we in-
vestigated the influence of persona information on several character groups in the
Harry Potter novels. Results showed that including persona information elevated
the performance of groups Ghost, Acromantula, Veela, Centaurs, and French. Fur-
thermore, a bias of LLMs fed with personalized neurosymbolic knowledge towards
subject and object groups is observed.

1.5 Conclusion

The pursuit of automating tedious or repetitive tasks has a rich history, with origins
tracing back to Ancient Egypt and the Greek Empire. Among the earliest documented
works on automation is the “Book of Ingenious Devices”, published in 850 by the
Banu Musa brothers. While we have made significant strides since those times,
thanks to advancements in mathematical modeling, we now face the challenge that
mere mathematics alone may not suffice to model the intricate processes by which
the human brain encodes and decodes meaning for complex tasks, including intuitive
decision-making, sense disambiguation, and narrative comprehension.
In this chapter, we discussed the importance of personalized AI (in the context of
sentiment analysis) and responsible AI (in the context of recommender systems). We
also proposed a novel approach to AI that centers on humanity, characterized by seven
essential features or pillars. In the future, we plan to define best practices for abiding
by such pillars. For example, current post-hoc interpretability methods may not be
the best way to implement Trustworthiness as they simply find correlations between
inputs and outputs of an AI model without really explaining its inner workings.
Similarly, there is no point in having a confidence score if this is calculated based
on the wrong parameters.
36 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

Moreover, we need to define how to evaluate explainability in terms of qualities

such as plausibility, i.e., the extent to which an explanation resonates with and
is deemed acceptable by a human audience, and faithfulness, i.e., the extent to
which the explanation accurately reflects the model’s decision-making process. As
we look ahead, it is imperative to foster the development of human-in-the-loop
and human-in-command systems, integrating human participation in AI through
paradigms such as active learning and decision intelligence. We need to develop
clear guidelines and principles for AI development which prioritize human values,
fairness, accountability, transparency, and privacy, and which should be integrated
into the design process from the outset. We need to conduct regular audits of AI
algorithms to detect and mitigate biases, errors, and ethical concerns.
Finally, we need to implement and enforce regulations and governance mecha-
nisms that define the boundaries of AI usage, protect individual rights, and foster
moral AI practices. By implementing these strategies, society can work toward ensur-
ing that AI technologies are developed and used in ways that empower individuals,
maintain human control, and align with ethical and societal values. Balancing tech-
nological progress with human agency and values is essential for the responsible
advancement of AI.

Fig. 1.12: The NLU suitcase model.

1.5 Conclusion 37

If we do not engineer it well, in fact, AI could very much end up being like
plastic: a great invention that made our life easier about a century ago, but which
is now threatening our own existence. NLU can aid this process by implementing
a more transparent a brain-inspired way of processing language. We discuss this
in more detail in the next three chapters, in which we illustrate how to handle the
multiple cognitive processes associated with the different building blocks of language
understanding via three layers (Fig. 1.12), namely: Syntactics Processing, Semantics
Processing, and Pragmatics Processing.
This framework draws inspiration from two significant sources: the sentiment
analysis suitcase model (Cambria et al., 2017) and the Jumping NLP Curves
paradigm (Cambria and White, 2014). The former was specifically designed to
address polarity detection. It focused on a narrower scope compared to more gen-
eral NLU tasks and utilized a different arrangement of its components to tackle
sentiment-related challenges.
The latter conceptualized the evolution of NLP research as a series of three dis-
tinct curves, each representing different levels of complexity in handling natural
language. These curves illustrate the progression from basic language processing
techniques to more sophisticated approaches that handle increasingly complex lin-
guistic phenomena. The current framework builds on this paradigm by incorporating
its insights into the design and organization of NLU components, aiming to model
and manage the complexities of modern NLP challenges effectively.

Fig. 1.13: Jumping NLP curves paradigm.

38 1 Natural Language Understanding & AI

1.6 Learning Resources

A. Reading List
• Erik Cambria, Rui Mao, Melvin Chen, Zhaoxia Wang, and Seng-Beng Ho. Seven
Pillars for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 38(6):
62–69, 2023 (Cambria et al., 2023)

• Przemys≥aw Kazienko and Erik Cambria. Towards Responsible Recommender

Systems. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 39(3):5–12, 2024 (Kazienko and Cambria,
2024)

• Luyao Zhu, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria, and Bernard Jim Jansen. Neurosymbolic AI
for Personalized Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of HCII, 2024 (Zhu et al.,
2024b)

B. Relevant Videos
• Labcast about the Seven Pillars for the Future of AI: [Link]/SX1Cl_eDTLE

• Labcast about RRS: [Link]/DGc1i5I3q88

• Labcast about Personalized Sentiment Analysis: [Link]/pzlUpZfc8fQ

C. Related Code
• Github repository about ChatGPT Affect: [Link]/SenticNet/ChatGPT-Affect

• Github repository about RRS: [Link]/SenticNet/Recommendation-System

• Github repository about Personalized AI: [Link]/SenticNet/PSA

D. Exercises
• Exercise 1. Choose a downstream task or application and explain in detail how
each of the Seven Pillars can be applied to it. Discuss how these pillars can
enhance the task’s effectiveness, accuracy, and ethical implications, considering
factors like interpretability, robustness, scalability, fairness, and privacy. Illus-
trate how these principles can be integrated into the development, deployment,
and monitoring phases of the system to ensure it operates efficiently and ethically.
1.6 Learning Resources 39

• Exercise 2. Discuss the development of a QA system implementing the principle

of panalogy, i.e., a QA system storing information redundantly in two formats:
knowledge graph and embeddings. This approach aims to leverage the comple-
mentary strengths of both structured and unstructured data representations to
provide more accurate and flexible responses to user queries. Describe strengths
and weaknesses of each format with respect to different scenarios or domains.

• Exercise 3. Provide two examples of neurosymbolic systems: one in which a

symbolic representation, e.g., a knowledge graph or a semantic network, is incor-
porated within a subsymbolic algorithm to improve its accuracy, and one in which
a subsymbolic algorithm, e.g., a neural network or a machine learning model, is
used to develop a symbolic representation to increase its comprehensiveness.

• Exercise 4. Discuss how the concept of responsible recommender systems can

be adapted to other types of systems, e.g., search engines, automated hiring plat-
forms, financial services, healthcare applications, or smart city infrastructures, by
integrating principles of fairness, transparency, accountability, user control, and
privacy protection to ensure ethical and equitable outcomes.

• Exercise 5. Describe how the Personalized Sentiment Analysis Pyramid can be

adapted to another downstream task (instead of polarity detection) and explain
in detail how each layer can be tailored to meet the specific needs of the chosen
task. Discuss how personalization can be incorporated at each stage to enhance
the task’s relevance and effectiveness for individual users. Highlight practical
examples and potential challenges in adapting the pyramid to this new context.
Chapter 2
Syntactics Processing

Abstract Computational syntactics processing is a fundamental technique in NLU.

It normally serves as a preprocessing method to transform natural language into
structured and normalized texts, yielding syntactic features for downstream task
learning. This chapter proposes a systematic review of low-level syntactic processing
techniques, namely: microtext normalization, sentence boundary disambiguation,
POS tagging, text chunking, and lemmatization. In particular, we summarize and
categorize widely used methods in the aforementioned syntactic analysis tasks,
investigate the challenges, and yield possible research directions to overcome the
challenges in future work.

Key words: Microtext Normalization, Sentence Boundary Disambiguation, Part of

Speech Tagging, Text Chunking, Lemmatization

2.1 Introduction

Syntactics processing is a generalization of NLU subtasks that are concerned with

the structure of phrases and sentences, as well as the relation of words to each
other within the phrase or sentence (Woolf, 2009). It involves extracting meanings
from sentence constituents, and establishing the semantic structure of the input
sentence (Roberts, 2016). Syntactics processing is thus a foundational step towards
higher-level interpretations, preceding other more complicated tasks, such as WSD,
information retrieval, sentiment analysis, dialogue system, etc. It preprocesses the
input texts, and provides important features that can be further utilized by machines.
However, in the era of deep learning based high-level NLP tasks, syntactic processing
techniques are often overlooked. These NLP applications rely on neural networks
to implicitly extract syntactic information. They are indeed able to significantly
outperform symbolic methods that depend on handcrafted feature templates.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 41

E. Cambria, Understanding Natural Language Understanding,
[Link]
42 2 Syntactics Processing

Nevertheless, we argue that integrating symbolic and subsymbolic AI, also known
as neurosymbolic AI, is the key for stepping forward in the path from NLP to NLU.
Despite recent advancements in deep learning, statistical NLP does not achieve true
NLU, as it merely makes probabilistic guesses. Belinkov et al. (2017) conducted an
experiment to evaluate the word embeddings learned by neural machine translation
(NMT) on syntactic tasks, with results indicating that they are poor representations
for syntactic information. Therefore, to further improve the performance of semantic
and pragmatic tasks, it is of great benefit to regard syntactics processing as sub-
problems. For instance, POS tagging is incorporated in the decoding process (Feng
et al., 2019b) or as an auxiliary task (Niehues and Cho, 2017; Mao and Li, 2021) to
improve NMT and metaphor detection, lemmatization as a preprocessing step boosts
the accuracy of neural sentiment analysis on social media text (Symeonidis et al.,
2018). Hence, syntactics processing is an integral part of the neurosymbolic NLU
paradigm.
In this chapter, we examine the five most basic tasks in syntactics processing,
namely, microtext normalization, sentence boundary disambiguation (SBD), POS
tagging, text chunking, and lemmatization. There is a variety of other tasks in
this field, e.g., stopword removal, negation detection, constituency parsing, and
dependency parsing. Here, we decide to focus on the most foundational syntactic
processing tasks that can be helpful to high-level syntactic tasks and other NLU
applications. To elaborate, dependency parsing analyzes the grammatical structure
of a sentence based on the dependencies between words. It is strongly related to
POS linguistically. Indeed the majority of existing algorithms heavily rely on POS
tagging (Chen and Manning, 2014; Dyer et al., 2015; Zhou et al., 2020a). Similarly,
constituency parsing analyzes sentences by breaking them down into constituents.
It can be regarded as hierarchical text chunking, establishing structure within the
chunks. Therefore, we view them as high-level tasks that can benefit from the newly
introduced low-level syntactic processing techniques and justify separate reviews.
Although low-level syntactic processing tasks have gradually faded out of public
views in many NLP conference proceedings, previous surveys presented significant
findings in individual syntactic processing tasks. Satapathy et al. (2020) presented a
comprehensive review on microtext normalization. They discussed the similarities
between microtext and brachygraphy, and suggested the potential applications of
microtext normalization in more complex NLU tasks. Read et al. (2012) reviewed
10 publicly available SBD systems, and argued that the published results of these
systems are evaluated on different task definitions and data annotations. Thus, they
assessed the systems on unified task definition and gold-standard datasets, as well as
on user-generated content (UGC) corpora. Manning (2011) conducted error analysis
on existing POS tagging algorithms at the time, deducing 7 common error categories,
and proposed a solution for the errors and inconsistencies in the gold-standard dataset.
Kanis and Skorkovská (2010) compared manual and automatic Czech lemmatizers,
based on their influence on the performance of information retrieval. However, many
of these reviews are out-of-date, unable to cover the recent advancement, powered by
e.g., deep learning techniques. Additionally, some of them focused on the applications
of specific tasks.
2.1 Introduction 43

Fig. 2.1: Outline of this chapter. Each subtask is explained in terms of different
technical trends.

In the following sections, we introduce five different pragmatic processing tech-

niques, namely: microtext normalization (Section 2.2), SBD (Section 2.3), POS
tagging (Section 2.4), text chunking (Section 2.5), and lemmatization (Section 2.6).
Fig. 2.1 presents an outline of the chapter: each task is organized in terms of different
approaches and provides a summary. Finally, Section 2.7 wraps up the chapter by
proposing concluding remarks, a reading list, three relevant videos, some related
code, and five exercises.
44 2 Syntactics Processing

2.2 Microtext Normalization

In the era of short message service (SMS) and social media, a plethora of text data
can be mined from the web. Microtext is a term referring to shorthand writing, com-
monly seen in these informal texts. The occurrence of microtext poses a problem for
NLU, as it uses informal languages, e.g., shortened and lengthened words, abbrevi-
ated phrases, and missing grammatical components. It is challenging for machines
to comprehend the meaning of the source text. Therefore, microtext normalization
is essential in NLU. The task aims to convert the informal texts into their standard
forms that can be easily processed by a downstream task, such as sentiment analysis
for social media (Brody and Diakopoulos, 2011; Satapathy et al., 2017b, 2019b;
Chaturvedi et al., 2024), information retrieval (Bontcheva et al., 2013b), and ques-
tion answering (QA) system (Mittal et al., 2014). Microtext is often highly compact,
informal, and semi-structured (Rosa and Ellen, 2009). There are many abbreviations,
acronyms, lax spelling and grammar, as well as metadata that establish the context.
Although microtext is a written language, it is strongly influenced by phonetics, re-
sulting in language-dependent character repetition and substitution phenomena, e.g.,
“nooooo” for “no”, and “luv” for “love”. It is also an important preprocessing task
in the context computer vision, e.g., optical character recognition (OCR) can be used
to digitize handwritten or printed informal notes, and then microtext normalization
can be applied to standardize the resulting text for further processing.

Table 2.1: Popular text and phonetic corpora for microtext normalization.

Category Dataset Source Reference

SMS-M Mobile phone short messages Dunlop and Crossan (2000)
SMS-C Short Message Service corpus Choudhury et al. (2007)
SMS-L Mobile phone short messages Liu et al. (2011)
NUS SMS NUS Short Message Service corpus Wang and Ng (2013)
Edinburgh The Edinburgh X Corpus PetroviÊ et al. (2010)
LexNorm1.1 English X text Han and Baldwin (2011)
Text
LexNorm1.2 Modified LexNorm1.1 Yang and Eisenstein (2013)
2015 ACL-IJCNLP Workshop
W-NUT Baldwin et al. (2015)
on Noisy User-generated Text
Nom-Tweets English X text Satapathy et al. (2017b)
WSJ Wall Street Journal Marcus et al. (1993)
WUS SMS messages in Swiss Ueberwasser and Stark (2017)
Sw-SMS SMS messages in Swiss Lusetti et al. (2018)
International Phonetic Alphabet
ARPABET Khoury (2015)
(IPA) to ASCII symbols
TIMIT Revised ARPABET Taylor et al. (1998)
Phonetic
Carnegie Mellon University
CMUdict Jiampojamarn et al. (2007)
Pronouncing Dictionary
Festival Festival lexicon Taylor et al. (1998)
Lexical databases of English,
CELEX Jiampojamarn et al. (2007)
Dutch and German
2.2 Microtext Normalization 45

Even without any knowledge about texting conventions, humans can understand
this type of irregular words by sounding them out. Thus, phonetics-based abbrevia-
tions and spelling alterations are invented and evolve more freely than orthography-
based ones. For instance, “schewpid” is created to imitate “stupid” in a British
accent. It is uncommonly used, but most English speakers can understand it, even
if they have never seen it before. As for orthography-based abbreviations and alter-
ations such as “wdym” for “what do you mean”, less Internet-savvy people will have
to look up its meaning. Therefore, text-level mapping alone is often not adequate
to address the sparsity caused by phonetic-level alterations. Thus, existing typical
corpora (see Table 2.1) are prepared for both text-level and phonetic-level mappings.
Accuracy, top-n accuracy, F1 score, and bi-lingual evaluation understudy (BLEU)
score (Papineni et al., 2002) are widely used evaluation measures. Specifically, top-n
accuracy considers the system correct, if the correct standard form is in its top n
predictions.
In the remainder of this chapter, we review and categorize existing microtext
normalization approaches by linguistic, statistical, and neural network methods.

2.2.1 Linguistic Approach

Linguistic approaches normalize microtext by modeling linguistic knowledge or

commonly observed patterns in informal texts. Normalizers in this categories use
rule-based and/or lexicon-based method to leverage orthographic and phonetic in-
formation, or to implement their observations or assumptions about the formation
of microtext. This approach is advantageous at addressing specific problems, such
as abbreviation, character repetition, and character substitution caused by phonetics.
However, it is labor intensive, as most rules and lexicons are manually built. Pennell
and Liu (2010) described a rule-based normalization system for text messages so that
they can be read by a text-to-speech system. A set of hand-crafted rules are applied
to translate standard English into abbreviations in text lingo, which provides features
for a maximum entropy (MaxEnt) classifier to automatically create abbreviations,
thereby establishing a mapping from standard English to the text message domain.
This mapping is then reversed to create a look-up table so that the corresponding
English words can be predicted from the input text message.
Brody and Diakopoulos (2011) described an automated method based on the
notion that word lengthening is strongly associated with subjectivity and sentiment.
Their method leverages this association to identify new domain-specific sentiment-
and emotion-bearing words that are not in the existing lexicon. Jose and Raj (2014)
proposed a lexico-syntactic normalization model. As the name suggests, their model
consists of two modules – lexical normalization module, and syntactic analysis
module. The former is based on a channelized database and a user feedback system.
Inspired by the multi-channel model (Xue et al., 2011) that is introduced in the
later section, the database is built as four channels of database, namely abbreviation
channel, non-noisy channel, grapheme channel, and phoneme channel.
46 2 Syntactics Processing

Given a tokenized input string, candidate outputs are produced from each of these
channels via binary search. The syntactic analysis module is based on a bottom-up
parser. It takes the lexically normalized string outputted from the previous module,
and builds the corresponding parsing tree using grammar rules. The module will
then decide whether the sentence is valid or not, which helps to make the text
normalization task more efficient. Desai and Narvekar (2015) introduced a method to
normalize OOV words. First, a set of rules are applied to standardize elongated words
such as ‘goooood’. Then, the most probable candidates are found from compiled
databases for the OOV tokens. Lastly, any remaining noises are normalized using
Levenshtein edit distance, which signifies the minimum number of single character
insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one word to another.
Mittal et al. (2014) proposed a three-level architecture to process microtext in QA
systems. First, noise presented in the SMS tokens are replaced with the closest
dictionary words using the Soundex (Beider, 2008), Metaphone algorithm (Philips,
1990), and a modified version of the longest common subsequence (LCS) algorithm
termed Phonetic LSC (PLSC) that also takes phonetic similarity into account. Next,
a semantically similar set of candidate questions are selected. Lastly, the results are
optimized via syntactic tree matching (STM) and WordNet-based similarity.
Satapathy et al. (2017b) proposed a phonetic-based algorithm to normalize tweets,
which is used to enhance the accuracy of polarity detection. It is based on the
assumption that humans are able to understand character repetition and substitution
in unknown informal words because they automatically shift to the phonetic domain
when they read text. Therefore, they adopted an ensemble approach that mainly
relies on phoneme, and used a lexicon to address other forms of OOV words such
as acronyms and emoticons. Given a tweet, all the OOV words are matched with the
lexicon to find their in-vocabulary forms and corresponding polarity class. Then, any
leftover unnormalized tokens are processed using Soundex, which uses homophones
to encode texts so that characters with similar pronunciations can be easily matched.
Since their objective is to boost polarity detection, the phonetic code of OOV words
is matched against the knowledge base SenticNet (Cambria et al., 2024). The final
output is fed into a polarity classifier to test the effectiveness of normalization, and
yields promising results.
All of the phonetic algorithms used in the above mentioned methods encode words
based on their spelling, and thus are only applicable for English or languages written
in Latin alphabet. An alternative is to use International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA),
which more accurately represents pronunciations and can be used to encode any
languages. However, its disadvantage is also evident – such a fine-grained encoding
system can be too specific for phonetic matching. Thus, it needs to be simplified
accordingly. Khoury (2015) proposed a phonetic tree-based microtext normalization
model. The model determines the probable pronunciation of English words based
on their spelling via a radix-tree structured phonetic dictionary. To build the tree,
Khoury created a dataset of IPA transcriptions of the English Wiktionary1.

1 [Link]
2.2 Microtext Normalization 47

Jahjah et al. (2016) presented a novel word-searching strategy, built on the idea
of sounding out the consonants of a given word. Their algorithm uses spelling
and phonetic strategies to extract the base consonant data from misspelled and real
phrases. First, both visual signature and phonetic signature of real English words are
extracted using a set of rules. Then, the model finds a set of in-vocabulary words
with identical signatures to the OOV word, along with their occurrence probability,
and applies several heuristics to find the best matching in-vocabulary word.
Building upon their previous work, Satapathy et al. (2019b) proposed a cognitive-
inspired microtext normalizer, named PhonSenticNet, to aid concept-level sentiment
analysis for SMS texts. Given a message, a binary classifier is first applied to detect
whether microtext is present, aiming to reduce execution time. If true, PhonSenticNet
finds the closest match for every concept in the input sentence based on phonetic
distance, which is computed using Sorensen similarity algorithm based on both
Soundex encoding as well as IPA encoding. Results showed that PhonSenticNet
outperforms their previous algorithm.

2.2.2 Statistical Approach

Statistical approaches employ machine learning models such as hidden Markov

model (HMM) and support vector machine (SVM), to perform text normalization.
For this type of normalizers, noisy channel is the most widely-used formulation.
Modeling the process of distorting the source into the target, noisy channel is the ba-
sis of many NLP applications, e.g., statistical machine translation (SMT), automatic
speech recognition (ASR), and spell checking. Intuitively, we can view microtext nor-
malization as a translation task from standard English to informal English. Therefore,
the nature of noisy channel makes it suitable for microtext normalization.
Choudhury et al. (2007) constructed a noisy channel model based on HMM for
words in standard English to represent all possible variations of their corresponding
text language version. The core concept of their model is to formulate the transfor-
mation from standard English to text language as a noisy channel. Given a sentence
s in standard form, the noisy channel decodes it into text language t by

tˆ = argmaxs P(s)P(t | s)

where the language model P(s) encodes which strings in standard form are valid, and
the error term P(t | s) models how the standard forms are distorted. The former can
be easily constructed by exploiting large amounts of unlabeled data, therefore the
paper focused on the latter, which is implemented by a letter-to-phoneme conversion
HMM. Given a word in standard English, the HMM formulates the graphemes in
the word as observation states, and their corresponding phonemes as hidden states.
To train and test their method, they created a word-aligned corpus of SMS texts and
standard English.
48 2 Syntactics Processing

Jiampojamarn et al. (2007) pointed out that the previous letter-to-phoneme con-
version systems only support one-to-one letter-phoneme alignment, which leads to
difficulties in handling single letters that correspond to two phonemes, or vice versa.
This can be partially mitigated by manually constructing a fixed list of merged
phonemes prior to the alignment process. The paper, however, proposed a better so-
lution to overcome this limitation – an automatic many-to-many alignment method.
Given an input word, a many-to-many aligner establishes the appropriate alignments
across the graphemes and phonemes. After this process, the input word is represented
as a set of letter chunks, each containing one or two letters aligned with phonemes.
The chunk boundaries are determined via a bigram letter chunking prediction model
based on instance-based learning (Aha et al., 1991). The prediction model generates
all the bigrams in a word, automatically determining whether each of them should be
a double letter chunk based on the context. Subsequently, an HMM embedded with a
local classifier is applied to find the globally most possible sequence of phonemes of
the given word. The local classifier, also based on instance-based learning technique,
generates the phoneme candidates for every letter chunk according to the context.
Thus, compared to conventional HMM described above, their modified HMM is able
to utilize context information from not only the phoneme side but also the grapheme
side.
Bartlett et al. (2008) applied a structured SVM model called SVM-HMM
model (Altun et al., 2003) to orthographic syllabification, which acts as a sub-system
to improve letter-to-phoneme conversion. The paper formulated orthographic syl-
labification as a sequence labeling problem, employing SVM-HMM to predict tag
sequences. Unlike standard SVM, SVM-HMM employs Markov assumption during
scoring, and thus is able to consider complete tag sequences during training. The
motivation for using SVM-HMM over HMM is mainly the benefit of the discrim-
inative property in SVM, and leeway to adopt feature representations without any
conditional independence assumptions. The paper explored two tagging schemas for
syllabification. One is positional tags (NB tags) (Bouma, 2003) that label whether
each letter occurs at a syllable boundary or not. The other is structural tags (ONC
tags) (Daelemans et al., 1997; Skut et al., 2002), which represent the role each letter
is playing within the syllable, namely onset, nucleus, and coda. The former is simple,
straightforward, and adaptable to different languages. The latter, on the other hand,
is able to capture the internal structure of a syllable to improve accuracy, but does not
explicitly represent syllable breaks. To mitigate the weakness of the ONC tag schema,
the paper combined the two schemas and proposed a hybrid Break ONC tag schema.
Experiments show that their model not only outperforms previous syllabification
systems, but also improves the accuracy of letter-to-phoneme conversion. Kaufmann
and Kalita (2010) employed an SMT system for X message normalization. Given
a tweet, it is first passed through a syntactic normalization module, where sets of
rules on the orthographic- and syntactic-level are applied to preliminarily normalize
the input sentence. Next, the normalized tweet is fed into the machine translation
module, which is implemented by an existing SMT model called Moses (Koehn
et al., 2007), to transform the tweet into standard English.
2.2 Microtext Normalization 49

Xue et al. (2011) introduced a method that considers orthographic factors, pho-
netic factors, contextual factors, and acronym expansions, formulating each of them
as a noisy channel. The core concept is that a non-standard term should be similar
to its standard form in respect of one or more of these factors, and thus each channel
is responsible for one aspect of the distortion that converts the intended form into
the observed form. The grapheme channel models the corruption of spellings. The
phoneme channel causes distortion in pronunciations. The context channel changes
terms around a target term. The acronym channel transforms a phrase into a single
term. These channel models are combined using two variations of channel probabili-
ties, namely Generic Channel Probabilities and Term Dependent Channel Probabili-
ties. The former assumes that the probability of a term being emitted through a noisy
channel is independent of its standard form, whereas the latter takes into considera-
tion that some standard forms are more likely to be distorted via a certain channel
in reality. Experiments show that the two variants achieve similar performance, with
the latter being slightly better on SMS dataset.
Han and Baldwin (2011) theorized that supervised learning is not adept at han-
dling X OOV words due to data sparsity. Hence, they introduced an unsupervised
classifier that detects ill-formed words and generates candidate in-vocabulary words
using morphophonemic similarity. Their normalization strategy consists of three
stages. First, a confusion set of candidate in-vocabulary words is generated for each
OOV word based on morphophonemic variations, which are produced using lexical
edit distance and the double Metaphone algorithm (Philips, 2000). Then, based on
its confusion set, a linear kernel SVM classifier (Fan et al., 2008) is employed to
detect whether the given OOV word is actually an ill-informed word. Lastly, if the
OOV word is indeed ill-informed, the most likely candidate is selected based on
morphophonemic similarity and context. Although their method outperforms most
supervised models, there are limitations. The most prominent one is that it only
targets single-token words, and thus is unable to handle phrases and acronyms.
Pennell and Liu (2011) described an SMT-based system for expanding abbrevia-
tions found in informal texts. The method operates in two phases. In the first phase,
a character-level SMT model generates possible hypotheses for each abbreviation.
By training the model at character level, the model is able to learn the common char-
acter abbreviation patterns regardless of their associated words, and thus alleviates
the OOV problem. In the second phase, an in-domain language model decodes the
hypotheses, choosing the most likely one in the context.
Similarly, Li and Liu (2012) introduced a word-level framework based on an
SMT approach, which performs well in translating OOV words into in-vocabulary
words. The framework can be divided into two components. One component is a
character-based SMT module that translates non-standard words into standard words
by matching their character sequence. The other component is a two-stage SMT
module that leverages phonetic information. Non-standard words are first translated
into possible phonetic symbols, then mapping to standard words. The candidate word
lists generated by the two components are then combined and ranked using a set of
heuristic rules.
50 2 Syntactics Processing

Liu et al. (2012) described a broad-coverage normalization system that incor-

porates different aspects of human cognition, including letter conversion, visual
priming, and resemblance between string and phone. The system consists of four
key components. Given a token, three sub-normalizers respectively produce candi-
date words based on the cognition aspects, namely, enhanced letter transformation,
visual priming, and spell checking. Then, the last component, called candidate com-
bination, uses either word-level or message-level strategy to rank the candidates.
The enhanced letter transformation component is a standard noisy channel, where
the error term is modeled by a character-level conditional random field (CRF). The
enhancement is two-fold. First, features relating to phoneme, morpheme, syllable,
and word boundary are used to train the CRF. Second, the training (word, token)
pairs are chosen according to their global contextual similarity. On the other hand,
the visual priming component is also a noisy channel, but uses a novel technique
inspired by cognitive behavior. They observed that when humans are familiar with
informal texts, they are able to quickly recognize nonstandard tokens given only
minor visual cues. Following this observation, the priming component computes the
error term based on word frequency of the token and the minor visual stimulus, which
is LCS between the token and target word divided by the token length. Lastly, for the
spell checking component, the open-source Jazzy spell checker2 is employed. The
broad-coverage system outperforms previous state-of-the-art models at both word
level and message level.
Zhang et al. (2013) proposed a parser-centric word-to-word normalization method
to convert raw informal texts into the correct grammatical version. The main drive
for this method is that text normalization performance should be strongly dependent
on how useful it is for downstream applications, e.g., parsing. Given an input se-
quence, a series of replacement generators replace original tokens with normalized
ones by producing sets of edit operations. Subsequently, a directed acyclic normal-
ization graph is constructed based on the generated replacements. The graph models
two types of dependencies, namely, syntactic consistency of true assignments, and
correlations among replacements. The output is determined by using Maximum A
Posteriori probability (MAP) inference, which is to select the weighted longest path
in the normalization graph. The paper tested the normalizer in two aspect, namely,
its effects on dependency parsing and its domain adaptability. Results showed that
the proposed normalizer indeed helps improve parsing, and supports domain transfer
with low cost. Wang and Ng (2013) made the observation that aside from standardiz-
ing informal words, other normalization operations, such as missing word recovery
and punctuation correction, are also crucial for the improvements of downstream
NLU tasks. To this end, they presented a punctuation correction method based on
dynamic CRF (Sutton et al., 2007), which is described in detail in the text chunking
section, and a missing word recovery method based on standard CRF. For the former,
the words and punctuation symbols surrounding the focal word are represented as
binary features, and fed into a two-layer dynamic CRF model. The first layer assigns
the actual punctuation tags, whereas the second layer labels sentence boundaries.

2 [Link]
2.2 Microtext Normalization 51

For missing word recovery, the paper specifically targeted the omission of “be”
in English. Hence, a CRF is employed to label every token in the input sentence
with a tag that indicates whether the token should be followed by a conjugation of
“be”. Furthermore, they proposed a novel beam-search decoder that can integrate
different types of normalization operations, including statistical and rule-based oper-
ations. Given an input sentence, the decoder iteratively produces new sentence-level
hypotheses, evaluating them to retain the plausible ones, until it finds the best nor-
malization. Each hypothesis is generated by several hypothesis producers, each of
which focuses on a different target aspect of informal texts, applying the correspond-
ing type of normalization operation to the sentence. In other words, the objective of
beam-search is to find the best pipeline of hypothesis producers.
Yang and Eisenstein (2013) suggested that data sparsity of social media texts
makes unsupervised learning extremely challenging. To solve this problem, they
proposed a unified unsupervised model based on maximum-likelihood framework.
Given an informal sentence, a log-linear model is applied to model the string similar-
ity between tokens in tweets and standard English. Since it is an unsupervised, locally-
maximized conditional model, typical dynamic programming techniques such as the
Viterbi algorithm is not ideal. Instead, they applied the sequential Monte Carlo al-
gorithm (Cappé et al., 2007) for training. The log-linear model is combined with a
language model for standard English to output the desired conditional probability.
Based on the assumption that syllable plays a fundamental role in non-standard
word generation in social media, Xu et al. (2015b) viewed syllable as the basic
unit and extended the conventional noisy channel approach. Given a non-standard
word, it is first segmented into syllables to identify the non-standard syllables.
Then, the error term of the noisy channel can be represented as syllable similarity,
which is an exponential potential function that combines orthographic similarity
and phonetic similarity. The former is measured by edit distance and LCS, whereas
the latter is measured by phonetic edit distance and phonetic LCS based on letter-
to-phone transcripts. Results showed that the syllable-based approach indeed yields
significant improvement. Additionally, this method has the advantage of being robust
and domain independent.

2.2.3 Neural Network Approach

In recent years, deep learning models are widely used in the field of NLP (Otter
et al., 2020; Mao et al., 2019), as they are able to automatically extract features from
input text. Neural network approaches make use of this advancement in microtext
normalization domain. As stated in the previous section, microtext normalization
can be viewed as a translation problem. Hence, it is a natural progression to employ
the encoder-decoder framework commonly adopted by NMT (Yang et al., 2020a).
Additionally, since the attention of normalizing microtext has gradually shifted
from word level to character level, neural networks are frequently utilized to extract
character-level features.
52 2 Syntactics Processing

Chrupa≥a (2014) introduced a semi-supervised text normalization model. They

pointed out a weakness of the widely used noise channel decomposition in microtext
normalization – texts in normalized form of source domain are limited, and standard
text resources vary across domains. Thus the target language model is in fact not
as easy to estimate as one imagines. Therefore, their model serves as an alternative
that utilizes a large amount of unlabeled data from a source domain. To achieve
this, normalization is formulated as a string transduction problem (Chrupa≥a, 2006),
which is discussed in detail in the lemmatization section. Using labeled data, a CRF
learns the sequence of edit operations that transforms the tweets to standard English.
Additionally, a Simple Recurrent Network (Elman, 1991) is employed to induce
character-level embeddings from unlabeled X data, which are used as features in
the CRF transduction model. Their model is able to yield accurate results with less
training data and without lexical resources.
Leeman-Munk et al. (2015) proposed a deep learning model to solve the W-NUT
(see Table 2.1 for W-NUT) Lexical Normalization for English Tweets challenge.
Their model consists of three components, a normalizer, a flagger that identifies
words to be normalized, and a conformer that smooths out the simple errors from the
normalizer. The normalizer is implemented as a character-level three-layer feedfor-
ward neural network, which takes in the input word and predicts a possible standard
version. The flagger has the same architecture as the normalizer and works in parallel
with the normalizer. The input word is replaced by the generated word only if the
flagger tags it as to be normalized. Since the normalizer functions at character level,
it is possible that the predicted word is one character off. To address this error, a
conformer is constructed using a dictionary collected from the gold standard training
data. If the word generated by the normalizer is not in the dictionary, the conformer
replaces it with the most similar word in the dictionary based on Levenshtein edit
distance.
Taking inspiration from the advances in NMT, Lusetti et al. (2018) proposed a
character-level encoder-decoder model to normalize multilingual SMS messages.
The model employs a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) (Graves
et al., 2013) as an encoder, an LSTM (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1997) as a
decoder, and a soft attention mechanism (Bahdanau et al., 2015). They further
introduced two methods to augment the model. First is to fuse it with a word-level
language model of the target language using the synchronization mechanism (Ruzsics
and Samardzic, 2017). Second is to enhance the training set with additional target-
side data.
Similarly, Satapathy et al. (2019a) tested different variants of the sequence-to-
sequence (Seq2Seq) normalization framework, and to what extent they can improve
the performance of sentiment analysis on informal texts. Specifically, they exper-
imented with four types of character-level encoder-decoder architectures, namely
LSTM, LSTM with attention, gated recurrent unit (GRU) (Cho et al., 2014), and
LSTM with CNN as feature extractor (Kim, 2014). Experiments show that all the
normalizers above help boost the accuracy of sentiment analysis on social media
and SMS texts. The ranking of effectiveness from high to low is GRU, LSTM with
attention, LSTM with CNN, and LSTM.
2.2 Microtext Normalization 53

Table 2.2: Comparison between different microtext normalization methods. OM

stands for orthographic matching based on string similarity. PM stands for phonetic
matching based on phonetic similarity. CX stands for context. SY stands for syllable.
CH stands for character. UN stands for unlabeled.

Method OM PM CX SY CH UN Abbreviation Sentiment

Pennell and Liu (2010) X
Brody and Diakopoulos (2011) X X
Jose and Raj (2014) X X X
Mittal et al. (2014) X X
Linguistic
Desai and Narvekar (2015) X X
Satapathy et al. (2017b) X X X X
Khoury (2015) X
Jahjah et al. (2016) X
Satapathy et al. (2019b) X X
Choudhury et al. (2007) X X X
Jiampojamarn et al. (2007) X X
Bartlett et al. (2008) X X
Kaufmann and Kalita (2010) X X
Xue et al. (2011) X X X X X
Han and Baldwin (2011) X X X X
Statistical
Pennell and Liu (2011) X X X X
Li and Liu (2012) X X X X X
Liu et al. (2012) X X X X X
Zhang et al. (2013) X X
Wang and Ng (2013) X
Yang and Eisenstein (2013) X X
Xu et al. (2015b) X X X X
Chrupa≥a (2014) X X
Leeman-Munk et al. (2015) X X
Neural Lusetti et al. (2018) X X X
Satapathy et al. (2019a) X X X
Lourentzou et al. (2019) X X X

Lourentzou et al. (2019) proposed a hybrid word-character attention-based

encoder-decoder model for text normalization. Given a sentence, the tokens are
first passed through a word-based Seq2Seq model to capture semantic meaning
and long-term contextual dependencies. Any detected OOV tokens are marked and
passed on to a secondary character-based Seq2Seq model, which outputs the possible
in-vocabulary tokens and corresponding confidence. The character-based Seq2Seq
model is trained using synthetic adversarial data that aims to capture errors com-
monly found in social media texts.
54 2 Syntactics Processing

2.2.4 Summary

Microtext normalization is a complex task that encapsulate many sub-problems,

e.g., misspelled words, acronyms, phonetics-based spelling alterations, real-word
spelling errors, missing words and punctuations, etc. In summary, among linguistic
approaches, the system proposed by Pennell and Liu (2010) is advantageous in that it
does not require external lexicons, however, it relies on hand-crafted rules to gener-
ate candidates. Jose and Raj (2014) incorporated a parser as sub-system, effectively
capturing lexico-syntactic information. However, their method heavily relies on man-
ually complied database. The representation of string similarity is a focal point of
linguistic approaches. Desai and Narvekar (2015) used Levenshtein edit distance
to measure similarity, which cannot model the human intuition behind microtext.
Mittal et al. (2014), on the other hand, applied multiple spelling-based phonetic
matching algorithms to compute similarity. However, their method is language-
specific. IPA phonetic matching can be applied to any language, while it suffers
from over-specificity (Khoury, 2015). Jahjah et al. (2016) mitigated this weakness
by incorporating spelling features combined with IPA phonetic matching. Brody and
Diakopoulos (2011); Satapathy et al. (2017b, 2019a) all targeted sentiment analysis.
Brody and Diakopoulos (2011) relied a set of simple rules for elongated words, and
thus limited in use. The latter two models are able to handle various types of OOV
words, among which Satapathy et al. (2019b) has the advantage of incorporating IPA
encoding.
For statistical approaches, most models formulate microtext normalization as a
noisy channel problem, as first implemented by Choudhury et al. (2007). A limitation
of their method is that it can only map one letter to one phoneme. Jiampojamarn et al.
(2007) implemented a many-to-many letter-phoneme alignment that can mitigate
this problem, whereas their solution relies on hand-crafted conversion rules and only
works on fixed window size of letters. Bartlett et al. (2008) and Xu et al. (2015b)
addressed this limitation by utilizing syllable. The former uses syllable tagging as a
sub-system, whereas the latter considers syllable as the basic unit for noisy channel.
Han and Baldwin (2011); Yang and Eisenstein (2013) both utilized unsupervised
learning to mitigate the data sparsity problem for social media text. However, their
methods cannot handle phrases and acronyms. The parsing-centric method proposed
by Zhang et al. (2013) is advantageous in aiding downstream task, however, it has
the same weakness of only dealing with single-token word-to-word conversion. This
limitation can be addressed by SMT-based approach. Kaufmann and Kalita (2010)
directly implemented an existing SMT system for microtext normalization. Following
this approach, Pennell and Liu (2011) presented a character-level SMT system that
can better handle abbreviation. Li and Liu (2012) further improved such method by
combining character-level and phonetic SMT systems. On the other hand, Xue et al.
(2011) tackled the difficulty of abbreviation by using multiple noisy channels, each for
one aspect of microtext. Similarly, Liu et al. (2012) also incorporated multiple noisy
channels, and took it one step further by designing each noisy channel specifically for
its function. Lastly, Wang and Ng (2013) confronted the niche aspects of microtext
normalization, i.e., missing word recovery and punctuation correction.
2.2 Microtext Normalization 55

With neural network approaches, Chrupa≥a (2014) addressed the target domain
problem of NMT-based approach by proposing a semi-supervised alternative. How-
ever, such method only targets single-token word. Leeman-Munk et al. (2015) cir-
cumvented both of these limitations by using a character-level pipeline model, which
conversely can introduce propagated errors. Lusetti et al. (2018); Satapathy et al.
(2019a); Lourentzou et al. (2019) all made use of the encoder-decoder structure
with various neural networks, which can be considered as an NMT-based approach.
Nonetheless, the target domain problem is less prominent nowadays, because a) more
annotated datasets are available, and b) deep learning approach is more adept at ex-
tracting generalized information than traditional SMT systems. Table 2.2 presents
a summary of the introduced methods and their concerns. Notably, most linguistic
and statistical methods use a combination of orthographic matching and phonetic
matching by computing their corresponding similarities. This is expected, as each
provides complementary information that the other cannot address.
There are methods that use neither, formulating their target problems as sequence
prediction tasks instead, using either graphical models or neural networks. For some
approaches, contexts are taken into consideration by incorporating syntactic fea-
tures (Fossati and Di Eugenio, 2008; Kaufmann and Kalita, 2010; Zhang et al.,
2013), or using attention mechanism (Lusetti et al., 2018; Satapathy et al., 2019a;
Lourentzou et al., 2019). Additionally, syllable-level and character-level models are
able to learn more fine-grained patterns than word-level ones, and thus are gaining
popularity in recent years, especially for the latter. Since microtext normalization
is a field with abundant raw text, we also mark out methods that are able to utilize
unlabeled data. Finally, there are specific sub-problems that were addressed by a part
of the reviewed linguistic and statistical methods, namely, abbreviation and acronym
and sentiment-related error. Table 2.3 shows the performance of the introduced
methods, organized by their target tasks. On the SMS-C dataset, Li and Liu (2012)
obtained the highest top-1 accuracy, whereas Liu et al. (2012) obtained the highest
top-20 accuracy. Zhang et al. (2013) achieved the best performance on LexNorm1.1,
and Xu et al. (2015b) on LexNorm1.2.
To sum up, linguistic approaches build upon simple text-level and phonetic-level
matching algorithms, utilizing hand-crafted rules, lexicons or knowledge bases. As
mentioned above, it is adequate at targeting specific problems, e.g., IPA-based pho-
netic matching, sentiment, and context provided by metadata. However, its drawbacks
are prominent. Rule-based and lexicon-based methods require a lot of human effort,
hence unable to adapt to other language domains. Statistical approach, on the other
hand, is much less labor-intensive. This type of models regard microtext normaliza-
tion as an SMT problem or a sequence labeling problem. Although most of them still
rely on feature engineering, they pave the way for neural network approaches. With
the help of neural networks, context-sensitive character-level features can be easily
extracted by Seq2Seq models. It is also adaptable to other languages. However, neu-
ral network approaches still have much room for improvement. To our knowledge,
there is not yet a deep learning normalizer that directly addresses the data sparsity
problem caused by phonetics-based alterations.
56 2 Syntactics Processing

Table 2.3: Performance of the introduced microtext normalization methods. Non-

standard denotes normalizing informal OOV words. X API stands for data randomly
collected from X (formerly known as Twitter). SMS-G stands for SMS messages
generated by volunteers. WER is word error rate.

Task Method Experiment 1 Experiment 2

Dataset Result Measure Dataset Result Measure
Pennell and Liu (2010) X API + SMS-G 58.46 top-1 acc. X API + SMS-G 75.38 top-3 acc.
Jose and Raj (2014) SMS-G 95.41 acc.
Khoury (2015) SMS-L 30.2 top-1 acc. SMS-L 59.7 top-5 acc.
Jahjah et al. (2016) SMS-L + SMS-C 56.6 top-1 acc. SMS-L + SMS-C 73.6 top-5 acc.
Satapathy et al. (2019b) NUS SMS 92.75 acc. X API 72.88 acc.
Kaufmann and Kalita (2010) X API 79.85 BLEU
Pennell and Liu (2011) X API 75.57 top-1 acc. X API 92.53 top-20 acc.
Choudhury et al. (2007) SMS-C 58 top-1 acc. SMS-C 86 top-20 acc.
Xue et al. (2011) SMS-C 96 acc. X API 96 acc.
Nonstandard Han and Baldwin (2011) SMS-C 75.5 F1 LexNorm1.1 75.3 F1
Li and Liu (2012) SMS-C 71.96 top-1 acc. SMS-C 83.11 top-20 acc.
Liu et al. (2012) SMS-C 64.36 top-1 acc. SMS-C 91.75 top-20 acc.
Yang and Eisenstein (2013) LexNorm1.1 82.09 F1 LexNorm1.2 82.06 F1
Xu et al. (2015b) LexNorm1.1 85.3 F1 LexNorm1.2 86.08 F1
Chrupa≥a (2014) LexNorm1.1 4.5 WER
Leeman-Munk et al. (2015) W-NUT 81.49 F1
Lourentzou et al. (2019) W-NUT 83.94 F1
Lusetti et al. (2018) WUS + Sw-SMS 87.61 acc.
Brody and Diakopoulos (2011) X API 93 acc.
Polarity Satapathy et al. (2017b) X API 81.59 acc.
Satapathy et al. (2019a) NUS SMS 83.5 acc.

Letter-to-phoneme Jiampojamarn et al. (2007) CMUDict 65.6 acc. CELEX Eng 83.6 acc.
Bartlett et al. (2008) CELEX 89.99 acc.
QA system Mittal et al. (2014) FAQ corpus 75 acc.
Missing tokens Wang and Ng (2013) NUS SMS 66.54 BLEU
Parsing Zhang et al. (2013) SMS-C 81 F1 LexNorm1.1 91.9 F1

It can potentially lead to performance drop for languages that are rich in such
alterations on social media, such as Chinese. Thus, incorporating phonetic features
or a phonetic-level encoder can be a potential direction for future work. Furthermore,
the use of microtext is strongly affected by the geolocation and dialect of users. For
instance, when expressing laughter in Latin alphabets, there is a tendency to use “lol”
for English speakers, “hhh” for Chinese speakers, “www” for Japanese speakers,
“kkk” for Korean speakers, “555” for Thai speakers, etc. Metadata that provides
such information is scarcely utilized in existing methods. As such, this would also
be an interesting direction to explore.

2.3 Sentence Boundary Disambiguation

SBD, which decides where sentences begin and end in raw texts, is an important yet
overlooked preprocessing task for many NLU applications. Downstream tasks such
as machine translation (Matsoukas et al., 2007; Zhou et al., 2017) and document
summarization (Jing et al., 2003; Boudin et al., 2011) rely on predetermined sentence
boundaries for good performance.
2.3 Sentence Boundary Disambiguation 57

Table 2.4: Widely used corpora for SBD.

Dataset Source Reference

BC The Brown Corpus Francis and Kucera (1979)
WSJ Wall Street Journal Marcus et al. (1993)
SMC X text corpus Rudrapal et al. (2015)
MG Texts in Modern Greek Stamatatos et al. (1999)
Text

GRS Gold Standard Rules Sadvilkar and Neumann (2020)

Medical Information Mart
MIMIC Johnson et al. (2016)
for Intensive Care corpus
FV Fairview Health Services database Knoll et al. (2019)
T-News Speech transcripts from news program Stevenson and Gaizauskas (2000)
T-CTL Prepared speech transcripts Treviso et al. (2017)
T-MCI Impaired speech transcripts Treviso et al. (2017)
T-R Transcripts of BBC and radio news Gotoh and Renals (2000)
Prosody

BN Broadcast news transcripts Liu et al. (2004)

Conversational telephone
CTS Liu et al. (2004)
speech transcripts

Sentence segmentation is seemingly easy through identifying punctuation marks.

However, there are some notable ambiguities that often occur in text. For instance,
aside from indicating the end of a sentence, a period can also appear in abbreviations
or as decimal point. In a more complex scenario where an abbreviation is the last
token of a sentence, the period simultaneously serves as a part of the abbreviation
as well as the full-stop of the sentence. There are two widely-used corpora for SBD,
the Brown Corpus (Francis and Kucera, 1979) and the WSJ corpus from the Penn
Treebank project (Marcus et al., 1993). In the Brown Corpus, 90% of periods occur
at the end of sentences, and 10% at the end of abbreviations, among which about
1% to 2% are in both, whereas in the WSJ corpus, about 47% of periods appear
in abbreviations. Thus, the ambiguity level largely depends on corpora and the
associated domains. Widely applied datasets are listed in Table 2.4. The evaluation
metrics commonly used are accuracy (or error rate) and F-measure.
In this chapter, we divide existing SBD algorithms into three categories: word-
based approaches, syntax-based approaches, and prosody-based approaches.

2.3.1 Word-based Approach

The word-based approaches largely rely on morpholexical information, e.g., suffix,

spelling, capitalization, and word length to segment sentences. For early works,
rule-based approaches, n-gram probabilistic methods, and lexical lookup methods
are commonly employed to predict the type of the words surrounding a period, thus
determining whether the period marked the end of the sentence.
58 2 Syntactics Processing

Grefenstette and Tapanainen (1994) were the first to propose a rule-based algo-
rithm to resolve the ambiguities caused by the usage of periods. Specifically, a set of
rules are manually created using regular expressions to represent possible patterns
where periods that do not occur as full-stops. The system then matches the surround-
ing context of every period in texts against the regular expressions to predict whether
it is a sentence boundary. Their system obtains reasonably high accuracy with great
computational efficiency. To enable automated extraction of rules, Stamatatos et al.
(1999) applied transformation-based learning to SBD. Compared to the original
transformation-based algorithm (Brill, 1995), which is discussed in detail in the
POS tagging section, their method limits the number of possible transformations.
This is achieved by maintaining two sets of rules for each punctuation mark. Initially,
all punctuation marks are considered to be full-stops. Then, for each of them, the
system automatically learns a set for rules that triggers the removal of a sentence
boundary, and a set of rules that triggers the insertion of a sentence boundary. This
mechanism ensures that the maximum number of transitions for each punctuation
mark is two.
Sadvilkar and Neumann (2020) developed a rule-based SBD system called
PySBD, where the reasoning mechanism of their system are explainable. The perfor-
mance is comparable to statistical models. Unlike the other supervised SBD methods,
PySBD is trained and evaluated with the Golden Rule Set (GRS). GRS is a language
specific corpus designed for SBD. It contains sets of hand-crafted rules over a variety
of domains that are carried out in a pipeline fashion. Despite the decent accuracy,
there are some drawbacks to rule-based methods. Firstly, periods exhibit absorption
properties, meaning when multiple periods occurs they are often marked as one.
Therefore, it is challenging to build a comprehensive set of rules where they do
not contradict each other. Furthermore, such systems are often developed using a
specific corpus, thus further application to a corpus in another language or domain
is difficult. Therefore, many machine learning methods are proposed for the SBD
tasks to address these shortcomings.
To reduce the labor efforts in developing hand-crafted rules and features, Reynar
and Ratnaparkhi (1997) proposed a SBD system based on MaxEnt (Ratnaparkhi,
1996). It requires only simple information about the candidate punctuation marks.
For each candidate punctuation mark, the system utilizes morpholexical features
of its trigram tokens, estimating their joint probability distribution as a sentence
boundary. The performance of their system is comparable to those which require
vastly more resources.
Schmid (2000) proposed an unsupervised learning method by manually listing all
the possible scenarios where a period may denote a decimal point or an abbreviation.
For each of the listed scenarios, a probability model is created accordingly to predict
whether the period is a full-stop. Unlike previous token-based methods, which rely on
the focal token itself and its local context to determine whether it is an abbreviation,
their model computes the distribution of possible abbreviations by scanning through
the whole corpus. This method can be referred to as a type-based approach (Kiss
and Strunk, 2002).
2.3 Sentence Boundary Disambiguation 59

Similarly, Kiss and Strunk (2002) introduced an innovative unsupervised type-

based system that requires less human effort. Their approach views the identification
of abbreviations as a collocation detection problem, which can be solved using
log likelihood ratio. Specifically, an abbreviation can be seen as a collocation of
the abbreviated word and the following period. Kiss and Strunk (2006) further
expanded this system to create the Punkt system, which has a more complex structure.
First, the input text is processed by the previous type-based algorithm to obtain the
initial annotation, which marks a period as either part of an abbreviation, part of
an ellipsis, or sentence boundary. Subsequently, a token-based classifier is applied
to revise the initial annotation as well as to determine whether a period is both
part of an abbreviation or ellipsis and the end of sentence, thus producing the final
annotation. In the token-based classifier, log likelihood ratio is used for two heuristic.
One is the collocation heuristic, which takes a pair of word surrounding a period
and tests whether a collocation tie exists between them. The other is the frequent
sentence starter heuristic, which searches for word types that form a collocation with
a preceding sentence boundary based on the results from the type-based classifier.
The frequent sentence starter heuristic helps counterbalance the collocation heuristic,
which in some scenarios falsely identifies collocation across a sentence boundary.
Gillick (2009) proposed a SBD system based on SVM. The system takes the
trigram contexts of periods as input. Specifically, for a trigram of the form “L.R”,
the problem is defined as the conditional probability of the binary sentence boundary
class s, P(s |“L.R”). The system utilizes morpholexical features, e.g., capitalization
and word length to train the SVM. To reduce the error rate caused by words such
as U.S and N.Y, the system adopts the type-based approach, taking into account
the log count of lowercased appearances of L and R in the input texts. Rudrapal
et al. (2015) focused on the problem of SBD in social media texts and explored
three machine learning algorithms for the task, namely CRF, Naïve Bayes, and
sequential minimal optimization (SMO) (Platt, 1999). Since social media texts likely
use informal languages, identifying sentence boundaries in such texts is a even
greater challenge. To mitigate the ambiguities, the corpus is first tokenized, using
the tokenizer in CMU Twitter POS tagger (O’Connor et al., 2010; Gimpel et al.,
2010). Subsequently, the machine learning algorithms are trained on the basic textual
features of the tokenized corpus. The CRF method is able to extract simultaneously
correlated lexical features, thus easier to incorporate different knowledge sources.
The SMO method, on the other hand, is an iterative optimization approach to train
SVM. Results show that SMO yields the best performance on social media texts,
whereas Naïve Bayes comes close in the second place. On the Brown corpus, both
Naïve Bayes and SMO obtain good performance, but the former is more accurate.
CRF, however, performs marginally worse than the other two algorithms. Riley
(1989) first introduced a tree-based algorithm to SBD, where a regression tree is
generated using a set of hand-crafted morpholexical features from the trigram context
of words with periods in them to identify decimal points and abbreviations. Although
their model achieves accurate results, the model requires a vast amount of training
data, making it too costly for a preprocessing task and unrealistic for languages and
domains with limited resources.
60 2 Syntactics Processing

Wong and Chao (2010); Wong et al. (2014) applied an incremental algorithm
on SBD. Their system is based on i + Learning principle, which is an incremental
decision tree learning algorithm, making it flexible to changes and suited for online
learning. The algorithm can be divided into two phases. First, the system constructs
a top-down binary decision tree offline using the initial training data. The resulting
tree acts as an optimal base for the second phase, which is a online procedure that
adopts the tree transposition mechanism of Incremental Tree Induction (Utgoff et al.,
1997) as a bias to grow and revise the base tree. This method dynamically revises
the tree according to the new incoming data while preserving the essential statistical
information. Thus it is able to adapt to texts in a different language or domain without
the need to retrain from scratch. Their system is trained on morpholexical features
extracted from trigram contexts.
All of the aforementioned SBD systems, with the exception of Kiss and Strunk
(2002, 2006), use n-gram based technique to extract textual information, which leads
to sparse vector space problems. To address this, Treviso et al. (2017) suggested word
embedding as an alternative and verified which embedding induction method works
best for SBD. They investigated word2vec (Mikolov et al., 2013a), Wang2Vec (Ling
et al., 2015a), and FastText (Bojanowski et al., 2016). They used Continuous Bag-
Of-Words (CBOW) and Skip-gram to train the vectors, respectively. They then tested
the embeddings on a Recurrent CNN (RCNN) (Treviso et al., 2016) for sentence
segmentation. Experiments show that word2vec consistently performs better than
the other two methods. Additionally, the Skip-gram strategy generally yields better
results than the CBOW for the Wang2Vec and the FastText, whereas for word2vec the
better strategy depends on the corpus. Furthermore, they also compared the model
performance between using only the extracted morpholexical features and adding
morphosyntactic features for SBD. Interestingly, the results show that the explicitly
added features do not make a difference in terms of accuracy. They theorized that
the word embedding alone carries sufficient morphosyntactic information for SBD.
Knoll et al. (2019) utilized both word embeddings and character embeddings
to further capture morpholexical features. Based on the observation that previous
SBD systems perform poorly on a domain-specific corpus such as clinical texts, they
proposed a deep learning algorithm to address this problem. First, the input text is
tokenized and transformed into word embeddings using FastText. The text is also fed
into a CNN layer (Collobert et al., 2011) to obtain character embeddings, which is
summed with the word embeddings. The final word representation is passed through
a BiLSTM layer (Graves et al., 2013) and a sigmoid-activated dense layer to output
the log-probability of a word being the start of a sentence. They tested their algorithm
on the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) corpus (Johnson et al.,
2016) and a dataset drawn from the Fairview Health Services (FV). Results suggest
that the deep learning approach indeed outperforms the traditional ones, especially on
corpora from different domains and corpora where sentences are often not terminated
by punctuation marks.
2.3 Sentence Boundary Disambiguation 61

2.3.2 Syntax-based Approach

It is difficult for word-based approaches to robustly capture contexts larger than the
focal token. Syntax-based SBD systems can solve this problem by utilizing POS tags.
Intuitively, we know that the number of possible POS patterns for a bigram is much
less than the number of possible word patterns, thus lessening sparsity problems.
Additionally, the syntactic function of a word makes a big difference when identifying
abbreviations. For instance, when predicting whether a capitalized word following a
period is a proper name or a common word, taking into account the POS tags of its
trigram context is more effective than relying only on their morpholexical properties.
Palmer and Hearst (1994) were the first to incorporate POS tagging in the task of
SDB. They proposed an efficient and portable system based on feed-forward neural
network. The core idea is to use POS probabilities of the tokens surrounding a
punctuation mark as input to the feed-forward network, which outputs an activation
value to determine what label to assign to the punctuation mark. First, the system
uses a slightly modified version of the PARTS POS tagger (Church, 1989), which
also produces the frequency counts of the POS tags associated with each token.
The system then maps them into a more generalized set of 18 POS categories. Each
input token in the n-gram context around a punctuation is then represented by a
descriptor array indicating their probability distributions for these 18 categories, in
addition of two flags that mark whether the word is capitalized and if it follows a
punctuation mark. Subsequently, these descriptor arrays are fed into a fully-connected
hidden layer with a sigmoid activation function, and then into an output unit to
decide whether the punctuation marks are full-stops. The system also introduces
two adjustable thresholds to leave room for difficult ambiguities. When the output
score falls under the first threshold, the punctuation mark is not a sentence boundary.
When the score is higher than the second threshold, it is a sentence boundary. If the
score is in between these two thresholds, that means the system is under-informed to
make a confident prediction and it’ll be marked accordingly for later use.
Based on this algorithm, Palmer and Hearst (1997) further developed a SBD
system called Satz, where the aforementioned n-gram descriptor arrays containing
POS information can be fed into either a neural network as in their previous work,
or a decision tree. The learning algorithm chosen for the system is a c4.5 (Salzberg,
1994) decision tree induction program, which iteratively constructs the tree using the
descriptor arrays as input attributes. Each leaf node of the decision tree represents
the value of the goal attribute, which in this case indicates whether a punctuation
mark is a sentence boundary. After the decision tree is built, the algorithm prunes it
by recursively examining each sub-tree to reduce errors and overfitting. Experiments
show that the tree-based learning method achieves comparable accuracy as the feed-
forward neural network. However, there are problems with the n-grams of generalized
POS categories. First, the generalized categories are far sparser than the traditional
Penn Treebank POS tags, thus requiring more training data. Furthermore, since
words outside of the n-gram have no influence on the prediction, the n-gram must be
of sufficient length to capture syntactic information. In the Satz System, n is set to
be 6, which is also much sparser than the commonly adopted bigrams and trigrams.
62 2 Syntactics Processing

The reason behind these weakness is that, this method is built on the premise
that sentence boundaries must be obtained before POS tagging. Thus, to utilize
syntactic information, the original POS tags have to replaced by the generalized
POS categories. This dilemma is solved by Mikheev (2000), who suggested that POS
taggers do not necessarily require predetermined sentence boundaries to operate. The
simple solution is to break the input text into short text-spans so that it is easier for
POS taggers to handle. Based on this notion, he proposed a SBD system using
POS tagging framework. To achieve this, he made some minor adjustments to the
Brown Corpus and the WSJ corpus. First, the period in abbreviation is tokenized
separately from the rest of the abbreviations. Second, all the periods are marked
accordingly to three types of tags, namely full-stop, abbreviation, or both. With this
setting, SBD can be performed using a POS tagger, which is able to fully make use
of the local syntactic information. The POS tagger chosen for this system is based
on HMM and MaxEnt, which will be discussed in detail in the POS tagging section.
He further introduced a document-centered approach (Mikheev, 2002), which can
also be regarded as type-based. When using this approach, the system scans the
entire document for contexts where the focal token is marked unambiguously. This
approach is proven to be effective in distinguishing whether a capitalized word is a
proper name or a common word, which works in complement with the POS tagger
to determine sentence boundaries.
Stevenson and Gaizauskas (2000) applied memory-based learning to identify
sentence boundaries in transcripts produced by an ASR system. It is more challenging
than SBD with standard texts. For instance, the text generated by an ASR system
is generally unpunctuated, in single case, and likely to contain transcription errors.
Their algorithm is based on TiMBL (Daelemans et al., 2003), which memorizes a
set of training examples. It classifies new instances by assigning them the class of the
most similar learned instances. The system adopts both POS tags and morpholexical
features such as capitalization and stopword flag. Results show that the proposed
algorithm cannot effectively address the difficulties in ASR transcripts. Following the
work of Reynar and Ratnaparkhi (1997), Agarwal et al. (2005) proposed a MaxEnt
classifier that incorporates both lexical and syntactic information. They assigned
each token with a binary End-of-Sentence tag and a POS tag, formulating SBD as a
sequential labeling problem. Similar to the previous MaxEnt model, their classifier
is also trained on the features of trigram contexts. Their work also concluded with
the best tested feature set for the MaxEnt classifier.

2.3.3 Prosody-based Approach

Prosody-based approaches are proposed specifically for SBD in ASR. Previous

methods (Stevenson and Gaizauskas, 2000; Treviso et al., 2017) took a word-based
approach, using only textual features from speech transcripts. However, transcripts
tend to be erroneous, and thus are unable to provide reliable cues to segment sen-
tences.
2.3 Sentence Boundary Disambiguation 63

Prosody-based approaches, on the other hand, incorporate prosodic information,

e.g., pitch, pause length, pre-pausal lengthening, and energy patterns. Such prosodic
features are assumed to be able to compensate the lack of punctuation and capital-
ization in speech. Furthermore, sentence structures are often more elusive in spoken
language. A sentence-like unit (SU) in speech can be a sentence, part of a sentence, or
a semantically complete component in a sentence (Strassel, 2003). Therefore, SBD
in ASR faces the additional challenge of determining whether an SU is an actual
sentence. Gotoh and Renals (2000) presented two finite state models to statistically
extract sentence boundary information from program scripts, as well as transcrip-
tions of broadcast speech produced by a vocabulary speech recognition system. The
former is an n-gram type language model trained by the program [Link] latter
is a pause duration model, which is a statistical prosody model estimated from the
outputs of an ASR system aligned with their corresponding program transcripts. The
joint probability of a sequence of prosodic features are combined the corresponding
sequences of word- and class-tokens to enhance the accuracy.
Liu et al. (2004) first built an HMM-based SBD system for continuous speech.
Then, they proposed a MaxEnt posterior probability model, which aims to address
two main shortcomings of the HMM system. Firstly, the training objective of HMM
is to maximize the joint probability of observed and hidden events, which is not the
best criterion to reduce classification error. Secondly, the n-gram language model
underlying the HMM transition model requires a significant increase in the number
of model parameters to incorporate highly correlated features. The former is solved
by replacing the generative model with a posterior probability model. The latter is
addressed by MaxEnt framework, which allows for a large number of overlapping
features. Aside from word n-gram and its syntactic information, they also utilized
prosodic features around each word boundary, e.g., duration, pitch, and energy
patterns. The system is evaluated using the NIST3 SU error rate. Results suggest that
the proposed model and HMM have complementary strengths and weaknesses. The
MaxEnt model is able to achieve better accuracy, whereas the HMM makes more
effective use of prosodic features, and degrades less with word recognition errors.
Taking it one step further, Liu et al. (2005) applied CRF to SBD in speech,
comparing its performance with the HMM model and the MaxEnt model. CRF
has the advantages of being discriminatively trained and able to model the entire
sequence. As in their previous work, textual and prosodic information is used to
train the models. Results show that CRF indeed performs marginally better than
the HMM and MaxEnt. The only shortcoming of CRF model is that, compared
to other two models, it takes longer to train as the number of features increases.
Liu et al. (2006) found that a SU in speech is less frequently a sentence than a
non-sentence unit. Thus, a prosody model must be able to deal with the imbalanced
dataset distribution. To address this problem, they modeled prosodic information
with a decision tree classifier in their HMM-based system (Liu et al., 2004). They
also investigated different types of sampling approaches, concluding that random
downsampling is the most advantageous.

3 [Link]
64 2 Syntactics Processing

Table 2.5: Comparison between different SBD methods. Token stands for token-
based SBD. Type stands for type-based SBD.

Method Morpholexical Syntactic Prosodic Token Type Neural ASR

Grefenstette and Tapanainen (1994) X X
Stamatatos et al. (1999) X X
Sadvilkar and Neumann (2020) X X
Reynar and Ratnaparkhi (1997) X X
Schmid (2000) X X
Kiss and Strunk (2002) X X
Word Kiss and Strunk (2006) X X
Gillick (2009) X X
Rudrapal et al. (2015) X X
Riley (1989) X X
Wong and Chao (2010) X X
Wong et al. (2014) X X
Treviso et al. (2017) X X X
Knoll et al. (2019) X X
Palmer and Hearst (1994) X X X
Palmer and Hearst (1997) X X X
Syntax Mikheev (2000) X X
Mikheev (2002) X X X
Stevenson and Gaizauskas (2000) X X X X
Agarwal et al. (2005) X X X
Gotoh and Renals (2000) X X X X
Prosody Liu et al. (2004) X X X X
Liu et al. (2005) X X X X
Liu et al. (2006) X X X X

2.3.4 Summary

In conclusion, existing SBD systems can be categorized into word-based, syntax-

based, and prosody-based approaches. Table 2.5 presents a summary of the intro-
duced systems, and the features and methods they used. In this chapter, for conve-
nience, if a SBD system only use the word itself as lexical features, it is not counted
as a method using morpholexical features. A comparison of all the system perfor-
mance can be found in Table 2.6. The datasets used are listed in Table 2.4. On the
Brown Corpus, word-based method proposed by Wong and Chao (2010) achieved
the highest accuracy, exceeding the best syntax-based method (Mikheev, 2002) by
0.26%. On the WSJ dataset, the best word-based method (Gillick, 2009) obtained
99.75% accuracy, whereas the best syntax-based method (Mikheev, 2002) obtained
99.55%. For prosody-based approaches, Liu et al. (2005) obtained the lowest NIST
SU error rate.
Word-based systems utilize morpholexical features, e.g., capitalization, suffix,
word length, etc, which can be further divided into token-based, type-based, and
neural network based. Given a focal word, token-based methods use rules or machine
learning models to determine sentence boundary based on the features of the local
context. Among rule-based systems, the work of Stamatatos et al. (1999) could
automatically generate rules, and Sadvilkar and Neumann (2020) applied sets of
accurate rules in pipeline.
2.3 Sentence Boundary Disambiguation 65

Since the rule-based methods are rigid and labor intensive, Reynar and Ratna-
parkhi (1997); Rudrapal et al. (2015) alleviated this by using statistical models that
require simple features. Riley (1989) proposed the first tree-based SBD system,
which is more comprehensible to human. To reduce the computation cost, Wong
and Chao (2010); Wong et al. (2014) applied an incremental tree-based algorithm,
which is also more flexible and suited for online learning. Type-based methods,
compared to token-based ones, not only consider the morpholexical features of the
token, but also compute its likelihood as a non-sentence boundary over the entire
corpus. Hence, type-based approaches have the advantage of having the capacity to
manage a large amount of unannotated data. Among type-based methods, Schmid
(2000) implemented separate probability models for different scenarios. However,
it requires the manual labor of listing such scenarios. Kiss and Strunk (2002, 2006)
adverted this by framing SBD as a collocation detection problem of words and
following periods. Gillick (2009) classified sentence boundary based on trigram
context, only incorporating a type-based method for difficult instances, which is less
computationally expensive. Treviso et al. (2017) suggested word embedding as a
more effective alternative for n-gram and type-based approaches, bypassing feature
engineering. Further on this direction, Knoll et al. (2019) utilized word-level and
character-level neural networks to automatically extract morpholexical features.
Syntax-based systems are proposed based on the assumption that POS tags can
provide context information where word-based approaches are lacking. The majority
of syntax-based systems utilize syntactic features in conjunction with morpholexi-
cal ones to enhance the performance. Palmer and Hearst (1994, 1997) are the first
to incorporate POS information, but wrongly assume that sentence boundary is a
prerequisite for POS tagging. Notably, although these systems consist of a feedfor-
ward neural network, it is solely used for classification, not for feature extraction.
Thus, they are not included in the neural category in Table 2.6. Mikheev (2000,
2002) solved the POS tagging dilemma, and developed a type-based method. Fol-
lowing this setup, Agarwal et al. (2005) used a token-based probabilistic model,
whereas Stevenson and Gaizauskas (2000) tackled SBD in ASR with memory-based
learning, which can be seen as type-based. Lastly, since speech lacks the textual
cues crucial to sentence boundary, prosody-based systems incorporate prosodic fea-
tures for SBD in ASR. Gotoh and Renals (2000); Liu et al. (2004, 2005) integrated
prosodic features using various machine learning models. However, their systems
are not adept in distinguishing SUs and sentences. Liu et al. (2006) confronted this
weakness by tackling the imbalanced data distribution.
SBD for standard texts has already been well-studied. However, domain-specific
SBD still remains a challenge, as some domains tend to use punctuations differently
from general formal texts. Griffis et al. (2016) reviewed several off-the-shelf models
on biomedical and clinical corpora. Their error analysis showed that the semicolons,
colons, and newlines heavily used in clinical text are extremely error-prone. Addition-
ally, periods used in unknown abbreviations, names, and numbers are a significant
cause of error as well. Fatima and Mueller (2019) attempted to solve the task of SBD
in financial domain via a machine learning approach and an unsupervised rule-based
approach.
66 2 Syntactics Processing

Table 2.6: Performance of the introduced SBD methods. W stands for Word. S stands
for Syntax. P stands for Prosody. NIST is for NIST SU error rate.

Experiment 1 Experiment 2
Method
Dataset Result Measure Dataset Result Measure
Stamatatos et al. (1999) MG 99.4% Acc.
Sadvilkar and Neumann (2020) GRS 97.92% Acc.
Treviso et al. (2017) T-CTL 79% F1 T-MCI 74% F1
Knoll et al. (2019) MIMIC 98.6% F1 FV 99.2% F1
Rudrapal et al. (2015) BC 99.6% Acc. SMC 87.0% Acc.
Grefenstette and Tapanainen (1994) BC 93.78% Acc.
W Reynar and Ratnaparkhi (1997) BC 97.9% Acc. WSJ 98.8% Acc.
Schmid (2000) BC 99.70% Acc. WSJ 99.62% Acc.
Kiss and Strunk (2002) WSJ 99.05% F1
Kiss and Strunk (2006) BC 98.89% F1 WSJ 98.35% F1
Gillick (2009) BC 99.64% Acc. WSJ 99.75% Acc.
Riley (1989) BC 99.8% Acc.
Wong and Chao (2010) BC 99.98% Acc.
Wong et al. (2014) BC 99.81% Acc. WSJ 99.80% Acc.
Palmer and Hearst (1994) WSJ 98.5% Acc.
Palmer and Hearst (1997) WSJ 98.9% Acc.
Mikheev (2000) BC 98.8% Acc. WSJ 99.2% Acc.
S Mikheev (2002) BC 99.72% Acc. WSJ 99.55% Acc.
Agarwal et al. (2005) BC 97.7% F1 WSJ 97.8% F1
Stevenson and Gaizauskas (2000) T-News 76% F1
Gotoh and Renals (2000) T-R 70% F1
Liu et al. (2004) BN 48.61% NIST CTS 30.66% NIST
P
Liu et al. (2005) BN 46.28% NIST CTS 29.30% NIST
Liu et al. (2006) BN 49.57% NIST CTS 32.40% NIST

Unfortunately, the former fails to produce acceptable results, whereas the per-
formance of the latter is acceptable but still leaves a lot to be desired. Sanchez
(2019) examined several off-the-shelf algorithms for SBD on legal texts. Similarly,
the results are not ideal, indicating that there is still a lot of room for improvement
for these existing approaches. Therefore, a robust SBD system that is capable of
handling domain-specific corpora is called for. Another challenging aspect is SBD
in speech, especially SU boundary detection. Considering the lack of annotated re-
sources in this domain, one possible direction for future work is semi-supervised
learning (SSL). For instance, the machine can learn from annotated training samples
that are manually labeled to precisely indicate SU boundaries, infer labels on the
unannotated data, and fine-tune itself.
2.4 POS Tagging 67

2.4 POS Tagging

POS tagging is a fundamental task in NLU, which aims to label each word in a
given text with its POS tag, e.g., noun, verb, adjective, etc. It is an upstream task
that preprocesses the input texts to assist more complex NLU applications. Since
the POS of a word can affect its meaning and polarity, POS tagging is important
for downstream tasks such as WSD (Taghipour and Ng, 2015a; Alva and Hegde,
2016), information retrieval (Mahmood et al., 2017), sentiment analysis (Asghar
et al., 2014; Mubarok et al., 2017), metaphor detection (Mao et al., 2021a; Ge et al.,
2022) and interpretation (Mao et al., 2018, 2022a). Numerous studies have been
done on POS tagging for a variety of languages (Shao et al., 2017; Nguyen et al.,
2017; Kanakaraddi and Nandyal, 2018; Darwish et al., 2018). Considering that the
fundamental methodologies are similar across different languages, here we focus on
introducing POS taggers in English.
English POS tagging is a well-studied problem. Following Church (1989), most
early works utilized hand-crafted features, derived from the local contexts, e.g., rule-
based learning (Brill, 1995), memory-based learning (Daelemans et al., 1999b),
and other statistical approaches, among which the MaxEnt framework (Ratnaparkhi,
1996; Toutanvoa and Manning, 2000; Curran and Clark, 2003) and directed graphical
models (Kupiec, 1992; Brants, 2000; McCallum et al., 2000) received the most
attention. The performance of feature engineering approaches took a big leap with
the novel CRF (Lafferty et al., 2001) and the perceptron algorithm (Collins, 2002),
which addresses the parameter estimation problem of MaxEnt models. Attempts at
applying bidirectional inference to the task also achieved remarkable improvements,
for instance the cyclic dependency network (Toutanova et al., 2003) and guided
learning framework (Shen et al., 2007). With the recent surge of interest in deep
learning, neural networks such as CNN (LeCun et al., 1998; Collobert et al., 2011),
recurrent neural network (RNN) and LSTM (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1997;
Graves et al., 2013) have been applied to the field of POS tagging, freeing the task
of POS tagging from hand-crafted feature set and yielding even more promising
results. Subsequently, many studies extended the previous methods to SSL to further
boost the tagging accuracy (Clark et al., 2003; Suzuki and Isozaki, 2008; Zhou et al.,
2018). The performance of POS taggers are measured by accuracy, or in its other
form, e.g., error rate.
In this chapter, we first review the tagging schemas of POS tagging. Then, we
divide existing POS taggers into the following categories: feature engineering ap-
proaches, deep learning approaches, and SSL approaches.

2.4.1 Tagging Schemas

In this section, we introduce the two most prevalent tagsets used in the field of POS
tagging, namely: Penn Treebank POS tags and Universal POS tags.
68 2 Syntactics Processing

Table 2.7: Widely used corpora for POS tagging.

Category Dataset Source Reference

BC the Brown Corpus Francis and Kucera (1979)
Formal WSJ Wall Street Journal Marcus et al. (1993)
Genia Genia Biomedical corpus Kim et al. (2003)
T-POS X text corpus Ritter et al. (2011)
Social media ARK X text corpus Owoputi et al. (2013)
NPS X text corpus Forsyth (2007)

The Penn Treebank POS tagset (Marcus et al., 1993) is the most widely used
tagging paradigm. Derived from the Brown corpus, the Penn Treebank has since
replaced it as the standard for POS tagging in English. Compared to its predecessor,
the Penn Treebank offers a more fine-grained syntactic distinction, containing 36
POS categories in total. For instance, a base form of a verb is always tagged as VB
in the Brown corpus, whereas the Penn Treebank differentiates it as VB (imperative
or infinitive) or VBP (non-third person singular present tense) depending on the
context. However, as the need for multilingual and cross-lingual POS induction
arises, the granular differentiation of the Penn Treebank becomes a drawback, since
many languages do not follow the grammatical structure of English.
To address the weakness of the Penn Treebank and facilitate future research,
Petrov et al. (2011) proposed a tagset with coarser syntactic POS categories based
on the observed commonalities across most languages. The Universal tagset contains
12 universal POS categories. In addition, they also created a mapping from 25 Penn
Treebank POS categories to their tagset. When used in conjunction with the Penn
Treebank, the Universal tagset and mappings are able to account for 22 different
languages. The commonly used corpora for POS tagging (in English) are listed in
Table 2.7.

2.4.2 Feature Engineering Approach

Feature engineering approaches, as the name suggests, rely on hand-crafted feature

templates to determine the POS tag for a word. Some commonly used features are
lexical, contextual, and morphological. To avoid confusion, here we define lexical
features as the frequencies of the observed POS tags in the training data, contextual
features as the surrounding words and their predicted POS tags if available, mor-
phological features as affixes, and existence of numerals, hyphens, capitalization,
etc. The taggers utilize such features via rule-based or machine learning algorithms.
Notably, graphical models such as HMM and CRF gain most attention because of
their proficiency at capturing sequential dependency.
2.4 POS Tagging 69

Church (1989) was the first to determine that features from two or less of the
nearby tokens are significantly informative to predicting the POS tag of a given
token. For example, the word bear can be a verb or a noun, but if it is observed to
follow a determiner such as the, then the tagger can label bear in the word sequence
the bear as noun. The tagger takes a lexicon-based approach – for each word in the
corpus, their most frequent POS tags and the corresponding lexical probabilities are
stored in a lookup table. The tagger also computes the contextual probability, which
is the probability of observing a POS tag given the two POS tags following it. Then,
given a sentence, the goal is to search for the tag sequence that optimizes the lexical
and contextual probabilities.
Brill (1995) proposed a POS tagger with transformation-based learning. Initially,
the tagger assigns each word the most likely POS tag according to the training corpus.
When the prediction is incorrect, the tagger tries another transformation from the
transformational rule templates, which is derived from the three preceding words,
the three following words, and their POS tags. The learning procedure stops when no
more transformation can be found to reduces the errors. This method is simple and
effective, but unfortunately it requires a long training time. To address this problem,
Ngai and Florian (2001) optimized the model by incorporating good and bad counts
for each transformational rule, which avert repetition in the learning procedure. This
method successfully reduces the training time while maintaining the accuracy.
Daelemans et al. (1999b) introduced a memory-based approach to POS tagging.
Examples in training set are represented as a feature vector with an associated tag
category. For each test data point, its similarity to all examples in the memory is
computed. The category of the most similar instances is chosen as the predicted
category for the test data points.
Abney et al. (1999) applied boosting to POS tagging. Boosting algorithm is
similar to transformation-based learning discussed above, where the model combines
template rules to produce the most accurate classification rule. They proposed two
methods to deal with the multi-class problem. First they applied the [Link]
algorithm (Schapire and Singer, 1999), where each possible class is paired with
the given word and assigned a binary label as a derived problem, which is then
solved by binary AdaBoost. [Link] is memory-consuming, therefore they
proposed a novel [Link] algorithm, which uses binary AdaBoost to train
separate binary classifiers for each class, and combines their output by choosing the
class with most confidence. Unlike [Link], here the predictions are selected
independently for each class. The boosting approach is shown to be more accurate
than transformation-based learning.
Nakagawa et al. (2001) employed SVM to specifically solve the unknown word
problem in POS tagging. In this method, binary SVM classifiers are created for
each POS tag based on the training corpus, which are then used to predict the POS
tags of unknown words. Subsequently, Giménez and Marquez (2004); Giménez
and Màrquez (2004) proposed SVMTool, which extends the binary SVM to cover
multi-class classification. SVM classifiers are created for each POS tag that contains
ambiguous lexical items. When labeling a word, the most confident prediction among
all the SVM classifiers is selected.
70 2 Syntactics Processing

Ratnaparkhi (1996) first successfully applied MaxEnt framework to POS tagging.

A set of binary features is paired with every possible output label. Each feature-label
pair is assigned a weight which is trained to maximize the entropy. When predicting
the POS tag of a word, these weights are multiplied by the corresponding feature
to estimate the probability of a label. The label with the highest probability is se-
lected. Toutanvoa and Manning (2000) improved this method by modifying the set
of features. They removed the lexical features derived from the preceding words,
adding other hand-crafted features derived from a larger context window, which al-
leviates the proper noun problem and the ambiguous word form distinction problem.
Curran and Clark (2003) proposed a re-implementation of the MaxEnt tagger (Rat-
naparkhi, 1996) using the Generalized Iterative Scaling estimation algorithm and
model smoothing technique. Their method proves to be much faster in training and
predicting than the original MaxEnt tagger.
Directed graphical model is another well-studied statistical approach to POS
tagging. Kupiec (1992) proposed a POS tagger based on a HMM. For POS tagging,
the observations are that the words in a given input sentence x, and the states are
the corresponding POS tags y. The objective is to estimate the joint distribution
P(x, y) by computing the transition probability and the emission probability. The
former links the current state with the previous one, whereas the latter represents
how likely a word is observed under a given label. The transition matrix and emission
matrix are estimated from frequency counts using a tagged training dataset. Brants
(2000) proposed a Trigram’n’Tags POS tagger based on second order Markov model
combined with a smoothing technique. It is a generative model, similar to HMM.
The states in the model represent tags. The outputs represent words. The transition
probabilities depend on the states, whereas the output probabilities only depend
on the most recent class. The trigram probability is computed using a smoothing
paradigm that is a linear interpolation of unigrams, bigrams and trigrams. This POS
tagger requires less time to train while achieving similar accuracy as a MaxEnt
tagger (Ratnaparkhi, 1996).
McCallum et al. (2000) presented Maximum Entropy Markov model (MEMM), a
novel Markovian sequence model combining HMM and MaxEnt framework. HMM
tagger needs to enumerate all possible observation sequences to define the joint
probability P(x, y). Additionally, the inference is intractable. Therefore, it is not
cost-effective for HMM to represent multiple interacting features or long-range
dependencies of the observations. Conditional probabilistic sequence model such as
MEMM is a good alternative to alleviate this difficulty, since it defines the probability
of possible label sequence given an observation sequence, i.e., P(y | x). It also allows
observations to be represented as arbitrary overlapping features. The MEMM uses
the MaxEnt framework to fit a set of exponential models, where the probability of a
state depends on the observations and the previous state. Although MaxEnt models
are effective and widely used for sequence labeling tasks, their parameter estimation
methods have limitations. In MEMM, the transitions leaving a given state compete
locally instead of globally, which causes a bias towards states with fewer outgoing
transitions. Thus, it cannot accurately represent dependencies between consecutive
states. Different methods were proposed to solve this label bias problem.
2.4 POS Tagging 71

Collins (2002) proposed a perceptron-based (Rosenblatt, 1958) parameter esti-

mation algorithm for global learning. The tagger predicts a sequence of tags from left
to right, where each tag is determined based on the input sequence and the previous
tags, also known as history. The tagging task is then represented as a feature-vector
representation of history-tag pairs. The history-tag pairs are seen as local represen-
tations, which sums up to the global representation of the input sequence. A score
function is defined based on the global representation, which is used to estimate the
parameters corresponding to each history. The highest scoring tag sequence for the
given sentence is found via Viterbi algorithm. In the training phase, if the highest
scoring sequence is incorrect, the parameters will be updated using simple addition
and subtraction.
Another more widely-used alternative to MaxEnt is CRF, which is a novel method
as opposed to the sequential classification approaches mentioned above. Lafferty
et al. (2001) is the first to introduce CRF to sequence labeling. CRF is a discrimi-
native linear-chain graphical model. It uses a single exponential model for the joint
probability of the entire state sequence given an observation sequence. Thus, the
weights of different features at different states can be traded off against each other.
The graph model can be expressed as G = (V, E), where V denotes the nodes, i.e.,
states and observations, and E denotes the undirected edges that represent the de-
pendencies between variables. The features are defined over each edge in the graph.
x = (x1, x2, . . . , xn ) denotes the input sequence. y = (y1, y2, . . . , yn ) denotes the
output sequence. Then, each yi is dependent on x and yi 1 , represented by a set of
binary feature functions F. The joint probability is thus computed as
1
P(y | x) = exp( · F(y, x)),
Z(x)
where Z is the normalization factor, and denotes weights for each feature function.
Rush et al. (2012) proposed a POS tagger using Markov random fields (MRFs) to
model global constraints between sentences, which alleviates the accuracy problem
when labeled dataset is limited or out-of-domain. MRF is an undirected graph
model G = (V, E), where V are nodes for every word in the given sentence. An
index set is constructed to include all valid label assignments in the corpus, which
acts as inter-sentence constrains. The objective is to find the best sentence-level label
assignments with regards to V and E that are consistent with elements in the index
set, incorporating corpus-level information to augment sentence-level labeling.
Although undirected graphical models such as CRF avert the label bias problem,
they have a few disadvantages against the sequential classification method. On one
hand, CRF is less efficient to train because they need to perform Viterbi algorithm
over the entire sentence in each iteration. On the other hand, sequential classification
method leaves room to employ a variety of machine learning algorithms as local
classifiers. Therefore, many works focus on improving the performance of sequential
classification methods by enriching the information for the local classifiers. Since
the previous directed graphical taggers take an unidirectional approach, one popular
way of enhancing features is utilizing future tags via bidirectional networks.
72 2 Syntactics Processing

Toutanova et al. (2003) was the first to introduce bidirectional inference for POS
tagging. They proposed a cyclic dependency network with a series of local condi-
tional log-linear models to exploit information from both directions explicitly. Each
node in the network represents a random variable with a corresponding local condi-
tional probability model that considers the source variables from all incoming arcs.
The tagger finds the sequence that maximizes the score via Viterbi algorithm, similar
to previous MaxEnt and HMM models. The only difference between bidirectional
inference and an unidirectional graphical model such as HMM is that, when the
Markov window is at the time step i, the score it receives is P(ti 1 | ti, ti 2, wi 1 )
instead of P(ti | ti 1, ti 2, wi ), t and w being output tag and input word respectively.
Their model, however, suffers from collusion problem where the model lock onto
conditionally consistent but jointly unlikely sequences. This is because the local clas-
sifiers encounter double-counting problem when using the information from future
tags.
In order to avert this problem, Tsuruoka and Tsujii (2005) proposed an alternative
bidirectional inference algorithm with an easiest-first strategy. The label sequence of
a given sentence is the product of local probabilities. The proposed inference method
is to consider all of the possible decomposition structures and choose the optimal
structure to predict label sequence. The paper also proposed a more efficient alter-
native to bidirectional decoding algorithm, which adopts the easiest-first strategy.
Instead of enumerating all the possible decompositions, the tagger tags the easiest
word at each step, and repeating the procedure until all the words are tagged. To pick
the easiest word, the appropriate local MaxEnt classifier is selected according to the
availability of the neighboring labels, and used to output the probabilities. The word
with the highest probability is deemed as the easiest word for the current step. Their
bidirectional inference method is proven to be able to find the highest probability
sequence with similar performance but lower computational complexity.
Shen et al. (2007) proposed a novel guided learning framework for bidirectional
inference. Unlike the easiest-first strategy which only uses heuristic rule to determine
the order of inference, their approach incorporates the selection of inference order
into the training of the MaxEnt classifier for individual token labeling, combining
the two into a single learning task. Specifically, a sub-sequence of the input sentence
is called a span. Each span is associated with one or more hypotheses, which are
started and grown via labeling actions. The tagger initializes and maintains a set P
of accepted spans and a set Q of candidate spans. It repeatedly selects a candidate
span from Q whose action score of its top hypothesis is the highest,moving it to P,
until a span covering the whole input sentence is added to P from Q. For training, the
tagger uses guided learning to learn the weight of action score. If the top hypothesis
of a selected span is compatible with the gold standard, then the candidate span is
accepted. Otherwise, similar to perceptron algorithm (Collins, 2002), the weight is
updated by rewarding the feature weights of the gold standard action and punishing
the feature weights of the action of the top hypothesis. Then, all the existing spans in
Q are removed and replaced with new hypotheses for all the possible spans generated
based on the context spans in P. This allows the tagger to simultaneously learn the
individual classification and the inference order selection.
2.4 POS Tagging 73

Ma et al. (2013) proposed an easy-first POS tagger with beam search. The easy-
first POS tagger enumerates all possible word-tag pairs, choosing the most confident
one to label according to the score function, marking the word as processed. Then, the
tagger re-computes the scores of the unprocessed words based on the local context,
repeating the selection procedure until all the words are marked as processed. For the
easy-first tagging with beam search, a set of labeling action sequences is maintained
and grows via beam search. At each step, the sequences in the beam are expanded
in all possible ways, and the top expanded sequences within the beam width are
selected into . The trainable weight vector in a score function is learned through
perceptron-based global learning similar to the previously mentioned guided learning
framework (Shen et al., 2007), however its performance on the WSJ dataset is not as
good as the latter.

2.4.3 Deep Learning Approach

All the above-mentioned methods are dependent on hand-crafted features sets. With
the development of deep learning, the application of neural networks to POS tagging
makes it possible to avoid feature engineering and further improve the tagging
performance. Notably, neural network models are widely-employed to automatically
capture character-level patterns, which have to be modeled with morphological
features in previous taggers, e.g., suffix, capitalization, presence of numerals, etc.
Collobert et al. (2011) proposed a window approach for sequence labeling tasks,
which assumes the tag of a word is mainly dependent on its neighboring words.
Hence, it considers a fixed size window of words around the current word as local
features. Given an input sentence, the tagger passes it through a lookup table layer.
The resulting sequence of representations is fed into the convolutional layer, which
can be regarded as a feed-forward neural network with L layers, to extract local
features. That is, a concatenation of the word vectors in the focal window is inputted
to L linear layers to perform affine transformations over their inputs. Finally, a
softmax layer computes the probabilities for each labels given the output of the L-th
layer. The POS tagger is trained with word-level log-likelihood, also more commonly
known as cross-entropy.
Dos Santos and Zadrozny (2014) used deep nets to learn the character-level
representations and combined them with the corresponding word representations to
perform POS tagging. Prior to their work, the morphological or other intra-word
information is given to the tagger via hand-crafted features. To reduce human effort,
CharWNN is proposed as an extension of the previously introduced convolutional
architecture (Collobert et al., 2011). CharWNN uses the convolutional layer to
extract features from the input words and generates their character-level embedding
at tagging time. The character-level embeddings are concatenated with word-level
embeddings as word representations. Taking the window approach, a fixed window
size of word representations in the input sentence are concatenated into a vector,
which are then fed into two linear neural network layers to compute the scores.
74 2 Syntactics Processing

Wang et al. (2015a) proposed a BLSTM-RNN model for POS tagging. The model
first implements a linear layer as a lookup table to produce word embeddings, which
are fed into a bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) layer and then a softmax layer to output
the scores of tags. They also introduced a novel method to train word embedding
on unlabeled data, where BLSTM-RNN takes a sentence with some words replaced
by randomly chosen words as input, tagging the words in the sentence as correct or
incorrect. Thus the lookup table in BLSTM-RNN is trained to minimize the binary
classification error. Ma and Hovy (2016) introduced a BiLSTM-CNN-CRF model,
which utilizes both word-level and character-level representations automatically, re-
quiring no task-specific resources, feature engineering or data preprocessing. First,
a CNN layer (Chiu and Nichols, 2016) is applied to encode character-level infor-
mation of a word into its character-level representation. A dropout layer is applied
before character embeddings are feed into CNN. Then, the model concatenates the
character-level representations and word embeddings, feeding them into BiLSTM
to model context information of each word. A dropout layer is also applied to the
output vectors. Lastly, the output vector of BiLSTM is fed to a CRF layer to decode
labels for the whole sentence.
Akbik et al. (2018) proposed Flair, a contextual string embedding for sequence
labeling tasks. The Flair embedding is learned using a LSTM-based language model
over sequences of characters instead of words. For optimal performance, the Flair
embedding is stacked together with pretrained static word embedding GloVe (Pen-
nington et al., 2014) and a task-trained character embedding learned by LSTM. The
final embedding is passed onto a standard BiLSTM-CRF architecture to acquire the
output label sequence.
Zhao et al. (2019) proposed a deep CNN architecture called Deep Gated Dual
Path CNN (GatedDualCNN) for sequence labeling. The model first uses a CharCNN
to extract character-level representations, which are then concatenated with the word
embeddings and fed into a 1-D convolution (Conv1D) layer followed by rectified
linear unit (ReLU) and batch normalization (BN) to get the inital hidden states.
Thereafter, in order to stack up more convolutional layers while averting the vanishing
gradient problem, the paper incorporated gate blocks, residual connection, and dense
connection. The core component of a gate block is the gated linear unite (Dauphin
et al., 2017), whose output is processed by a Conv1D layer with ReLU and BN to
produce the successive hidden state. To encourage feature re-usage between gate
blocks, residual connection is introduced to bypass the non-linear transformation in
the gate block. On the other hand, dense connection serves the purpose of new feature
exploration in a dense [Link] combine these two connections, the model uses a dual
path, where hidden state produced by each block is split row-wise, then fed into the
residual path and the dense path respectively. The outputs are concatenated as the
input of the next block. The final hidden state is then passed on to a CRF layer to
decode the best sequence of tags. Yang et al. (2017) introduced transfer learning for
deep hierarchical RNN POS tagger to alleviate the out-of-domain problem. The base
model uses a character-level GRU (Cho et al., 2014) to obtain character embeddings,
which are concatenated with word embeddings and passed on to a word-level GRU
and a CRF layer to predict the tag sequence.
2.4 POS Tagging 75

They described three different transfer learning architectures for this base model.
Transfer model T-A, which shares all the model parameters and feature represen-
tations between domains, is used for cross-domain transfer where label mapping is
possible. It only performs a label mapping step on top of the base’s CRF layer. If
the two domains have disparate label sets, then transfer model T-B learns a separate
CRF layer for each tasks while sharing parameters in other layers. For cross-lingual
transfer, model T-C only shares the parameters and representations in the character-
level GRU, keeping two separate word-level GRU and CRF layers for the source
task and the target task. The paper experiments with transferring from chunking and
Name Entity Recognition (NER) to standard POS tagging on WSJ, and also tests
transfer learning from WSJ to Genia Biomedical corpus (Kim et al., 2003) and X
corpus T-POS.
Similarly, Meftah and Semmar (2018) presented a transfer-learning-based end-to-
end neural model. Their base model uses a CNN layer to extract character embedding,
a GRU layer to compute hidden states, and a fully-connected layer and softmax layer
to output the scores for tags. Two transfer learning architectures are proposed based
on this neural network. For cross-domain transfer, they used a parent network for
source data and a child network for target data. The parent network is trained on
annotated out-of-domain data, namely WSJ, whose parameters are transferred to the
child network. Then, the child network is fine-tuned through training on labeled X
datasets. For cross-task transfer, the parent network and the child network shares
a set of parameters, jointly optimizing the two tasks, while maintaining separate
task-specific parameters that are trained on the corresponding task. The task selected
for the parent network is NER.

2.4.4 Semi-Supervised Approach

As researchers have easy access to large amounts of unlabeled texts online, it is

a natural progression for POS taggers to utilize unlabeled data. In addition, POS
taggers trained from annotated dataset generally achieve high accuracy on in-domain
data, whereas their performance drops on out-of-domain data such as social media
posts and conversational texts. Consequently, there have been many attempts to use
unsupervised or SSL to alleviate the OOV problem that is largely responsible for the
fall in tagging accuracy. Unsupervised learning POS taggers mostly take the word
clustering approach. For example, Clark (2003) described an unsupervised POS
tagger that incorporates morphological information into a distributional clustering
algorithm to sort unlabeled text into lexical classes. Biemann (2006) introduced a
graph-based word clustering method based on context similarity of high frequency
words and log-likelihood of lower frequency words. Owoputi et al. (2013) proposed
an unsupervised MEMM tagger for word clustering on X conversations. The SSL
approach, on the other hand, utilizes both small amounts of labeled data and relatively
large amounts of unlabeled data for training.
76 2 Syntactics Processing

SSL is more scalable than unsupervised learning. It can be applied to POS

tagging to solve the out-of-domain problem and improve accuracy. Clark et al.
(2003) proposed bootstrapping POS tagger using co-training with unlabeled data.
The main idea is to co-train a Trigram’n’Tags tagger (Brants, 2000) and a MaxEnt
tagger (Curran and Clark, 2003), using the output from one as additional labeled
data for the other. The model first learns two separate classifiers for each view of
the task via a small amount of labeled seed data. Then, each classifier incrementally
labels a subset of unlabeled data for the other to use as the new training dataset.
Results show that when using little labeled training data and a much larger amount
of unlabeled data, the accuracy of POS tagger improves. However, the performance
drops when the amount of labeled training data increases.
Ando and Zhang (2005) proposed a semi-supervised multi-task learning (MTL)
framework. The objective is to learn from unsupervised tasks, and transfer to the
target supervised task. The framework consists of multiple task classifiers, each made
of two alternatively optimized feature functions. One is task-specific and the other is
trained to map into a low dimensional subspace common across all tasks. For POS
tagging, two unsupervised auxiliary tasks are used. The first task is word prediction,
which predicts the word at the current position. The second task is Top-2, which
predicts the top-2 choices of the POS tagger trained with labeled data.
Toutanova and Johnson (2007) presented a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)
model for semi-supervised POS tagging. Compared to previous semi-supervised
approaches, the tagger is not given any labeled data, but a dictionary that constrains
the possible tags of some words. The LDA-based model is a generative model that
uses only observed context features to predict the tags of words. They incorporated
a sparse prior on the distribution over tags for each word, and employed a Bayesian
approach that maintains a distribution over parameters. The semi-supervised LDA
is enabled by explicitly modeling ambiguity classes obtained from the dictionary
constrain.
Spoustová et al. (2009) extended the average perceptron algorithm (Collins, 2002)
for SSL. Specifically, they used an ensemble of taggers (Brill and Wu, 1998; van
Halteren et al., 2001) to pre-tag a large unannotated corpus, which is then combined
with labeled dataset and fed into an average perceptron POS tagger. Furthermore,
they observed that it is beneficial to feed the tagger with different chunks of unsu-
pervised data at each training iteration. Hence, they explored three types of selection
mechanisms, namely, sequential chopping, random selection without replacements,
and random selection with replacements. Based on the properties of the average per-
ceptron algorithm, the selected chunk of unannotated data is inputted after the labeled
dataset. Results show that the semi-supervised method indeed outperforms super-
vised ones, and the three mechanisms contribute identically for English POS tagging.
Suzuki and Isozaki (2008) introduced a semi-supervised extension of CRF (Lafferty
et al., 2001) that combines supervised and unsupervised probability models via a
parameter estimation called Maximum Discriminant Functions sum. For a given
input sequence x and its corresponding output y, C denotes the set of cliques in
an undirected graphical model. y c is the feature function and the output from the
associated clique c.
2.4 POS Tagging 77

Then, similar to standard CRF, the conditional probability for y is

1 ÷
P(y | x) = exp( · Fc (y c, x)),
Z(x) c 2C

where Z(x) is the normalization factor, Fc is the set of feature function for the
corresponding clique c, and is the function weights. In this SSL-based architecture,
the feature functions for clique c are the concatenation of Fc and the log likelihood
of all the joint probability models. A set of model parameters ✓ is introduced to
weight the joint models, which is estimated using unlabeled data via Maximum
Discriminant Functions.
Subramanya et al. (2010) described another CRF-based algorithm for semi-
supervised POS tagger. For graph construction, they used local sequence contexts as
graph vertices V, which consists of a set Vl of n-grams that occur in the labeled data
and a set Vu in the unlabeled data. The graph is built over types rather than tokens
via a symmetric similarity function, thus named similarity graph. This similarity
graph is used as a smoothness regularizer to train CRF in a semi-supervised manner.
Specifically, given a set of CRF parameters, the tagger first computes marginals over
tokens in the unlabeled data, which are then aggregated to marginals over types and
used to initialize the graph label distributions. After running label propagation, the
posteriors from the graph are used to smooth the state posteriors. Subsequently, the
unlabeled data is decoded using Viterbi algorithm to produce a set of automatic
annotations, which are combined with the labeled data to retrain the CRF through
supervised learning. The procedure is repeated until convergence. They used WSJ
as labeled source domain training data, and the QuestionBank (Judge et al., 2006)
as test data. The unlabeled data are collected from Internet search queries in similar
forms to the QuestionBank. Experiments show that their proposed algorithm indeed
outperforms supervised CRF in other domains.
Søgaard (2010) introduced stacked learning as a way to reduce POS tagging to a
classification task, thus simplifying semi-supervised training. The stacking approach
here is to combine SVMTool (Giménez and Màrquez, 2004) and an unsupervised
tagger (Biemann, 2006) into a single-end classifier, where the former predicts the
POS tag of a given word and the latter sorts the word into a word cluster. SSL
is achieved by tri-training with disagreement. Firstly, three classifiers of the same
learning algorithm mentioned above are trained on three bootstrap samples of the
labeled dataset, which ensures that the classifiers are diverse. Then, a data point in
the unlabeled dataset is labeled for classifier c1 , if and only if the other two agree
on its label assignment but c1 disagrees, which strengthens the weakness of the
classifier without skewing the labeled data by easy data points. This labeling process
is repeated until the classifiers no longer change. Subsequently, the three classifiers
are integrated by majority voting. Zhou et al. (2018) proposed a weakly supervised
sequence tagging model with ECOC (Error-Correcting Output Codes) that can learn
to predict the POS tag for a given word in a context, given a dictionary of words with
their possible tags.
78 2 Syntactics Processing

Most approaches prior to this paper are based on disambiguation, such as CRF
and HMM, which suffers from the negative effects of false positive tags as the size
of possible tags increases. The POS tagger is trained and tested based on constrained
ECOC (Dietterich and Bakiri, 1994). First, a unique L-bit vector is assigned to
each tag. The set of bit-vectors is regarded as a coding matrix, where each row
represents a codeword, e.g., class, and each column specifies a dichotomy over the
tag space to learn a binary classifier. In the encoding stage, for each column of the
coding matrix, a binary classifier is built based on binary training examples derived
from the dictionary of the words with their possible tags. In the decoding stage, the
codeword of an unlabeled test instance is generated by concatenating the predictive
output of the L binary classifiers. The predicted instance is the class with the closest
codeword according to hamming distance or Euclidean distance. Thus, the proposed
model which not only treats the set of possible tags as an entirety without resorting
to disambiguation procedure, but also needs no manual intervention for feature
engineering.
Gui et al. (2017) proposed a Target Preserved Adversarial Neural Network
(TPANN) for POS tagging on X (formerly known as Twitter). WSJ is used as
the labeled out-of-domain data, T-POS, ARK, and NPS as labeled in-domain data,
and tweets collected via X API as unlabeled in-domain data. The objective is to
learn common features between resource-rich domain and target domain while pre-
serving some domain-specific features of the target domain. TPANN first extracts
character embedding features via CNN and concatenates them to word embedding as
input. The hidden states are produced by a BiLSTM layer. Subsequently, the hidden
states are transferred to a POS tagging classifier and a domain discriminator, which
are both standard feed-forward networks with a softmax layer. The POS tagging
classifier maps the hidden states to their labels, whereas the domain discriminator
maps the same hidden states to the domain labels so as to make the input features
domain-invariant. By training this adversarial network, common features can be ob-
tained, but some domain-specific features are weakened. Thus, the paper introduced
a domain-specific auto-encoder to reconstruct target domain data. Specifically, at the
X decoder side, the hidden state ht is computed with ht = LST M([h0 zt 1 ], ht 1 ),
where h0 is the last hidden state of the BiLSTM layer, denotes the concatenation
operation, and zt 1 is computed from ht 1 using a multiple perceptron function. In
this way, the auto-encoder counteracts the adversarial network’s tendency to erase
target domain features by optimizing the common representation to be informative
on the target domain data.

2.4.5 Summary

POS tagging is a well-researched problem in the field of NLU. Existing POS tag-
ging models can be divided into feature engineering approaches and deep learning
approaches. Nonetheless, to address the growing need for domain adaptable POS
taggers, we introduce another category to introduce semi-supervised methods.
2.4 POS Tagging 79

Table 2.8: Comparison between different POS tagging methods. FE stands for feature
engineering. DL stands for deep learning. SS stands for semi-supervised. RW stands
for rare word.

Method Lexical Contextual Morphological RW Character Global Neural

Church (1989) X X
Brill (1995) X
Ngai and Florian (2001) X
Daelemans et al. (1999b) X X
Abney et al. (1999) X X X
Nakagawa et al. (2001) X X
Giménez and Màrquez (2004) X X
Ratnaparkhi (1996) X X X
FE Toutanvoa and Manning (2000) X X X X
Curran and Clark (2003) X X X
McCallum et al. (2000) X X
Kupiec (1992) X X X X X
Brants (2000) X X X X
Lafferty et al. (2001) X X X
Collins (2002) X X
Rush et al. (2012) X X X
Toutanova et al. (2003) X X X
Tsuruoka and Tsujii (2005) X X X
Shen et al. (2007) X X X
Ma et al. (2013) X X X
Collobert et al. (2011) X X
Dos Santos and Zadrozny (2014) X X X
Wang et al. (2015a) X X
DL Ma and Hovy (2016) X X X
Akbik et al. (2018) X X X
Zhao et al. (2019) X X X
Yang et al. (2017) X X X
Meftah and Semmar (2018) X X X
Clark et al. (2003) X X X
Ando and Zhang (2005) X X
Toutanova and Johnson (2007) X X
Spoustová et al. (2009) X X X
SS Suzuki and Isozaki (2008) X X X
Subramanya et al. (2010) X X X
Søgaard (2010) X X
Zhou et al. (2018) X X X
Gui et al. (2017) X X X

Early feature engineering methods predict the POS tag of a word based on its
local n-gram context with various machine learning techniques, following Church
(1989). Graphical models are commonly used for sequence labeling. Generative
graphical models (Kupiec, 1992; Brants, 2000) estimate the joint distribution based
on the explicit dependency between the states and the observations, and thus difficult
to accommodate context features. Directed discriminative model (McCallum et al.,
2000) addresses this weakness by modeling the conditional probability based on the
dependencies between adjacent states and the observation sequence, while it suffers
from the label bias problem. It is an undirected discriminative graphical model that is
able to leverage decisions globally. However, it is disadvantageous in computational
efficiency.
80 2 Syntactics Processing

Collins (2002) proposed an alternative that enables global learning by modify-

ing the parameter estimation process of directed graphical model. Others alleviate
the local limitation by introducing bidirectional sequence classification (Toutanova
et al., 2003; Tsuruoka and Tsujii, 2005; Shen et al., 2007). These methods fallen
out of favor in recent years, because it is not as adaptable to deep learning as CRF.
MRF (Rush et al., 2012) is an undirected skip-chain graphical model that makes
global decision not only on sentence-level but also corpus-level. Computationally it
is as costly as CRF. For deep learning, early methods take the window approach (Col-
lobert et al., 2011; Dos Santos and Zadrozny, 2014) to extract contextual information.
With the advancement of neural networks in NLP, it is replaced by RNN and RNN
variants (Wang et al., 2015a), which is better suited for processing text. The most
common approach is the BiLSTM-CRF architecture, with improvement achieved
through exploration of embeddings (Ma and Hovy, 2016; Akbik et al., 2018). Zhao
et al. (2019) proposed a CNN-based model that addresses the vanishing gradient
problem of deep CNN, which outperforms BiLSTM-CRF when using the same em-
beddings. For transfer learning on cross-domain POS tagging, Meftah and Semmar
(2018) relied on hard parameter sharing, whereas Yang et al. (2017) utilized hard
and soft parameter sharing on different scenarios.
For SSL, Clark et al. (2003); Søgaard (2010); Spoustová et al. (2009) take the
ensemble approaches. Clark et al. (2003); Søgaard (2010) co-trained multiple POS
taggers, whereas Søgaard (2010) introduced a tri-training strategy to reduce errors.
Spoustová et al. (2009) used ensemble to label unannotated data for a specific
tagger, which risks error propagation. Ando and Zhang (2005) jointly trained two
unsupervised auxiliary tasks with supervised POS tagging. Toutanova and Johnson
(2007); Zhou et al. (2018) used dictionary constrains instead of labeled data. The
former method was based on clustering, thus difficult to evaluate. The latter used
constrained ECOC to solve the false positive tag problem of disambiguation-based
methods. Suzuki and Isozaki (2008); Subramanya et al. (2010) extended CRF to SSL
by introducing cliques of states and similarity graph respectively. The former focused
more on incorporating unlabeled data, whereas the latter targeted cross-domain
scenarios. Compared to other cross-domain taggers, TPANN (Gui et al., 2017) is
advantageous in utilizing a large amount of unlabeled data through a domain-specific
auto-encoder.
Table 2.8 illustrates a summary of the features and properties of all the discussed
models. For feature engineering methods, there are mainly three types of features.
First, lexical features are the observed POS tags of the focal word in the training
corpus and their corresponding frequencies, or less commonly, other frequency
counts relating to the word, e.g., capitalized form frequency (Toutanvoa and Manning,
2000). Second, contextual features are the words surrounding the focal word and their
predicted POS tags if available. Third, morphological features are the focal word’s
suffix, prefix, and existence of numerals and special symbols. For some taggers less
adept at handling overlapping features, only rare words in the corpus are given such
morphological features. Thus we mark out the methods using rare word distinction.
For methods using neural networks, on the another hand, such features can be
automatically extracted via character-level encoding.
2.4 POS Tagging 81

Table 2.9: Performance of the introduced POS methods.

Experiment
Method
Dataset Result Measure
Brill (1995) WSJ 96.6% Acc.
Ngai and Florian (2001) WSJ 96.61% Acc.
Daelemans et al. (1999b) WSJ 96.6% Acc.
Abney et al. (1999) WSJ 96.68% Acc.
Nakagawa et al. (2001) WSJ 97.1% Acc.
Giménez and Màrquez (2004) WSJ 97.05% Acc.
Ratnaparkhi (1996) WSJ 96.63% Acc.
Toutanvoa and Manning (2000) WSJ 96.86% Acc.
Curran and Clark (2003) WSJ 97.27% Acc.
Feature Engineering
Kupiec (1992) WSJ 95.7% Acc.
Brants (2000) WSJ 96.7% Acc.
Collins (2002) WSJ 97.11% Acc.
Lafferty et al. (2001) WSJ 95.73% Acc.
Rush et al. (2012) WSJ 91.98% Acc.
Toutanova et al. (2003) WSJ 97.24% Acc.
Tsuruoka and Tsujii (2005) WSJ 97.24% Acc
Shen et al. (2007) WSJ 97.33% Acc.
Ma et al. (2013) WSJ 97.28% Acc.
Collobert et al. (2011) WSJ 97.37% Acc.
Dos Santos and Zadrozny (2014) WSJ 97.47% Acc.
Wang et al. (2015a) WSJ 97.40% Acc.
Ma and Hovy (2016) WSJ 97.55% Acc.
Akbik et al. (2018) WSJ 97.85% Acc.
Deep Learning Zhao et al. (2019) WSJ 97.59% Acc.
Yang et al. (2017) WSJ 97.55% Acc.
Yang et al. (2017) Genia 92.62% Acc.
Yang et al. (2017) T-POS 83.65% Acc.
Meftah and Semmar (2018) T-POS 90.90% Acc.
Meftah and Semmar (2018) ARK 92.01% Acc.
Meftah and Semmar (2018) NPS 93.20% Acc.
Clark et al. (2003) WSJ 409 Perplexity
Ando and Zhang (2005) BC 93.1% Acc.
Toutanova and Johnson (2007) WSJ 93.4% Acc.
Spoustová et al. (2009) WSJ 97.44% Acc.
Suzuki and Isozaki (2008) WSJ 97.35% Acc.
Semi-supervised Subramanya et al. (2010) QuestionBank 86.8% Acc.
Søgaard (2010) WSJ 97.27% Acc.
Zhou et al. (2018) WSJ 92.91% Acc.
Gui et al. (2017) T-POS 90.92% Acc.
Gui et al. (2017) ARK 92.80% Acc.
Gui et al. (2017) NPS 94.10% Acc.
82 2 Syntactics Processing

Additionally, some methods determine the optimal output sequence by making

the best local decision, whereas others are able to leverage predictions at different
positions (see the global column in Table 2.8). Table 2.9 shows a comparison of the
accuracy of the introduced POS taggers. Currently, most POS tagger yield stable
and reliable performance on the WSJ dataset from the Penn Treebank, with accuracy
slightly above 97%. Akbik et al. (2018) obtained the state-of-the-art result of 97.85%.
On X text corpus, Gui et al. (2017) consistently achieved the best performance.
Manning (2011) performed an error analysis and categorized the common errors
from POS taggers into 7 classes. Results indicate that, a proportion of errors due
to lexicon gap and unknown words can be addressed by semi-supervised methods.
The errors caused by inconsistent or faulty gold standards can be fixed by correcting
the WSJ dataset, for which he proposed a solution using deterministic rules. The
other errors are mostly high frequency words that have odd properties, which is an
inherently difficult problem most POS taggers are attempting to solve.
Another challenge for English POS tagging is informal or out-of-domain texts,
which is the focus of the semi-supervised approach section. With the boom of deep
learning in NLP, novel neural networks and pretrained language models (PLMs)
can be expended to unsupervised or SSL to further ameliorate the efficiency and
tagging accuracy for user generated texts. Noticeably, as a language preprocessing
technique, POS tagging is ultimately intended for improving the performance of
complex downstream tasks. Therefore, when pushing for higher accuracy for POS
taggers, it is better to prioritize how we can eliminate the errors that have a strong
influence on the downstream tasks. In the future, we hope to see POS taggers that
are not only accurate and reliable, but also serve their purpose of enhancing more
complicated NLU tasks.

2.5 Text Chunking

Text chunking is an NLU task that splits sentences into non-overlapping segments,
such as Noun Phrase (NP) and Verb Phrase (VP). Chunking, also called shallow
phrasing, can be applied as a preprocessing step before complete parsing. It helps
the machine to learn the sentence structure and relation between words, e.g., recog-
nizing names and syntactic components. Thus, it provides a useful foundation for
downstream NLU tasks that require a general understanding of sentence components,
e.g., NER (Collobert et al., 2011; Yang et al., 2017), text summarization (Gupta et al.,
2016a), and sentiment analysis (Syed et al., 2014).
In this section, we first review different tagging schemas in text chunking, then
investigating previous methods in tow categories: feature engineering approaches
and deep learning approaches.
2.5 Text Chunking 83

2.5.1 Tagging Schemas

[Link] IOB tagging schema

Ramshaw and Marcus (1999) proposed noun phrase chunking as a machine learning
problem. Prior to their work, chunk structure was mostly encoded with brackets
between words, which is often met with the problem of unbalanced brackets. To
solve this problem, they introduced the IOB1 (also known as IOB) tagging schema
to represent chunk structures, where “B” stands for the beginning of a chunk that
immediately follows another chunk, “I” means the word is inside a chunk, and “O”
stands for outside of any chunk. Thus, chunking is considered as a sequence labeling
problem. The dataset they derived from the Penn Treebank is later referred to as
baseNP and is used in some very early works. Thereafter, Sang and Buchholz (2000)
introduced the widely-used dataset CoNLL-2000, extending the task of chunking
from noun phrase to other types of chunks, such as verb phrases, prepositional
phrases and adverb phrases. The dataset modifies the above-mentioned IOB1 encod-
ing schema to IOB2 (also known as BIO), where “B” is simply used in the beginning
of every chunk. It also contains the corresponding POS tag of every token assigned
by a standard POS tagger from Brill and Wu (1998). The CoNLL-2000 dataset, along
with F1 score as metric, has become a standard for evaluating chunkers. Although
the CoNLL-2000 comes with IOB2 encoding, it is not difficult to convert it into
other schemas. A variety of encoding schemas are explored to study their effects on
chunking performance.

[Link] IOE tagging schema

An alternative to IOB is IOE (Sang and Veenstra, 1999), where “E” represents the
final word of a chunk immediately preceding another chunk in IOE1, or the final word
on every chunk in IOE2. Sang and Veenstra (1999) split the baseNP dataset into two
group and investigated the effectiveness of IOB and IOE. Results are inconclusive to
determine which one can best improve the performance. Considering that IOB and
IOE follow the same core concept to segment chunks, it is reasonable that they do
not vary much in performance.

[Link] BIOES tagging schema

Another popular encoding schema is BIOES (BILOU) (Ratinov and Roth, 2009),
where “E” stands for the ending token of a chunk, and “S” denotes a single element.
Research shows that chunkers using BIOES outperform those using IOB signifi-
cantly (Yang et al., 2018; Ratinov and Roth, 2009; Dai et al., 2015). This is likely
because BIOES is more fine-grain then IOB, allowing the machine to learn a more
expressive model with only a small amount of extra parameters.
84 2 Syntactics Processing

2.5.2 Feature Engineering Approach

The feature engineering approaches rely on hand-crafted feature sets from the sur-
rounding contexts, e.g., local lexical information, POS tags, and chunk tags of pre-
vious words. In this chapter, we further categorize the feature engineering approach
into two groups: local classification approaches and global classification approaches.
The local classification approaches view the chunking task as a sequence of clas-
sification problems, one for each of the word in the sequence, where the predicted
tag at each position may depend on the features of the whole input sentence and
the predicted tags of previous words. The global classification approaches, on the
other hand, are able to trade off decisions at different positions to obtain a globally
optimal label sequence. Chunkers in this category are mostly graphical models, such
as HMM (Freitag and McCallum, 2000) and CRF.

[Link] Local Classification Approach

The local classification approaches predict the label of one word in a sequence at a
time, utilizing different lexical and syntactic information as features, e.g., the word
itself, its POS tag, its surrounding words and their POS tags, to make the best local
decision. Ramshaw and Marcus (1999) proposed a chunker with transformation-
based learning. The chunk structure is represented by IOB1 tag schema in non-
recursive base NP distinction, and by BN, N, BV, V, P in noun/verb phrase separation.
First, a baseline heuristic is learned using POS tags. It is then used to produce
initial hypotheses for each site in training corpus. When the baseline prediction is
incorrect, the rule templates generate candidate rules for different locations based
on the identities of words within a neighborhood, their POS tags and the current
chunk tags. The candidate rules are tested against the rest of the corpus and sorted
based on their positive scores. This will eventually create an ordered sequence of
rules that predict the features of words. In order to speed up the learning process, an
index is constructed to link each candidate rule to its static locations in the corpus,
and the rules are disabled and re-enabled based on their scores and changes. (Ngai
and Florian, 2001) also applied transformation-based learning to chunking, whose
method is previously introduced in the POS tagging section.
Daelemans et al. (1999a) proposed a memory-based learning method where
POS tagging, chunking, and identification of syntactic relations are formulated as
memory-based modules. The proposed model is a lazy learner, keeping all training
data available for extrapolation. Thus, it is more accurate than greedy learners for
NLU tasks. Memory-based learning constructs a classifier for a task by storing a set
of examples. Each example associates a feature vector with one of a finite number
of classes. The classifier extrapolates the classes of feature vectors from those of the
most similar feature vectors in the memory. The syntactic analysis process is split
into a number of classification tasks where input vectors represent a focused item
and a dynamically selected surrounding context. Outputs of some memory-based
modules are used as input by other memory-based modules.
2.5 Text Chunking 85

Based on their work, Sang (2000) proposed a system-internal combination of

memory-based learning classifiers to find base chunks. The main idea is to gen-
erate five different chunking models by using different chunking representations,
namely IOB1, IOB2, IOE1, IOE2, and the bracket structures. Each classifier uses the
memory-based learning algorithm IB1-IG (Daelemans et al., 1999a) for determining
the most probable tag for each word. The training data is stored and a new item is
classified by the most frequent classification among training items closest to the
new item. Outputs of the five classifiers are combined using either voting methods,
classifier stacking method or combination method. The paper also explored three
processing strategies: single-pass, double-pass, and n-pass, where the data are pro-
cessed once, twice or many passes to identify the correct chunk tags. According to
the experiment, the best combination is the majority voting method and double-pass.
Similarly, Van Halteren (2000) proposed a chunking method using Weighted
Probability Distribution Voting (WPDV) model (van Halteren, 2000). The proposed
model has a three-stage architecture. In the first stage, five different base chunkers
are trained, including a stacked TiMBL model (Daelemans et al., 2003), a WPDV
model, a reverse WPDV model, a R&M WPDV model, and a LOB WPDV model.
Subsequently, another WPDV model is used to combine the outputs of the five
base chunkers. Lastly, corrective measures are applied to the systematic errors,
which are mostly due to the determination of the start position of NPs. Koeling
(2000) introduced a MaxEnt model for chunking, which is an exponential model
that chooses the probability distribution with the highest entropy. MaxEnt operates
on the intuition that if there is no evidence to favor one solution over the other,
then both solutions are equally likely. Therefore, the probability distribution with the
highest entropy should be chosen. Given a word, the probability of a candidate label
is dependent on its history, containing the word itself and its tag context. The label
with the highest probability is selected.
Kudo and Matsumoto (2000) employed SVM for text chunking. The paper ap-
plied a weighted voting method to 8 pairwise SVM classifiers, using contextual
information as features for training. Training data is split into 4 different types of
representations, namely IOB1, IOB2, IOE1, IOE2. For each representation, forward
parsing and backward parsing are employed, thus creating a weight voting of 8
SVM systems. Four methods are proposed to determine the weight given to each
system: uniform weights, cross validation, VC-bound, and Leave-One-Out. Zhang
et al. (2001) applied a Winnow algorithm (Littlestone, 1988; Grove and Roth, 2001)
to text chunking. Winnow is suitable for problems with a high dimensional feature
space. The Winnow multiplicative update algorithm (Littlestone, 1988) updates the
trainable parameter repeatedly when the algorithm cannot correctly classify an ex-
ample. However, it may not converge when the data is not linearly separable. The
paper proposes regularized Winnow, which converts the original Winnow into a nu-
merical optimization problem that converges in both linear separable case and linear
non-separable case, thus making it suitable for NLU tasks such as text chunking. Be-
sides contextual information, the model also uses English Slot Grammar (McCord,
1990) as addition features. Dynamic programming (Punyakanok and Roth, 2000) is
used to determine the best sequence of chunk tags.
86 2 Syntactics Processing

Based on their work, Lee and Wu (2007) proposed a mask method based on SVM
classifier that does not depend on external knowledge and multiple learners. The
purpose of the mask method is to collect unknown word examples from original
training data, so that the chunker can handle unknown words in testing data. First,
a tokenizer and a POS-tagger is applied to produce POS tag for each token. Then,
the feature selection component encodes the important features of context words.
One-Against-All SVM classification method is employed to classify the IOB1 tag of
the words. After lexicon-related features are derived, the training set is divided into 2
or more parts. New training examples can be generated by mapping the new feature
dictionary set from each training part. This method emulates training examples that
do not contain lexical information, which helps the model considers the effect of
unknown words, and adjusts the weights on lexical related features.
Johnson and Zhang (2005) proposed a semi-supervised method for text chunking,
which is based on the idea that good classifiers should have similar predictive
structure, and thus learns good structure from an auxiliary classification problem
can help improve performance on the target problem. The paper presents a linear
prediction model for structural learning. Supposedly, there is a low-dimensional
predictive structure shared by multiple prediction problems, which can be discovered
through joint empirical risk minimization (ERM). The goal of this model is to
discover the common low-dimensional predictive structure parameterized by the
projection matrix in the predictor, i.e., to find the optimal projection matrix that
minimizes the empirical risk summed over all the problems. This optimization
problem is solved by alternating structure optimization (ASO) (Ando and Zhang,
2005). For SSL, the auxiliary prediction problems are generated automatically from
unlabeled data. A classifier is trained with a feature map and labeled data, whose
behavior is then predicted on the unlabeled data using another distinct feature map.
After the training data for each auxiliary problem is created, the optimal projection
matrix is computed from the training data via ASO, and the empirical risk on the
labeled data is minimized.

[Link] Global Classification Approach

The objective of chunkers using the local classification approaches is to minimize

functions related to labeling errors, where they make the best local decisions. As a
result, they cannot trade off decisions at different positions against each other to obtain
a globally optimal labeling. To solve this problem, many works attempt to establish
global classifiers for text chunking. The earliest global classification approach relies
on generative graphical models, such as HMM (Kupiec, 1992). Zhou and Su (2000)
proposed an error-driven HMM-based text chunking tagger with context-dependent
lexicon. The input token sequence is the product of the word sequence and the POS
tag sequence. The chunking structure is represented by structural tags, which consists
of structural relation, phrase category, and POS tags. The model uses the Viterbi
algorithm to find a stochastic optimal tag sequence for the given token sequence.
2.5 Text Chunking 87

The baseline system only uses the current POS as lexical entry to determine the
current structural chunk tag. Then, the paper attempts to add more contextual infor-
mation by adding lexical entries into the lexicon, such as the current and the previous
words, and their POS tags. Adding more contextual information significantly im-
proves the accuracy, however, it is difficult to merge all the above context-dependent
lexicons in a single lexicon due to memory limitation. Thus, an error-driven learning
approach is adopted to examine the effectiveness of lexical entries and reduce the
size of lexicon.
Molina and Pla (2002) proposed an HMM-based tagging method where the model
finds the sequence of states of maximum probability given the input sequence. This
method can be used in many different shallow parsing tasks including text chunking,
given the appropriate input information. When implemented for chunking, the model
considers words and POS tags as the input. In addition, the paper suggests that the
output tag set could be too generic to produce accurate models. Thus, for a chunking
task, the model can be enriched by adding POS information and certain selected
words into the chunk tags. These are achieved by applying a specialization function
on the original training set. From this new training set, the Specialized HMM can be
learned by maximum likelihood. The tagging process is carried out using the Viterbi
algorithm.
Although the HMM-based algorithms are well-understood, they require strict
conditional independence assumptions to work effectively, which makes it diffi-
cult to represent non-independent features, such as surrounding words. Attempts
have been made to enable chunkers to handle more statistically correlated features
of input tokens while obtaining global optimal labeling, e.g., the perceptron algo-
rithm (Collins, 2002) and bidirectional inference algorithm (Tsuruoka and Tsujii,
2005), both previously discussed in the POS tagging section.
Another popular algorithm to address this problem is based on CRF, which
is the most widely-used alternative to generative graphical models. As mentioned
in the POS tagging section, first proposed by Lafferty et al. (2001), CRF is an
undirected linear-chain graphical model. It uses a single exponential model for the
joint probability of the entire tag sequence given an observation sequence. CRF can
not only take in many statistically correlated features from the input data and train
them discriminatively, but also trade off decisions at different sequence positions to
obtain a globally optimal labeling. Hence, it averts the limitations while maintaining
the advantages of the local classification approach and the HMM-based approach.
Sha and Pereira (2003) introduced the application of CRF to text chunking,
proposing a novel CRF training algorithm with better convergence properties. For
chunking task, the CRF labels are pairs of consecutive chunk tags, which establishes a
second-order Markov dependency between chunk tags. The local feature is based on a
predicate on the input sequence and current position, and a predicate on pairs of label.
Instead of using iterative scaling as training algorithm (Lafferty et al., 2001), the paper
experiments with two training methods to maximize the log-likelihood of the training
set: preconditioned conjugate gradient (Shewchuk et al., 1994), and limited-memory
quasi-Newton (Nocedal and Wright, 2006). Both utilize approximate second-order
information to achieve high convergence speed.
88 2 Syntactics Processing

Following their work, many alternative CRF or other second-order random fields
algorithms are proposed for chunkers to model more complex dependencies. For in-
stance, as described in the POS tagging section, Suzuki and Isozaki (2008) employed
a SSL CRF, which is also tested to be effective at text chunking. Sutton et al. (2007)
proposed dynamic CRF (DCRF), which is a generalization of the original CRF that
repeats structure and parameters over a sequence of state vectors. Compared to con-
ventional CRF, DCRF is able to represent distributed hidden states and complex
interactions among states, such as factorial, second-order and hierarchical structure.
To achieve this, DCRF introduces clique index c, which represents any state in the
unrolled graph through a time step offset and its index in the state sequence y. Then,
the set of variables in the unrolled version of clique index c at time step t can be
denoted as yt,c . Let C be a set of clique indices. Similar to standard CRF, given an
input sequence x, the conditional probability P(y | x) is computed as
1 ÷÷
P(y | x) = exp( · F(yt,c, x, t)),
Z(x) t c 2C

where Z is the normalization factor, F is a set of feature function, and denotes

weights for each feature function. The generalization of DCRF allows for complicated
structure, such as the proposed factorial CRF (FCRF), which incorporates edges be-
tween co-temporal labels to explicitly model dependencies between different chains.
Assume an FCRF has L chains, where yl,t is the variable in chain l at time t. The
distribution over output sequence is computed within-chain and between-chain:

!
1 ÷÷
T 1 L
P(y | x) = exp( · F(yl,t , yl,t+1, x, t))
Z(x) t=1 l=1
!
÷T ÷
L 1
exp( · F(yl,t , yl+1,t , x, t)) .
t=1 l=1

This factorized structure can be used to jointly train several sequence labeling
tasks, such as POS tagging and text chunking, with shared information. Based on
this, the paper further describes a marginal DCRF for joint learning between POS
tagging and chunking, which is inspired by the notion that the main purpose of POS
tagging is to help the prediction of chunking. Therefore, training by maximizing the
joint likelihood is not ideal, since the model might trade off accuracy among the
chunk tag to obtain accuracy among the POS tag.
The proposed marginal training encourages the model to prioritize learning the
main task whilst retaining useful information from the other task. That is, in the
training set, the observations of POS tag sequence are ignored, thus the model is
able to focus on the conditional probability over y. Experiments show that joint
training using marginal FCRF improves chunking accuracy slightly in comparison
to cascaded training where the two tasks are learnt in sequence.
2.5 Text Chunking 89

Sun et al. (2008) proposed a chunker based on Latent-Dynamic CRFs (LD-

CRF) (Morency et al., 2007) and a coinciding inference algorithm named Best
Lable Path (BLP), which can learn latent-dynamics explicitly. More specifically,
latent-dynamics is the underlying structure of syntactic contexts, which is often too
complex for chunk labels to encapsulate. For example, it is difficult for the BIO
tagging schema to differentiate the latent-structures between the sequences “He is
her -” and “He gave her-”, where the former is likely to be followed by a I-NP tag
and the latter a B-NP tag. LDCRF is able to mitigate this problem by explicitly
modeling hidden state variables. Given an input sentence x = (x1, . . . , xn ), the task
is to learn the mapping between x and a sequence of labels y = (y1, . . . , yn ). The
model also assumes a vector of hidden state variables h = (h1, h2, . . . , hn ) for the
sequence. To make training and inference more efficient, the model is restricted to
have a disjointed set of hidden states Hyi associated with each class label yi .The
conditional probability can be written as
’
P(y | x, ⇥) = P(h | x, ⇥),
h 2H y1 ⇥···⇥H y n

where P(h | x, ⇥) is calculated as conventional CRF:

1
P(h | x) = exp(⇥ · F(h, x)),
Z(x)
where ⇥ denotes the model parameters. Due to the inclusion of hidden states, the
best label sequence ŷ cannot be found directly via Viterbi algorithm. Therefore,
NLU inference is introduced to search for ŷ, where the top-k hidden paths over
hidden states are chosen using A⇤ search (Hart et al., 1968), and the corresponding
probabilities of hidden paths are produced. Subsequently, the estimated probabilities
of various label paths can be computed as the sum of the probabilities of hidden
paths.
Muis and Lu (2016) proposed a weak semi-Markov CRF model for NP chunking
on user generated text, namely NUS SMS Corpus (Chen and Kan, 2012). Semi-
Markov CRF (semi-CRF) (Sarawagi and Cohen, 2004) can be defined as conventional
CRF with additional edges from one node to all the nodes up to L words away,
representing a segment within which the words will be labeled with a single label.
Based on Semi-CRF, the paper introduces a weaker variant that restricts each node
to connect either to only the nodes of the same label up to L words away, or to all the
nodes only in the next word. With this restriction, weak semi-CRF can decide the
next segment length and type separately, whereas Semi-CRF is encouraged to make
the decisions simultaneously. This restriction is achieved by splitting every original
node into a Begin node and an End node. The End node connects only to the every
next Begin nodes of any label. On the other hand, the Begin node connects only to
the End nodes with the same label up to L next words. Thus, given the input sequence
x = (x1, . . . , xn ), the conditional probability of label sequence y = (y1, . . . , yn ) can
be defined as
90 2 Syntactics Processing
!
1 ’n ’L
P(y | x) = exp ( f (yi 1, yi, x, i) + g(yi, x, i k, i)) ,
Z(x) i=1 k=1

where Z(x) is the normalization factor, is function weights, f is the feature

function as in standard CRF, and g(yi, x, i k, i) represents the feature vector on the
edge between the Begin node with the current state yi at position i k and the End
node with state yi at position i.
Motivated by the idea that the choice of encoding schema can affect the perfor-
mance of sequence labeling models, Lin et al. (2020) proposed two Latent Variable
CRFs (LVCRF) that can automatically choose the best encoding schema for a given
input sentence. They tested the models on the most popular schema, IOB2 and
BIOES. The latent variable CRF is achieved by inserting a set of variables be-
tween the input and the output based on the chain rule of probability. This allows
the model to capture the latent structure between observations and labels. The first
model LVCRF-I labels the input sentence by labeling it with two encoding schemas
simultaneously and optimizing the parameters to maximize the probability of both
schemas. In the training phase, the model is not informed on which encoding schema
is better, but trained to maximize the probability of both schemas. The best encoding
schema is determined implicitly during the decoding stage when the best labeling
path is found via Viterbi algorithm. The second model LVCRF-II, on the other hand,
chooses the encoding schema on a word-level, combining the labeling path in two
encoding schemas. Therefore, LVCRF-II allows the transformation between the two
encoding schemas. Experiments show that LVCRF-II indeed yields higher accuracy.
It is also proven that the LVCRF framework can be used in neural network based
chunkers such as LSTM to achieve even better result.

2.5.3 Deep Learning Approach

Many deep neural networks, e.g., CNN, RNN and LSTM, can be applied to text
chunking. Unlike the previous methods, deep learning approaches are able to au-
tomatically extract features from the input texts, making it possible to avoid hand-
crafted feature templates.
As previously mentioned in the POS tagging section, Collobert et al. (2011)
described a window approach for sequence labeling problems. Aside from the pro-
posed model, they also suggested a novel training algorithm for tasks such as text
chunking, where tags are organized in chunks and some tags cannot follow other
tags. Named sentence-level log-likelihood, it is proposed as an alternative to softmax
and CRF, thus allowing the consideration of scores over all possible tag paths for
a given sentence. To achieve this, a transition score Ai, j is introduced, which is a
trainable variable for jumping from tag i to tag j in successive words. The score of a
tag path is computed by summing the transition scores and the scores outputted by
the neural network. The score over all possible tag paths is normalized via softmax
and interpreted as a conditional tag path probability.
2.5 Text Chunking 91

The advantage of this method over CRF is that it uses a non-linear neural network
instead of a linear model to maximize the likelihood, which encourages the model to
learn useful features according to the task of interest. Additionally, they jointly train
POS tagging, text chunking, and NER using the proposed window approach, where
all models share the same lexicon lookup table and the parameters of the first linear
layer, and the training objective is to minimize the loss averaged across all tasks.
Similarly, Yang et al. (2017) also utilized the correlation between text chunking,
POS tagging and NER. They showed that transfer learning from the latter two tasks
to chunking yields competitive performance. Their method was introduced in detail
in the POS tagging section. Huang et al. (2015) proposed a BiLSTM model with
a CRF layer (BiLSTM-CRF). The model efficiently utilizes past and future input
features via a BiLSTM layer and sentence level tag information via a CRF layer.
Yang et al. (2016a) described a deep hierarchical RNN, which can encode both
character level and word level sequential information. Many previous works (Dos San-
tos and Zadrozny, 2014; Santos and Guimaraes, 2015; Kuru et al., 2016) show that
character level features help alleviate the out of vocabulary (OOV) problem in se-
quence labeling tasks, most of which rely on convolutional layer to extract such
features. The proposed model, however, employs bidirectional GRU (Cho et al.,
2014) to achieve this. The model stack multiple recurrent layers together to build a
deep GRU. Such deep GRU is used on both character level and word level, together
forming a hierarchical GRU. The word representations produced by the hierarchical
GRU are fed into another deep bidirectional GRU to extract the context information
in the word sequence. The resulting sequence of hidden states is used as input fea-
tures for the next layer, where a CRF models the dependencies between tags in the
sequence and predicts a sequence of tags.
Zhai et al. (2017) proposed a BiLSTM-based sequence chunking model where
each chunk is treated as a complete unit for labeling. They also explored the idea
of using pointer networks (Vinyals et al., 2015a) instead of IOB labels. The paper
divides sequence labeling into two subtasks: segmentation and labeling. The former
is to identify scope of the chunks explicitly, whereas the latter is to label each chunk
as a single unit based on the segmentation results. The model employs an encoder-
decoder framework where the decoder is modified to take chunks as inputs. The
BiLSTM encoder is used to create a sentence representation as well as segment the
input sequence into chunks. It uses a CNNMax layer to extract important information
from words in the chunk, and utilizes context word embeddings of the chunks to
capture context information. The decoder is a LSTM that takes all the information
above to generate hidden states to label the segmented chunks. To further improve
the accuracy, the model uses pointer network instead of IOB2 tags to identify chunks.
It identifies a chunk, labels it, and repeats the process until all words are processed.
At the beginning of a possible chunk, the pointer network determines which word
is the ending point. After a chunk is identified and labeled, it serves as the input of
the decoder in the next time step. With this setup, the model is able to utilize chunk-
level features for segmentation. Experiments show that pointer network yields better
performance than the IOB2 encoding schema.
92 2 Syntactics Processing

Rei (2017) proposed a semi-supervised MTL framework for sequence labeling

tasks. They used BiLSTM-CRF as baseline model, integrating unsupervised lan-
guage modeling as the supplementary task, whose objective is to predict the next
word in the sequence based on only the hidden state produced by the forward LSTM,
and the previous word based on the hidden state from the backward LSTM. This
additional language model objective encourages the model to learn more general
patterns of semantic and syntactic composition.
Sun et al. (2020) proposed a hybrid neural CRF for multi-view sequence label-
ing, termed MVCRF, and adopted diverse neural networks for feature extraction of
multiple views. The model not only considers the correlation between neighborhood
labels and jointly decoding the best label sequence, but also combines multi-view
learning by utilizing consensus and complementary principles. The model takes the
word view and the POS view of the sequential data as input. Then, it uses BiLSTM
to extract features from the word view x1 with pretrained SENNA word embedding,
and uses a linear network for the POS view x2 . The model then regularizes the
log-likelihood by the consistency among distinct views to minimize the Euclidean
distance between the features across two views in a joint representation space. Then,
features from both views are fed into a MVCRF, where the output y is determined
by the conditional probability P(y | x1, x2).
Liu et al. (2020b) proposed a semi-CRF chunker based on stacked BiLSTM.
Firstly, the word embedding and character encoding vector are concatenated and
fed into the lower BiLSTM to obtain the sub-word representation. Subsequently, the
parameters of the lower BiLSTM are extracted and loaded into the upper BiLSTM,
which takes in the subword representation, and outputs the word representation
w = (w1, w2, . . . , wn ). Based on existing semi-CRF (Sarawagi and Cohen, 2004), the
paper describes a new semi-CRF (NSCRF). Let c = (c1, c2, . . . , cr ) be a label path
of the given sentence, where ci = (bi, ei, li ) denotes the i-th chunk, bi represents the
beginning word index, ei the end word index, and li the chunk-level tag. Then, the
conditional probability of NSCRF can be expressed as

1 ÷
r
p(c | w) = exp F(li 1, li, w, bi, ei ),
Z(c) i=1

where Z(c) is the normalization factor, F is the feature function.

Wei et al. (2021) proposed a Position-aware Self Attention (PSA) mechanism
to address the RNN-based method’s limitation of capturing discrete relations in
a sentence. The core of this model is the BiLSTM-based context encoder, which
employs self-attention to encode relative positional information. Specifically, the
context encoder contains two self-attentional context fusion layers: one for assigning
weights to the initial inputs, the other for re-weighting the output of the BiLSTM.
The self-attentional context fusion layer uses a PSA mechanism to learn context-
aware representations. Alignment scores between tokens are computed via a feed-
forward neural network, incorporating three positional biases: self-disabled mask
bias, distance-aware Gaussian bias, and token-specific position bias. This enables
the model to learn non-continuous token relationships.
2.5 Text Chunking 93

Table 2.10: Comparison between different text chunking methods. FE stands for
feature engineering. LC stands for lexical context. SC stands for syntactic context.
PC stands for preceding chunk tag prediction. CL stands for chunk-level. Morph is
short for morphological. Joint stands for joint learning with other tasks.

Method POS tag LC SC PC 2nd order CL Morph Character Joint

Ramshaw and Marcus (1999) X X X
Ngai and Florian (2001) X X X X X
Daelemans et al. (1999a) X X X X
Sang (2000) X X X X
FE - local Van Halteren (2000) X X X X
Koeling (2000) X X X X X
Kudo and Matsumoto (2000) X X X X
Zhang et al. (2001) X X X X X
Lee and Wu (2007) X X X X X
Johnson and Zhang (2005) X X X X X
Zhou and Su (2000) X X X
Molina and Pla (2002) X X X
Sha and Pereira (2003) X X X X X
McDonald et al. (2005) X X X
FE - global Sutton et al. (2007) X X X X
Sun et al. (2008) X X X X
Muis and Lu (2016) X X X
Lin et al. (2020) X X X X
Collobert et al. (2011) X
Yang et al. (2017) X X
Huang et al. (2015) X X X X
Yang et al. (2016a) X X
Deep Learning Zhai et al. (2017) X
Rei (2017) X X
Sun et al. (2020) X X
Liu et al. (2020b) X X
Wei et al. (2021) X

2.5.4 Summary

In conclusion, existing text chunking algorithms can be categorized as feature en-

gineering and deep learning. Notably, feature engineering methods can be further
divided into local and global approaches. The latter is able to leverage global infor-
mation whereas the former can only make the locally optimal decision. The local
approach includes machine learning methods such as transformation-based learn-
ing (Ramshaw and Marcus, 1999; Ngai and Florian, 2001), memory-based learn-
ing (Daelemans et al., 1999a; Sang and Buchholz, 2000; Sang, 2000; Van Halteren,
2000), MaxEnt (Koeling, 2000), SVM (Kudo and Matsumoto, 2000; Lee and Wu,
2007), and window algorithm (Zhang et al., 2001). For global approach, early works
utilize HMM. A significant limitation of HMM is that its strict independence as-
sumptions makes it inefficient to incorporate contextual information. To mitigate this
problem, Zhou and Su (2000) took an error-driven approach, whereas Molina and Pla
(2002) transformed the training set through specialization functions. CRF (Lafferty
et al., 2001; Sha and Pereira, 2003), as previously mentioned in the POS tagging
section, is more flexible than HMM in terms of feature design.
94 2 Syntactics Processing

However, its linear-chain structure limits the ability to capture dependencies

between non-adjacent states. Some CRF variants are proposed to address this lim-
itation. DCRF (Sutton et al., 2007) is a skip-chain graphical model that enables
complex interactions between labels. Similarly, semi-Markov CRF (Muis and Lu,
2016) is a skip-chain CRF targeting informal text, which accommodates restricted
dependencies between nodes. LDCRF (Sun et al., 2008) captures latent dynamics
by establishing a set of hidden states for every class label. LVCRF (Lin et al., 2020)
is able to automatically choose the optimal encoding schema by inserting variables
between states and observations. Compared to feature engineering approaches, deep
learning approaches are able to automatically extract features, and better facilitate
joint training with other sequence labeling tasks.
The most commonly used architecture is RNN variations combined with CRF.
Huang et al. (2015) implemented the standard BiLSTM-CRF structure. Yang et al.
(2016a) utilized hierarchical GRU with CRF for better feature extraction. Sun et al.
(2020) replaced the standard CRF with MVCRF, where the POS sequence is also
incorporated as input. Similarly, Liu et al. (2020b) utilized semi-CRF, which adds
helpful labeling restrictions to standard CRF. Wei et al. (2021) applied a self-attention
mechanism to the BiLSTM-CRF structure to model position-aware dependencies.
In short, the RNN-CRF structure consistently yields good performance, and the
neural network component leaves room for exploration and development. However,
such structure is computationally costly, because of the limitation of CRF. Zhai
et al. (2017) reframed the chunking task as segmentation and labeling tasks, where
a pointer-network is used to identify chunk span, averting the use of CRF. The
weakness of this method is that there is limited interaction between the two subtasks to
minimize error propagation. Joint learning is another direction of interest. Collobert
et al. (2011) and Yang et al. (2017) jointly learned text chunking with other sequence
labeling tasks. The former proposed a neural alternative to CRF, which is more
adept to learn task-specific features in joint learning. The latter presented a transfer
learning framework. Rei (2017) incorporated unsupervised language modeling as an
auxiliary task to text chunking.
Table 2.10 shows a comparison of the features used by the introduced chunkers.
Given a focal word, the commonly used features are its POS tag, lexical context (n
words to its left and to its right), syntactic context (n POS tags to its left and to its
right). Some chunkers are able to utilize second-order features, e.g., concatenation
of the focal word and at least two preceding or following POS tags, or the current
POS tag and at least two preceding chunk tags. Such features provide more context
but can lead to sparsity problems, and thus are not widely adopted. A few chunkers
attempt to capture the structure of a chunk and use chunk-level features, such as the
distance from the verb to the chunk head (Daelemans et al., 1999a), or employing a
pointer network to learn chunk segmentation before labeling each word (Zhai et al.,
2017). Morphological features e.g., affix and capitalization are less prevalent in text
chunking, as most of the information they contain are expressed with POS tags.
Nonetheless, morphological information can still be helpful in the case of OOV
words. Deep learning methods adopt character-level embedding to acquire similar
effects.
2.5 Text Chunking 95

Table 2.11: Performance of the introduced text chunking methods.

Experiment
Method
Dataset Result Measure
Muis and Lu (2016) NUS SMS 76.62% F1
Ramshaw and Marcus (1999) baseNP 92.3% F1
Daelemans et al. (1999a) baseNP 93.8% F1
Ngai and Florian (2001) CoNLL2000 92.30% F1
Sang (2000) CoNLL2000 92.50% F1
Feature Engineering - local
Van Halteren (2000) CoNLL2000 93.32% F1
Koeling (2000) CoNLL2000 91.97% F1
Kudo and Matsumoto (2000) CoNLL2000 93.95% F1
Zhang et al. (2001) CoNLL2000 93.56% F1
Lee and Wu (2007) CoNLL2000 94.22% F1
Johnson and Zhang (2005) CoNLL2000 94.39% F1
Zhou and Su (2000) CoNLL2000 93.68% F1
Molina and Pla (2002) CoNLL2000 92.23% F1
Collins (2002) CoNLL2000 93.53% F1
Tsuruoka and Tsujii (2005) CoNLL2000 93.70% F1
Sha and Pereira (2003) CoNLL2000 94.38% F1
Feature Engineering - global Suzuki and Isozaki (2008) CoNLL2000 95.15% F1
McDonald et al. (2005) CoNLL2000 93.90% F1
Sutton et al. (2007) CoNLL2000 93.87% F1
Sun et al. (2008) CoNLL2000 94.34% F1
Lin et al. (2020) CoNLL2000 92.44% F1
Muis and Lu (2016) NUS SMS 76.62% F1
Collobert et al. (2011) CoNLL2000 94.32% F1
Yang et al. (2017) CoNLL2000 95.41% F1
Huang et al. (2015) CoNLL2000 94.49% F1
Yang et al. (2016a) CoNLL2000 95.41% F1
Zhai et al. (2017) CoNLL2000 94.72% F1
Deep Learning Rei (2017) CoNLL2000 93.88% F1
Sun et al. (2020) CoNLL2000 95.44% F1
Liu et al. (2020b) CoNLL2000 91.80% F1
Wei et al. (2021) CoNLL2000 95.15% F1
Zhao et al. (2019) CoNLL2000 94.80% F1
Akbik et al. (2018) CoNLL2000 96.72% F1

Furthermore, since text chunking is a relatively coarse-grained syntactic task that

can benefit from other tasks e.g., POS tagging, NER, or language model, we specially
mark out the algorithms that employ joint learning. A summary of the performance
of the introduced algorithms are listed in Table 2.11. The current state-of-the-art
model (Akbik et al., 2018) obtained the F1 score of 96.72%. Compared to other
sequence labeling tasks in NLU such as POS tagging and NER, text chunking has
received relatively less attention. This has become more apparent in recent years,
since most neural network models meant for sequence labeling are largely universal
and can be extended to chunking.
96 2 Syntactics Processing

It is worth exploring whether a model designed specifically for chunking can im-
prove the performance. The more significant challenge, however, is that text chunking
as a sub-system in complex applications remains quite rare. Although pushing for
accuracy is important, it is also good to keep in mind how chunking as a syntactic
preprocessing step can benefit higher-level NLU tasks such as semantics or pragmat-
ics. With the development of neural network, the performance of sequence labeling
model is advancing rapidly. Currently, the most popular approach to text chunking
is the combination of different deep learning algorithms and CRF. In the future, one
possible way to further improve the performance is to apply graph neural network to
chunking models. Another way is to find a neural network alternative to CRF. Lastly,
we hope to see more integration between text chunking and other more complex
downstream tasks, e.g., aspect extraction, sentiment analysis, etc.

2.6 Lemmatization

Lemmatization is an NLU task that reduces the inflected forms of given words into
their morphologically correct root forms. It is an essential preprocessing technique
that extracts concepts and keywords for downstream applications, e.g., search en-
gine (Halácsy and Trón, 2006; Balakrishnan and Lloyd-Yemoh, 2014) and dialogue
system (Zhao and Gao, 2017; Altinok, 2018; Liu et al., 2019a). Another commonly
used method is stemming, which also converts words into their base form, but does
so by cutting off the prefixes or suffixes. Lemmatization, on the other hand, performs
a morphological analysis based on the context of given words, and thus is able to
preserve more syntactic information. For example, given the word “studied”, a stem-
mer simply removes the suffix and returns “studi”, whereas a lemmatizer is able to
extract the proper lemma “study”.
Lemmatization has received growing attention in recent years, especially for
highly inflected languages such as Dutch, Latin and Arabic. As lemmatizing English
words are relatively easy, here we cover lemmatizers for inflection-rich languages to
provide more perspectives to this task. Annotated training corpora for lemmatization
mostly include lexicons for the target languages, CoNLL-2007 (Nivre et al., 2007),
CoNLL-2009 (Haji et al., 2009), CoNLL-2018 (Zeman et al., 2018) and the Uni-
versal Dependencies (UD) treebanks (Nivre et al., 2016). The standard evaluation
metric is accuracy. Relevant information about the commonly used lemmatization
datasets can be viewed in Table 2.12.
Existing lemmatizers regard lemmatization as either a suffix and prefix transfor-
mation problem, or a string-to-string transduction problem. The former focus on the
starting and ending letters, identifying recurring affixes and transforming them. The
latter, on the other hand, considers the whole word form and generates the operations
to convert it into its lemma. In this chapter, we introduce the previous works in three
section: the transformation approaches, the statistical transduction approaches, and
the neural transduction approaches.
2.6 Lemmatization 97

Table 2.12: Widely used corpora for lemmatization.

Dataset Description Reference

CoNLL-2007 Dependency parsing corpus Nivre et al. (2007)
CoNLL-2009 Syntactic and semantic dependencies corpus Haji et al. (2009)
CoNLL-2018 Multilingual parsing corpus Zeman et al. (2018)
UD The Universal Dependencies treebanks Nivre et al. (2016)
Multext Multilingual text tools and corpora Ide and Véronis (1994)
MULText-EAST The MULText-EAST Slovene lexicon Erjavec (1998)
UniMorph The Universal Morphology project Kirov et al. (2018)
PDT The Prague Dependency Treebank Böhmová et al. (2003)
IFD The Icelandic Frequency Dictionary Helgadóttir (2012)
CELEX Lexical databases of English, Dutch, German Jongejan and Dalianis (2009)
Cast3LB Spanish treebank Civit and Martí (2004)
CESS-ECE Multilingual and multilevel annotated corpus Martı et al. (2007)
1984 Manually annotated G. Orwell’s 1984 Gesmundo and Samardzic (2012)
GML The Middle Low German dataset Peters and Nagel (2014)
PATB Penn Arabic Treebank Maamouri et al. (2004)
ARZ Egyptian Arabic Morphological Annotation Maamouri et al. (2012)
FTB French Treebank Seddah et al. (2013)
L-Lem Modern Greek & English lexical databases Lyras et al. (2007)
D-Lem Afrikaans lexicon Daelemans et al. (2009)
Lem-list Lexical databases of 25 languages Akhmetov et al. (2020)
RELIG Religious texts in Middle Dutch Van Kerckvoorde (2019)
CG-LIT Literary texts in Middel Dutch Van Kerckvoorde (2019)
WSD Hindi health and tourism corpora Khapra et al. (2010)
LT4HALA Latin texts Celano (2020)
T´’uBa-D/Z The T´’uBa-D/Z treebank for German Telljohann et al. (2004)
NoSta-D German texts with non-standard variations Dipper et al. (2013)
UD-EWT The English Web Treebank Silveira et al. (2014)
SIGMORPHON The SIGMORPHON 2019 shared task McCarthy et al. (2019)
SEJFEK Polish economic lexicon Savary et al. (2012)

2.6.1 Transformation Approach

Early lemmatizers learnt a set of classification rules that detected and modified
suffix and/or prefix of a given word form to transform it into the corresponding
lemma. The transformation approaches viewed lemmatization as a rule-based clas-
sification problem, where the class label assigned to a word was defined via giving
the transformation to be applied on the word in order to get the normalized form.
For instance, class labels could take the form of (x to y), where x is the suffix of
the word form and y is that of its lemma. Mladenic (2002) proposed two methods
for mapping from words to their lemmas. The first on is letter-based representation
using transformation-based learning, where the machine learns a set of classifica-
tion rules from feature set comprised of suffixes. The other method is context-based
representation using Naïve Bayes Majority classifier, where the features are n-grams
of the given words.
98 2 Syntactics Processing

Plisson et al. (2004) proposed a lemmatizer based on Ripple Down Rules

(RDRs) (Compton et al., 1992) induction algorithm. As opposed to the if-then
classification rules, RDR creates exceptions to existing rules, so that the addition of
new rules is confined to the context and will not cause inconsistency in the rule base.
New RDRs are added by creating “except” or “else” branches to the existing “if-then”
rules, creating a tree-like decision structure. The model is trained on a lexicon of
lemmatized Slovene words to learn what suffixes should be removed and/or added
to get the normalized form. Results show that the RDR approach achieves better
accuracy than the standard classification rules. Juröi et al. (2007) further explored
the application of RDR in the automatic construction of lemmatizers, presenting
the LemmaGen system. They improved the original RDR method by instantiating
general concepts in lemmatization into domain-specific terms, such as organizing
the training samples into (word-form, lemma) pairs, and restricting the form of rule
condition and consequent. The LemmaGen is trained and tested on lexicons from
multiple languages. It is proven to consistently outperform the original RDR.
Erjavec and Dûeroski (2004) presented a lemmatizer for unknown Slovene words.
Their method consists of two steps. First, a trigram tagger (Brants, 2000) performs
morphosyntactic description tagging on the input text. Subsequently, the resulting
morphosyntactic tag and the word itself are passed onto a first-order decision list
learning system (Manandhar et al., 1998), which learns ordered sets of classifica-
tion rules. The lemmatizer is trained on a lexicon containing lemmas with their full
inflectional paradigms. A limitation of the rule-based methods above is that classi-
fication rules are learned based on fixed-length suffixes. An alternative is to find the
LCS between a word form and its lemma to identify the possible suffix. Kanis and
Müller (2005) constructed a lemmatizer automatically from the Full Form Lemma
training dictionary using the LCS approach. They focused on three types of OOV
problems, namely, missing full forms, compound words, and unknown words. To
address the former two, they introduced the Hierarchical Lemmatization without
Rule Permission Check (HLWRPC), where a new lemmatization algorithm without
the lemmatization rule permission check is used when encountering missing full
forms or compound words. To address the unknown words problem, a set of word
applicable rules is assigned to every word. When lemmatizing an unknown word, the
word applicable rules create a set of prefix and suffix patterns. Then, these patterns
are matched in the relevant table. The rules with the highest count of winnings are
applied on the unknown word.
Jongejan and Dalianis (2009) described a method that automatically generates
classification rules to handle not only suffix but also prefix and infix changes to
transform word forms into lemmas. Such affixes are identified via finding the LCS
and their positions in relation to the LCS. During training, the system selects rules
to lemmatize words. If a rule is incorrect, a new one is added to generate the correct
lemma. Training ends when all words are correctly lemmatized. Then, the system
returns a data structure containing a set of classification rules that a lemmatizer must
traverse to arrive at one rule that is selected to fire. They explored two different
data structures to store rules, namely directed acyclic graph (DAG) and plain tree
structure with depth first, left to right traversal.
2.6 Lemmatization 99

Daelemans et al. (2009) applied prototype-based Active Learning (AL) to

memory-based lemmatization. AL (Cohn et al., 1996) is a type of unsupervised
approach where criteria are investigated to allow ordering the unannotated data in
a way that the instances potentially contributing most to the speed of learning can
be annotated first. The proposed lemmatizer is inspired by a novel AL algorithm
called Prototype-Based Active Classification (PBAC) (Cebron and Berthold, 2009),
where a new labeled prototype is added in each learning iteration to fine-tune the
classification. Prototypical examples are selected first, whereas examples at the clas-
sification boundary are only selected automatically when it becomes necessary. To
apply the PBAC approach to lemmatization, they used word frequency and word
length as features, assuming that longer or low frequency words are less prototyp-
ical than shorter or high frequency words. They hypothesized that contrary to the
standard PBAC, less prototypical linguistic examples should provide better results
faster in AL. Therefore, less prototypical instances are added to the memory-based
classifier (Daelemans et al., 2003) at the start of the learning process. The classes are
automatically generated based on the LSC. Experiments show that their algorithm
indeed outperforms random data selection and other AL methods in lemmatization.
Gesmundo and Samardzic (2012) formalized lemmatization as a category tag-
ging task, where a word-to-lemma transformation rule is encoded as a single label.
Specifically, given a word form, its prefix and/or suffix are found using the LCS
method. Then, a transformation rule is defined by a tuple that contains the four
types of generic transformation, namely, removing a suffix, adding a new lemma
suffix, removing a prefix, and adding a new lemma prefix. Such transformation rules
are used as labels. With this setup, any supervised tagging model can be used as a
lemmatizer for any languages.

2.6.2 Statistical Transduction Approach

As opposed to transforming word forms into lemmas by modifying suffix and/or

prefix, the transduction approach views lemmatization as a character-level word-to-
lemma transduction process. The introduction of edit tree paves the foundation for
this approach, which converts an input string into the output string. Alternatives
include edit distance, word vectors, etc. Chrupa≥a (2006) was the first to propose
a data-driven, context-sensitive lemmatizer based on a class-inference mechanism
called the shortest edit script (SES), which is able to detect recurring patterns in the
mappings from words to their corresponding lemma, thus automatically deriving the
lemmatization classes from training data. Specifically, an edit script of two sequences
is a set of instructions that specifies the transformations from one sequence to the
other. These instructions take the form of inserting or deleting a character at a
designated position. Hence, finding the LCS is integral to finding the SES between
two sequences. Though unlike the previously mentioned LCS-based transformation
approach, SES does not identify suffix or prefix based on its position to map onto
that of the lemma, but generating character-level modifications instead.
100 2 Syntactics Processing

This approach is proven to perform well for different languages, effectively re-
ducing the labor to manually create full-paradigm inflectional lexicon. Based on
the SES mechanism, Chrupa≥a et al. (2008) proposed Morfette, which is a modular,
data-driven, probabilistic system that jointly learns lemmatization and morphological
tagging from morphologically annotated corpora. Morfette consists of two MaxEnt
classifiers (Ratnaparkhi, 1996) that are trained to predict lemmas and morphological
tags respectively, and another module that dynamically combines their predictions
and outputs the probability distribution over tag-lemma pair sequences. The lemma
classifier uses the SES method to induce classes automatically.
Taking inspiration from the above-mentioned works, Müller et al. (2015) pre-
sented LEMMING, a modular model that jointly learns lemmatization and mor-
phological tagging at the token level. The proposed lemmatizer maps an inflected
form into its lemma given its morphological attributes using a log-linear model.
Following the induction method in Morfette (Chrupa≥a et al., 2008), the lemmatizer
selects candidates through a deterministic pre-extraction of edit trees. This formal-
ization allows the integration of arbitrary global features. It is vastly used in later
transduction-based models. For joint learning, the lemmatizer is combined with a
morphological tagger MARMOT (Müller et al., 2013) in a tree-structured CRF. Ex-
periments show that LEMMING yields significant improvements in joint accuracy
compared to Morfette and other lemmatizers.
Lyras et al. (2007) implemented the Levenshtein edit distance in a dictionary-
based algorithm for automatic lemmatization. The system calculates the similarity
between the input word and all dictionary lemmas, selecting those with the minimum
edit distance. To improve accuracy, they also used common suffixes in the target
language, removing possible suffixes and recalculating distances. The system then
compares all stored lemmas and returns the n-best ones with the lowest edit distance.
Experiments showed that the suffix-removal method, though more labor-intensive,
achieved higher accuracy than the baseline in both modern Greek and English.
Dreyer et al. (2008) presented a conditional log-linear model, which employs
overlapping features over latent alignment sequences, and learns latent classes and
latent string pair regions from incomplete training data. Given an input, the candidate
output is selected by a sliding window over the aligned (input, output) pair. At each
window position, the log probabilities of all possible alignments are accumulated,
evaluating each alignment separately. To further improve the performance, new la-
tent dimensions can be added to the (input, output) tuple. Toutanova and Cherry
(2009) presented a global joint model for lemmatization and POS tagging trained on
morphological lexicons and unlabeled data. The model consists of two components
– a semi-supervised POS tagger (Toutanova and Johnson, 2007), and a lemmatizing
transducer that is optionally given the POS tags of input word to inform the lemma-
tization. Taking a pipeline approach, given a sentence, the POS tagger first predicts
a set of tags for each word. Subsequently, the lemmatizer predicts one lemma for
each of the possible tags. The k-best predictions of tag sets and lemmas are chosen
to be the output. Additionally, based on the idea that words with the same lemma
have dependent POS tag sets, dependencies among multiple words are dynamically
determined.
2.6 Lemmatization 101

Nicolai and Kondrak (2016) presented three lemmatization methods leveraging

inflection tables. The first one is a stem-based lemmatizer, which is built upon a
word-to-stem transduction model by adding a stem-to-lemma model, both of which
are adapted from the DIRECTL+ transducer (Jiampojamarn et al., 2010). The word-
to-stem model is trained on morphological segmentations annotated by leveraging
paradigmatic regularity in inflection tables, whereas the stem-to-lemma model is
trained on character-aligned pairs of stems and lemmas. The second model is a
stemma-based lemmatizer, consisting of a word-to-stemma model and a stemma-
to-lemma model. The word-to-stemma model is an improved word-to-stem model,
where inflection tables are further utilized by replacing stems with the corresponding
stemmas, and affixes with inflection tags. In this way, the boundaries between stems
and affixes are identified by tags. The stemma-to-lemma model is the same as the
stem-to-lemma model except it is trained stemma-lemma pairs. The final method
is direct word-to-lemma transduction, which is trained on word-forms paired with
their lemmas and inflectional tags obtained from the inflection tables. Furthermore,
the paper employs a re-ranking algorithm (Joachims, 2002) after the n-best lists of
possible lemmas are generated, which is able to leverage large, unannotated word
lists to improve the accuracy. Experiments show that the re-ranking algorithm indeed
boost the performance, and the direct lemmatization method outperforms the other
two models in most languages.
Barteld et al. (2016) presented a novel candidate ranking method to tackle two
challenges in data-driven lemmatization. First, highly inflected languages can feature
complex morphological changes such as prefix and/or infix modification. Secondly,
spelling variations can appear in non-standard texts. To bring more emphasis on
word-internal modifications, Lexical Correspondence (LC) is used for lemma can-
didate generation instead of the commonly used edit trees. An LC is defined as a
tuple (T, L) where T and L are two sequences of constants and variables with the
requirement that the same variables appear in both sequences. Given a word form
and an LC, the constants in sequence T are matched with characters in the word form
and the variables are replaced with the remaining substrings. Then, the correspond-
ing lemma can be read off the second sequence L. To restrict over-generalization,
insertions are anchored by their character offset either from the beginning or the end
of the input word form. To deal with spelling variation, given an OOV word form,
the lemmatizer generates lemma candidates from similar in-vocabulary word form.
The similarity is measured by he Levenshtein distance.
Gallay and äimko (2016) proposed a method that automatically constructs a
lemmatizer by using text corpora to build vector models by means of principal
component analysis (PCA). The core concept is that vector space word representation
encodes not only syntactic and semantic patterns, but also morphological ones.
Given an input word, the relevant reference (word, lemma) pairs are chosen from the
reference lexicon by applying vector shifts to the input word to retrieve all candidate
lemmas. Then, each candidate is assigned a weight based on their similarity with the
input word. The correct lemma candidate is expected to appear in connection with
different reference pairs. Therefore, the weights for the same candidate are summed
together and the candidate with the highest total weight is selected as final lemma.
102 2 Syntactics Processing

Rosa and éabokrtskỳ (2019) presented an unsupervised approach by performing

agglomerative clustering of word forms with a novel distance measure. With the
assumption that the inflected forms of the same lemma tend to be similar in both
spelling and meaning, the proposed distance measure is a combination of string
similarity that is given by Jaro-Winkler edit distance (Winkler, 1990), and the co-
sine similarity of FastText word embeddings. Akhmetov et al. (2020) introduced
a language-independent lemmatizer based on the Random Forest classification al-
gorithm. Firstly, all words are converted into vectors by a term frequency-inverse
document frequency (TF-IDF) vectorizer (Luhn, 1957; Jones, 1972) in the form of
a sparse matrix. Then, the transpose of this matrix is multiplied by itself to produce
a character co-occurrence matrix, every row or column of which serves as character
embedding. For every word-lemma pair in the given dictionary, the word form is
encoded by the character co-occurrence matrix, whereas the lemma is encoded by
the character ordinal numbers. For lemmatization, a Random Forest classifier with
bootstrapping is adopted. Experiments show that this simple lemmatizer performs
well across a wide range of languages.

2.6.3 Neural Transduction Approach

The recent advancement of neural networks brings a fresh perspective to the trans-
duction approach. The encoder-decoder architecture especially receives a lot of
attention, as character-level Seq2Seq model is exceptionally adept at handling the
string-to-string transduction task, able to capture more contextual information than
the statistical approaches. Kestemont et al. (2017) described a deep learning ap-
proach to lemmatization for variation-rich languages. The proposed system consists
of two basic components. One is temporal convolutions that model the orthography
of input words at the character level. The other is distributional word embeddings
from Skip-gram model, which represents the lexical context surrounding the input.
Given a word, the system feeds the focus token into the convolutional component,
and its left and right tokens into two embedding components, respectively. The out-
puts of these three sub-nets, along with the one-hot encoding of the input token, are
concatenated to form one single hidden representation, which is then passed through
a final linear layer to produce the lemma.
Chakrabarty et al. (2017) introduced a composite bidirectional gated RNN
(BGRNN) architecture for language-independent, context-sensitive lemmatization.
Following previous works, the task is defined as detecting the correct edit tree rep-
resenting the transformation between a word form and its lemma. The proposed
architecture consists of two stages. First, a BGRNN is used to extract the char-
acter level dependencies. The outputs are combined with the corresponding word
embedding given by word2vec (Mikolov et al., 2013a) to form the final word repre-
sentations. Then, the representations are fed sentence-wise into the second BGRNN
to capture the contextual information of the input word, and to learn the mapping
from word embeddings to word-lemma transformations.
2.6 Lemmatization 103

To further improve the performance, a subset of unique edit trees involving

irregular transformations are sorted out from the corpus before training. This prior
knowledge is represented as applicable tree edit vectors, and combined with the
hidden states form the second BGRNN to be passed on to the final classification
layer. For the BGRNNs, the paper explores the combination of two BiLSTMs and
two bidirectional GRUs. Experiments show that the former achieves higher accuracy.
Bergmanis and Goldwater (2018) proposed a context-sensitive lemmatizer called
Lematus, which is based on the standard attentional encoder-decoder architecture,
and incorporated character-level sentence context. The system is based on an NMT
model (Sennrich et al., 2017), which consists of a 2-layer bidirectional GRU encoder,
and a 2-layer decoder with a conditional GRU (Sennrich et al., 2017) in the first layer
and a standard GRU in the second layer. The input sequence is a space-separated
character representation of a given word in its n-character left and right sentence
context. With this method, context is modeled using solely the character contexts
of the focus word, as oppose to additional POS information or word embeddings
trained on large corpus.
To address the problem of low-resource languages, Bergmanis and Goldwater
(2019) proposed a semi-supervised method that combines type-based learning and
context-sensitive approach. Using the above-mentioned lemmatizer Lematus as a
baseline, they incorporated unambiguous word-lemma pairs in the inflection table
from the Universal Morphology project (UniMorph) (Kirov et al., 2018) as addi-
tional training data. They also collected sentence context for them from Wikipedia.
Experiment results indicate that this data augmentation indeed improves a baseline
lemmatizer trained on low-resource language corpus. Celano (2020) introduced a
joint lemmatizer and POS tagger for Latin. Given a sentence, gradient boosting
machine called LightGBM (Ke et al., 2017) predicts the corresponding POS tag
sequence. Subsequently, the POS labels are combined with word embedding pre-
trained from large Latin corpora, and fed into a standard Seq2Seq model to output
the lemma sequence.
Arakelyan et al. (2018) introduced an LSTM-based neural network that jointly
learns lemmatization, POS tagging, and morphological feature extraction. Each word
in a sentence is represented by three vectors: a pretrained word vector from FastText,
a one-hot casing feature, and a character-level representation from a BiLSTM. This
concatenated representation is processed through three LSTM layers to obtain hidden
states for lemma, POS tags, and morphological features. POS tagging and feature
extraction use a linear output layer, while lemmatization uses a GRU-based decoder
per word, sharing weights and working in parallel. The output of each decoder is fed
to another linear layer to produce the predicted lemma.
Pütz et al. (2018) proposed a morphologically-informed Seq2Seq-based lemma-
tizer. The model extends the standard encoder-decoder architecture with Luong-style
monotonic attention (Luong et al., 2015; Raffel et al., 2017). The hidden state out-
putted by the encoder is concatenated with the embedded morphological and POS
tags, passing through a feed-forward layer with SELU activation function (Klam-
bauer et al., 2017), and fed into the decoder to generate the predicted lemma.
104 2 Syntactics Processing

The proposed model is compared with LEMMING (Müller et al., 2015) in Ger-
man, achieving competitive accuracy. The results also indicate that a log-linear
lemmatizer such as LEMMING is preferable when dealing with misspelled words,
whereas Seq2Seq lemmatizer is able to generalize and handle OOV words better.
Kondratyuk et al. (2018) proposed LemmaTag, which is a featureless bidirectional-
RNN-based architecture that jointly learns lemmatization and POS tagging. Given
a sentence, a GRU outputs the character-level embedding for every word, which is
summed with the word embedding to form the final word embeddings. The resulting
sequence is passed onto two layers of BiLSTM with residual connections, producing
a sequence of word representations with sentence-level connections. The POS tagger,
made up of a fully-connected layer, predicts the tag values, concatenating them into
a flat vector to pass onto the lemmatizer. The lemmatizer consists of a LSTM layer
with character-level attention mechanism that takes in the final word embedding,
the character embedding, and the POS features of the focus word to generate the
corresponding lemma.
Malaviya et al. (2019) introduced a simple LSTM-based joint learning model
for lemmatization and morphological tagging. Given a sentence, the morphological
tagger obtains the word representation for each word using a character-level BiL-
STM, which is then fed into a word-level BiLSTM to predict the corresponding
morphological tag. For lemmatization, a string-to-string transduction model (Wu
and Cotterell, 2019) is adopted, which is a Seq2Seq model with hard attention mech-
anism (Xu et al., 2015c; Rastogi et al., 2016). The joint probability of the input
sentence is define as the product of the probability outputted by the tagger and all
the probabilities outputted by the transducer. Yildiz and Tantu (2019) proposed
Morpheus, a joint contextual lemmatizer and morphological tagger. Similarly to the
above-mentioned works, given a sentence, firstly a character-level LSTM generates
word vectors, which are then fed into a word-level BiLSTM to produce context-aware
word representations. Subsequently, two separate LSTM decoders are employed to
predict morphological tags and edit operations from word forms to lemmas. More
specifically, to find the minimum edit operations, a dynamic programming method
based on Levenshtein distance is used.
Manjavacas et al. (2019) also built upon the classic encoder-decoder architecture
to acknowledge the difficulty of spelling variations in lemmatization for non-standard
language. Specifically, they presented a hierarchical sentence encoder that is jointly
trained for lemmatization and language modeling, adopting the attention mecha-
nism (Bahdanau et al., 2015) to extract additional context. The hierarchical encoder
consists of three levels. A bidirectional RNN first computes the character-level rep-
resentation, which is fed into another bidirectional RNN to extract word-level fea-
tures. Lastly, the final bidirectional RNN outputs the sentence-level features based
on the word-level hidden state. To extract higher quality sentence-level features, a
word-level bidirectional language model is added to the lemmatizer. Two softmax
classifiers predict left and right tokens using forward and backward sentence-level
hidden states. Jointly minimizing lemmatization and language modeling losses al-
lows the lemmatizer to represent global sentence context without needing POS or
morphological tags.
2.6 Lemmatization 105

Kondratyuk (2019) presented a cross-lingual joint learning model for lemmati-

zation and morphological tagging using multilingual BERT (Devlin et al., 2018).
Given an input sentence, a pretrained multilingual cased-BERT is used to encode
the tokens in the sentence. Subsequently, the encoded tokens are passed through two
separate layer attention (Kondratyuk and Straka, 2019) to produce embeddings that
are specific to each task. Furthermore, the model also applies BiLSTM character em-
beddings (Ling et al., 2015b; Kim et al., 2016) to generate enhanced morphological
representations that are summed with the two task-specific embeddings, respectively.
Following his previous work (Kondratyuk et al., 2018), the decoder for each task
consists of two successive layers of word-level bidirectional residual LSTMs. For
lemmatization, the final hidden state is fed into a feed-forward layer to map the focus
token to one of the pre-computed SES (Chrupa≥a, 2006) that transforms it to the
correct lemma. Similarly for morphological tagging, a feed-forward layer takes in
the hidden state and predicts the morphosyntactic description class.
Taking joint learning a step further, Zalmout and Habash (2019) proposed a
Seq2Seq-based model that handles both lexicalized and non-lexicalized features. It
jointly learns lemmatization, diacritization, normalization, as well as fine-grained
morphological tagging. This is achieved by means of applying parameter sharing
strategies on top on the standard LSTM encoder-decoder architecture. On one hand,
different non-lexicalized features are modeled on word-level by a BiLSTM tagger that
shares parameters with the encoder. One the other hand, all lexicalized features are
handled on character-level by the same encoder, and then sent to their corresponding
decoders separately. The proposed model gains improvement across all of the joint
tasks in two Arabic corpora.
Unlike previous contextual neural network approaches, which takes into account
the whole sentence, Chakrabarty et al. (2019) hypothesized that a limited context
is sufficient for lemmatization. Based on this notion, they introduced a BiLSTM-
CNN lemmatizer. Given a sentence, a BiLSTM is applied to extract character-level
embeddings, which are then arranged into a matrix and processed by a CNN to
generate positional embeddings. The size of filters in the CNN is determined by the
length of the context to include, which is set to be the trigram of focus tokens in
the paper. Experiments show that BiLSTM-CNN indeed outperforms the BiLSTM-
BiLSTM lemmatizer (Chakrabarty et al., 2017).
Schmitt and Constant (2019) focused on the lemmatization of multi-word expres-
sions (MWEs), combinations of several words that display the linguistic properties
of a lexical unit. The main challenge of lemmatizing MWE is that its unique prop-
erties require different classification rules on top of simple-word lemmatization
knowledge. To acknowledge this problem, they propose a deep encoder-decoder
lemmatizer solely based on the internal context of MWE. Given an MWE, a GRU
encodes the character-level word embeddings, which are passed onto another GRU
as a sequence to extract the internal context. The final word representation in an
MWE is a concatenation of the character-level word embedding, its left internal
context, its POS tag, its position and the length of the MWE. Then, a character-level
conditional GRU with an attention mechanism decodes the final word representation
to generate the corresponding lemma.
106 2 Syntactics Processing

Table 2.13: Comparison between different lemmatization methods. Trans is short

for transformation. Statistical is short for statistical transduction, whereas Neural is
short for neural transduction. SX stands for Syntactic. MP stands for morphological.
CX stands for Context. Char stands for character. CR is classification rule. ES is
edit script. SS is string similarity. LG is lemma generation. Joint is short for joint
learning.

Method Affix SX MP CX Char CR ES SS LG Joint

Mladenic (2002) X X X
Plisson et al. (2004) X X
Juröi et al. (2007) X X
Erjavec and Dûeroski (2004) X X X
Trans
Kanis and Müller (2005) X X
Jongejan and Dalianis (2009) X X
Daelemans et al. (2009) X
Gesmundo and Samardzic (2012) X X X
Chrupa≥a (2006) X X X
Müller et al. (2015) X X X
Lyras et al. (2007) X X
Dreyer et al. (2008) X X X
Toutanova and Cherry (2009) X X X X
Statistical Nicolai and Kondrak (2016) X X X X
Barteld et al. (2016) X X X X
Gallay and äimko (2016) X X
Rosa and éabokrtskỳ (2019) X
Akhmetov et al. (2020) X X
Kestemont et al. (2017) X X X
Chakrabarty et al. (2017) X X X
Bergmanis and Goldwater (2018) X X X
Bergmanis and Goldwater (2019) X X X X X
Celano (2020) X X X
Arakelyan et al. (2018) X X X X X
Pütz et al. (2018) X X X X
Kondratyuk et al. (2018) X X X X X
Neural
Malaviya et al. (2019) X X X X X
Yildiz and Tantu (2019) X X X X X
Manjavacas et al. (2019) X X X X
Kondratyuk (2019) X X X X X
Zalmout and Habash (2019) X X X X
Chakrabarty et al. (2019) X X X
Schmitt and Constant (2019) X X X X
Zalmout and Habash (2020) X X X X
Milintsevich and Sirts (2021) X X X X
2.6 Lemmatization 107

Zalmout and Habash (2020) presented a character-level Seq2Seq lemmatization

model, utilizing several sub-word features, namely FastText n-grams, greedy stem,
orthographic roots, and orthographic patterns. They used Lematus (Bergmanis and
Goldwater, 2018) as a baseline. Instead of fixed-size character window, they utilized
the characters of the n words surrounding the focus word, employing LSTM instead
of GRU. They explored two configurations to incorporate sub-word features. At
the encoder side, they condition on different sub-words by concatenating their em-
beddings with the character embeddings before feeding them into the encoder. The
embeddings for sub-words can be learned as a part of the system, or pretrained on an
external corpus. Alternatively, greedy stem, roots, and patterns can also be learned
jointly as auxiliary tasks at the decoder side. In this configurations, lemmatization
and the auxiliary tasks share the same encoder, whilst having specific decoders for
each task. Experiments indicate that though all the proposed methods outperform
the standard Seq2Seq lemmatizer, incorporating pretrained FastText n-grams at the
encoder side yields the best result.
Milintsevich and Sirts (2021) proposed a novel hybrid approach that enhances the
Seq2Seq lemmatizer with external resources. Their model is based on the lemmati-
zation module from the Stanford parsing system (Qi et al., 2018, 2020), which takes
the character-level representation and the corresponding POS tag into a BiLSTM
encoder and a BiLSTM decoder with attention, outputting the predicted lemma us-
ing greedy decoding. To improve the performance of this baseline, they incorporated
additional lemmas extracted from an external lexicon or a rule-based system. The
model employs another encoder, which receives and processes the candidate lem-
mas from an external lexicon, or generated by a rule-based system. The decoder then
learns via two separate attention mechanism to predict lemma using the combina-
tion of the classic string-to-string transduction as well as copying lemma characters
from external candidates. Results indicate that the enhanced lemmatizer performs
considerably better than a simple lexicon extension method based on the Stanford
system.

2.6.4 Summary

In conclusion, we divide existing lemmatizers into two categories – transformation

approaches and transduction approaches. Transformation approaches regard affix as
the base unit for rule-based classifications. In early works, the machine can only learn
rules that transform suffixes of fixed length (Mladenic, 2002; Plisson et al., 2004;
Juröi et al., 2007; Erjavec and Dûeroski, 2004). Such limitation can be solved by
using LCS, which enables the machine to identify prefixes and suffixes of any length.
Kanis and Müller (2005) specifically targeted missing full forms, unknown words,
and compound words. Jongejan and Dalianis (2009) focused on detecting prefix and
infix as well as suffix. Daelemans et al. (2009) utilized PBAC to enable efficient
unsupervised learning. Gesmundo and Samardzic (2012) reframed lemmatization as
a category labeling task, so that any tagging model can be applied as a lemmatizer.
108 2 Syntactics Processing

Table 2.14: Performance of the introduced lemmatization methods. Trans is short

for transformation. Statistical is short for statistical transduction. Neural is short for
neural transduction. MSA is Modern Standard Arabic. EGY is Egyptian Arabic.

Experiment 1 Experiment 2
Method Language Dataset Result Measure Language Dataset Result Measure
Mladenic (2002) Slovene MULText-EAST 74.2% Acc.
Plisson et al. (2004) Slovene MULText-EAST 77.0% Acc.
Juröi et al. (2007) Slovene MULText-EAST 94.38% Acc. English Multext 94.14% Acc.
Trans Erjavec and Dûeroski (2004) Slovene MULText-EAST 92.0% Acc.
Kanis and Müller (2005) Czech PDT 95.89% F1
Jongejan and Dalianis (2009) Icelandic IFD 71.3% Acc. English CELEX 89.0% Acc.
Daelemans et al. (2009) Afrikaans D-Lem 91.0% Acc.
Gesmundo and Samardzic (2012) English 1984 99.6% Acc.
Chrupa≥a (2006) Spanish Cast3LB 92.48% F1 Catalan Cast3LB 94.64% F1
Müller et al. (2015) English Pen Treebank 98.84% Acc. Spanish CoNLL-2009 98.46% Acc.
Lyras et al. (2007) Modern Greek L-Lem 95.03% Acc. English L-Lem 96.46% Acc.
Dreyer et al. (2008) German CELEX 94.0% Acc.
Toutanova and Cherry (2009) English CELEX 99.0% F1 Slovene MULText-EAST 91.2% F1
Statistical Nicolai and Kondrak (2016) English CoNLL-2009 93.3% Acc. German CELEX 90.0% Acc.
Barteld et al. (2016) German GML 97.76% Acc.
Gallay and äimko (2016) MSA PATB 95.4% Acc. EGY ARZ 83.3% Acc.
Rosa and éabokrtskỳ (2019) English UD v2.3 97.78% Acc.
Akhmetov et al. (2020) 25 languages Lem-list 84.05% avg Acc.
Kestemont et al. (2017) Middle Dutch RELIG 90.97% Acc. Middle Dutch CG-LIT 91.67% Acc.
Chakrabarty et al. (2017) Hindi WSD 94.90% Acc. Spanish CoNLL-2009 98.11% Acc.
Bergmanis and Goldwater (2018) 20 languages UD v2.0 95.0% avg Acc.
Celano (2020) Latin LT4HALA 94.6% Acc.
Arakelyan et al. (2018) English CoNLL-2018 95.77% Acc. French CoNLL-2018 86.28% Acc.
Pütz et al. (2018) German T´’uBa-D/Z 97.02% Acc. German NoSta-D 83.96% Acc.
Kondratyuk et al. (2018) Czech PDT 98.37% Acc. English UD-EWT 97.53% Acc.
Neural Malaviya et al. (2019) 20 languages UD v2.0 95.42% avg Acc.
Yildiz and Tantu (2019) 97 languages UniMorph 97.85% avg Acc.
Manjavacas et al. (2019) 20 languages UD v2.2 96.28% avg Acc.
Kondratyuk (2019) 100 languages SIGMORPHON 95.00% avg Acc.
Zalmout and Habash (2019) MSA PATB 97.6% Acc. EGY ARZ 88.5% Acc.
Chakrabarty et al. (2019) French UD 95.47% Acc. Hindi UD 97.07% Acc.
Schmitt and Constant (2019) French FTB 95.6% Acc. Polish SEJFEK 88.9% Acc.
Zalmout and Habash (2020) MSA PATB 95.4% Acc. EGY ARZ 83.3% Acc.
Milintsevich and Sirts (2021) 23 languages UD v2.5 97.09% avg Acc.

Transduction approaches, on the other hand, view either character as the base unit
for lemma generation, or the entire word as the base unit to map onto its lemma based
on string similarity measures. Transduction-based methods are more flexible than the
transformation-based ones, as they do not rely on an affix lookup table, manually-built
or automatically-generated. Thus, the transduction approach is better suited to handle
irregular changes. In this chapter, we further split the transduction approaches into
statistical and neural-network-based methods, since the development of deep learning
brings a new perspective to lemmatization. Statistical transduction approaches mostly
rely on edit scripts, for instance, the data-driven SES mechanism (Chrupa≥a, 2006;
Chrupa≥a et al., 2008). Müller et al. (2015) improved SES by proposing edit tree,
which does not encodes the LCSs and thus more capable of generalizing. Following
their work, Lyras et al. (2007); Nicolai and Kondrak (2016) enhanced lemmatization
with stemming. Toutanova and Cherry (2009) incorporated POS tagging as a sub-
system. Barteld et al. (2016) further improved edit tree with LC, which is more
adept at handling word-internal inflections. Dreyer et al. (2008) proposed a window
approach as an alternative to edit tree, which can handle more complex inflections,
while it is restricted by a window size. Another alternative is to infer lemma from
word embeddings (Gallay and äimko, 2016; Rosa and éabokrtskỳ, 2019; Akhmetov
et al., 2020), paving the way for neural approaches.
2.6 Lemmatization 109

Neural transduction approaches rely on neural networks to automatically learn

the character-level correspondence between lemmas and words. Earlier methods use
various types of neural networks to produce character embeddings, concatenate it
with word embeddings, and use another neural network to predict the corresponding
lemma (Kestemont et al., 2017; Chakrabarty et al., 2017, 2019). Recent works mostly
adopt the character-level encoder-decoder architecture (Bergmanis and Goldwater,
2018; Pütz et al., 2018). Schmitt and Constant (2019) modified the encoder-decoder
structure to specifically target MWEs. Bergmanis and Goldwater (2019) applied SSL
to the architecture for low-resource domain. Milintsevich and Sirts (2021) enhanced
Seq2Seq lemmatization with external resources. Joint learning is often applied to
improve the performance of lemmatization. Commonly used auxiliary tasks in-
clude POS tagging (Celano, 2020; Arakelyan et al., 2018; Kondratyuk et al., 2018),
morphological tagging (Arakelyan et al., 2018; Malaviya et al., 2019; Yildiz and
Tantu , 2019; Kondratyuk, 2019; Zalmout and Habash, 2019), and language model-
ing (Manjavacas et al., 2019). With a more linguistically-driven approach, Zalmout
and Habash (2020) used subword modeling as an auxiliary task, and expanded the
character-level representations to include the surrounding words of the focus word.
Table 2.13 shows a summary of all the introduced lemmatizers. Here, we mark
out the methods that utilize affix, syntactic, morphological, contextual, and charac-
ter information as features, either handcrafted or automatically learned. Specifically,
syntactic features refer to POS tags or coarse-grained POS categories. Contextual
features are word n-grams or global information. Additionally, we indicate the mech-
anisms used by the lemmatizers to find the target lemma, namely, classification rule,
edit script, i.e., SES and edit tree, string similarity matching such as Levenshtein
distance and vector shift, and character-level (or occasionally word-level) lemma
generation. Among all, character-level generation garners the most interest due to
the advancement of generative Seq2Seq models. Lastly, we list the lemmatization
algorithms that adopt joint learning with other tasks, e.g., POS tagging, morpho-
logical tagging, and language modeling. The commonly used corpora are listed in
Table 2.12. A comparison of performance can be found in Table 2.14.
With the help of neural networks and joint learning, lemmatization has achieved
remarkable accuracy, especially for less inflection-rich languages such as English.
The next step could be exploring the application of more recent pretrain language
models such as GPT (Radford et al., 2018), or further improving multi-task frame-
works for joint learning. On the other hand, lemmatization for resource-scarce lan-
guages is still lacking. Although neural network approaches are proven to effective
in ancient languages compared to a rule-based lemmatizer, for instance in Ancient
Irish (Dereza, 2018), there is still a lot of room for improvement. More research
on unsupervised learning, SSL, or transfer learning is called for resource-scarce
language lemmatization.
110 2 Syntactics Processing

2.7 Conclusion

In this chapter, we provided an extensive review of syntactic processing techniques,

namely: microtext normalization, SBD, POS tagging, text chunking, and lemma-
tization. We believe that syntactics processing is a significant step in developing
neurosymbolic AI. There have been some attempts to use simple syntactic process-
ing techniques to improve more complex NLU tasks. For instance, microtext nor-
malization is applied to assist sentiment analysis (Satapathy et al., 2017b, 2019b).
SBD can be incorporated as a sub-system in information retrieval (Krallinger et al.,
2017). In sentiment analysis, it can help identify negation scope to improve the per-
formance (Councill et al., 2010). POS tagger is used as part of the feature extraction
process for cyber-bullying detection (Nandhini and Sheeba, 2015) and query-based
information retrieval (Mahmood et al., 2017). Asghar et al. (2014) suggested that POS
tagging is also an important feature extraction step in sentiment analysis. Mubarok
et al. (2017); Mao and Li (2021) applied it to ABSA and indeed obtained better
results. Feng et al. (2019b) proposed NMT decoding models that jointly predict tar-
get words and corresponding POS tag sequence, acquiring significant improvement.
POS tagger is also used to provide syntactic structure in dialogue system (Meena
et al., 2014; Bang et al., 2015). As for text chunking, Gupta et al. (2016a) used both
POS tagging and chunking as subtasks to tackle text summarization. Song et al.
(2005) utilized chunking technique to improve biomedical information extraction.
Syed et al. (2014) integrated text chunking with sentiment analysis in Urdu. Lemma-
tization has long been used for information retrieval (Halácsy and Trón, 2006; Kanis
and Skorkovská, 2010; Balakrishnan and Lloyd-Yemoh, 2014) and other tasks, e.g.,
text categorization (Camastra and Razi, 2020), sentiment analysis (Mhatre et al.,
2017), and Tweet stance classification (Priyanshu et al., 2020). More recently, MTL
and curriculum learning techniques have been applied as an ensemble for syntactics
processing Zhang et al. (2024a).
2.8 Learning Resources 111

2.8 Learning Resources

A. Reading List
• Xulang Zhang, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. Granular Syntax Processing with
Multi-Task and Curriculum Learning. Cognitive Computation 16, 2024 (Zhang
et al., 2024a)

• Iti Chaturvedi, Ranjan Satapathy, Curtis Lynch, and Erik Cambria. Predicting
Word Vectors for Microtext. Expert Systems, e13589, 2024 (Chaturvedi et al.,
2024)

• Xulang Zhang, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. SenticVec: Toward Robust and
Human-Centric Neurosymbolic Sentiment Analysis. In: Proceedings of ACL,
4851–4863, 2024 (Zhang et al., 2024c)

B. Relevant Videos
• Labcast about Granular Syntax Processing: [Link]/Fr9lZ6u3Fxs

• Labcast about Intonation Disambiguation: [Link]/qbba_CvEXcQ

• Labcast about SenticVec: [Link]/jhCTzeC1ebc

C. Related Code
• Github repository about Syntactics Processing: [Link]/SenticNet/Syntactics

• Github repo about Microtext: [Link]/SenticNet/microtext-normalization

• Github repository about SenticVec: [Link]/SenticNet/SenticVec

D. Exercises
• Exercise 1. Create a Python program that reads a list of microtexts and outputs
their normalized versions. Use a predefined dictionary of common microtext ab-
breviations and their full forms. Implement a function to replace abbreviations
with full forms. Test your program with a given set of microtexts.
112 2 Syntactics Processing

• Exercise 2. Propose three sample paragraphs that contain ambiguities in sen-

tence boundaries. Each example should include explanations of the ambiguities
and how you would resolve them. After creating the examples, discuss your rea-
soning and approach.

• Exercise 3. Enhance your grasp of POS tagging by identifying the POSs in a

given sentence. Choose a random sentence of at least 100 characters from your
favorite book, write it down, and determine the part of speech for each word.
Rewrite the sentence, placing the POS tags in parentheses next to each word.

• Exercise 4. Test your text chunking skills by identifying and labeling noun
phrases (NP) and verb phrases (VP) in the previous sentence. Read the sentence
again, determine NPs and VPs, and then label each chunk accordingly.

• Exercise 5. Lemmatize the previous sentence by replacing each word with its
base form or lemma. Then, compare your lemmatized sentence with the output
produced by NLTK’s WordNetLemmatizer to see how they align and identify any
differences.
Chapter 3
Semantics Processing

Abstract Semantics processing is a fundamental research domain in computational

linguistics. In the era of LLMs, the advancement of research in this domain appears to
be decelerating. However, the study of semantics is multi-dimensional in linguistics.
The research depth and breadth of semantics processing can be largely improved with
new technologies. In this chapter, we analyze five semantic processing tasks: WSD,
NER, concept extraction, anaphora resolution, and subjectivity detection. We survey
theoretical research in these fields, advanced methods, and downstream applications,
with the hope of encouraging scholars to focus on these fine-grained NLU tasks.
The review of theoretical research may also inspire new tasks and technologies
in this domain. Finally, we compare different semantic processing techniques and
summarize their technical trends, application trends, and future directions.

Key words: Word Sense Disambiguation, Named Entity Recognition, Concept Ex-
traction, Anaphora Resolution, Subjectivity Detection

3.1 Introduction

Semantics is a linguistic term, generally referring to the meaning of language. Unlike

syntax which studies the structure of sentences, the significance of semantics lies
in its ability to aid our comprehension of how meaning is conveyed through words,
phrases, and sentences, as well as how language is used to express various ideas,
thoughts, and emotions. Language is one of the important carriers of meanings.
However, the term “meaning” encompasses multiple aspects of language. Palmer and
Frank Robert (1981) argued that there is a lack of consensus regarding the nature of
“meaning”, e.g., which components should be considered part of semantics, and how
it should be characterized. Thus, the study of “semantics” is also multi-dimensional
in academia.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 113
E. Cambria, Understanding Natural Language Understanding,
[Link]
114 3 Semantics Processing

The evolution of semantic research reflects the rich connotation of semantics in

linguistics. At the early stage, much attention is given to the study of lexical seman-
tics. The first English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, dates back
to 1604 (Noyes, 1943). The construction of dictionaries, e.g., The Oxford English
Dictionary (Simpson and Weiner, 1989) became one of the most significant symbols
of lexical semantic research achievements. The research of lexical semantics covers
word senses, polysemy, word formation, contrastive lexical semantics, and more.
Next, another important research dimension of semantics emerged, termed struc-
tural semantics. Structural semantics emphasizes the analysis of sentence structures,
including the relationships between words and the ways in which words contribute
to the meaning of a sentence. The study of structural semantics includes but is not
limited to analyzing the meaning of words by syntax, grammar, and pragmatics.
Structural semantics elevates the study of semantics from the word level to the
sentence level.
The later cognitive semantics further enrich the connotation of semantics. The
tenets of cognitive semantics posit that the faculty of language is intricately inter-
twined with the broader cognitive capacity of human beings (Croft and Cruse, 2004).
In other words, semantics is a reflection of how humans understand and make sense
of the world around them. Under cognitive semantics, researchers extend to frame
semantics (semantics is the reflection of encyclopedic knowledge), situation seman-
tics (semantics reflects the relationships between situations) (Barwise and Perry,
1981), conceptual semantics (semantics reflects the structural perception of con-
cepts) (Jackendoff, 1976), and more. Fig. 3.1 summarizes partial semantic research
domains in linguistics.

Semantics

Lexical semantics Structural semantics Cognitive semantics

Word senses Sem. und. by syntax Frame semantics

Polysemy Sem. und. by grammar Situation semantics

Word formation Sem. und. by pragmatics Conceptual semantics

Contrastive lex. sem.

Fig. 3.1: Semantic research domains in linguistics. Lex. denotes lexical; sem. denotes
semantics; und. denotes understanding.
3.1 Introduction 115

The development of automatic semantic processing techniques has largely facil-

itated semantic research. Many useful tools and knowledge bases1 were developed
for WSD, NER, concept extraction, anaphora resolution, and subjectivity detection.
These tools are the embodiment of many theoretical ideas in semantics. For example,
WSD is an important task in lexical semantics. NER categorized named entities in
texts by conceptually related classes, e.g., names, and locations. Similarly, concept
extraction and subjectivity detection tasks also embody the cognitive properties of
semantics. Anaphora resolution elucidates the relationship between the anaphor,
which is the repetition of a reference, and its antecedent, which is the earlier mention
of the entity.
In addition to improving semantic research, semantic processing techniques can
also help other downstream NLU tasks with more complexity (see Table 4.1). For
example, subjectivity detection can be an upstream task of sentiment analysis, be-
cause subjective expressions can be further categorized by positive, negative, and
neutral expressions with different opinionated intensities. The semantic processing
techniques that have been reviewed possess a range of potential applications, in-
cluding the ability to generate features that are effective, as well as to be used as a
parser in order to obtain desired categories of text. Additionally, these techniques
have the potential to improve the explainability of downstream applications. The
emergence of PLMs has greatly enhanced the semantic representation capabilities of
deep learning models and the ability to fit downstream tasks (Devlin et al., 2018; Liu
et al., 2019c; Lewis et al., 2020). Some LLMs, e.g., GPT-42 and Bard3 even realize
the functions of multiple complex NLP tasks by the means of dialogue, such as QA,
translation, and text summarization. Many semantics processing studies have grad-
ually faded out of the field of NLP. Then, in the era of PLMs and LLMs, an intuitive
question is what is the motivation for studying semantic processing techniques?
As mentioned before, semantics reflects the multiple aspects of language. Be-
sides understanding word senses, semantics is also the entrance to understanding the
mechanism, and perception of language. Language intelligence encompasses more
than just achieving a level of accuracy that is equivalent to or surpasses human ac-
curacy for specific tasks. It also entails the capacity to unveil the nature of language
and investigate the cognitive processes that underlie language. Much aforementioned
semantic research in the context of linguistics has not been explored in computa-
tional linguistics to the best of our knowledge. Thus, we are motivated to propose
a survey on semantic processing techniques to encourage future scholars that can
expand the depth and breadth of semantic research, leading the public attention from
the application value of NLP techniques to the research value of computational lin-
guistics. Nevertheless, we also highlight the fusion of low-level semantic processing
techniques and NLU techniques to demonstrate the application value of semantic
processing techniques in different domains.

1 A knowledge base normally refers to a collection of organized information that is machine-

readable, and supportive for an intelligent system.
2 [Link]
3 [Link]
116 3 Semantics Processing

Table 3.1: Surveyed semantic processing tasks and their downstream applications. F
denotes that the technique yielded features for a downstream task model; P denotes
that the technique was used as a parser; E denotes that the technique improved the
explainability for a downstream task. CE denotes concept extraction. AR denotes
anaphora resolution. SD denotes subjectivity detection.

Downstream tasks WSD NER CE AR SD

Polarity Detection F, P, E F, P, E F P
Information Retrieval E F, E P
Machine Translation F, P, E F, E
Summarization F
Textual Entailment F
Knowledge Graph Construction P
Recommendation Systems F, P, E
Dialogue Systems P, E F, P
Commonsense Explanation Generation F, E
Hate Speech Detection F, P
Question & Answering Systems F, P

Given the broadness of semantics, this chapter’s scope lies in semantic processing
techniques for WSD, NER, concept extraction, anaphora resolution, and subjectivity
detection. This is because these low-level semantic processing tasks reflect different
aspects of semantics. In addition, there were many research works on these tasks
in the field of computational linguistics. We focus on low-level semantic processing
tasks, rather than high-level semantic processing tasks, e.g., sentiment analysis and
natural language inference, because they provide fundamental building blocks for
both high-level semantic processing tasks and higher-level NLU tasks.
Multiple semantic processing techniques were rarely surveyed in the same article.
Salloum et al. (2020) surveyed several high-level semantic processing tasks, e.g.,
latent semantic analysis, explicit semantic analysis, and sentiment analysis. Unlike
the work of Salloum et al. (2020), this chapter includes the latest research in low-level
semantic processing techniques. Compared to the latest semantics processing surveys
focusing on specific tasks (Ransing and Gulati, 2022; Poesio et al., 2023; Wang
et al., 2022; Montoyo et al., 2012), we additionally reviewed important theoretical
research and downstream task applications in these domains. These contents can
help readers better understand the foundation of semantic research in linguistics, as
well as potential application scenarios.
More importantly, theoretical research shows the big picture of a semantic process-
ing task, which may inspire different research tasks in the computational linguistic
community. The collection of multiple semantic processing techniques is helpful for
readers to have a comprehensive understanding of a large field, inspiring more fusion
research across different domains. Theoretical research of other tasks has the poten-
tial to inspire fresh perspectives among researchers who have been concentrating on
a specific semantic research task.
3.1 Introduction 117

Fig. 3.2: Outline of this chapter. Each subtask is explained in terms of different
technical trends and downstream applications.

The contribution of this chapter is threefold:

• We survey recent semantic processing techniques, annotation tools, datasets, and
knowledge bases for five low-level semantic processing tasks.
• We highlight important theoretical research, and downstream applications to
encourage deeper and wider research in the semantics processing domain upon
the currently established task setups.
• We compare different semantic processing techniques, delineate their technical
and application trends, and put forth potential avenues for future research in this
domain.
118 3 Semantics Processing

In the following sections, we introduce five different semantic processing tech-

niques, namely: WSD (Section 3.2), NER (Section 3.3), concept extraction (Sec-
tion 3.4), anaphora resolution (Section 3.5), and subjectivity detection (Section 3.6).
Fig. 3.2 presents an outline of the chapter: each task is organized in terms of theo-
retical research, annotation schemes, datasets, knowledge bases, evaluation metrics,
methods, downstream applications, and a summary. Finally, Section 3.7 wraps up
the chapter by proposing concluding remarks, a reading list, three relevant videos,
some related code, and five exercises.

3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation

The complexity of human language is difficult for machines to understand it. One
of the challenges is the ambiguity of word senses. In natural language, a word may
have multiple senses, given different contexts. Consider the following example:
(1) He got his shoes wet as he walked along the bank.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the major senses of “bank” include
(a) an organization that provides various financial services, for example keeping
or lending money; (b) the side of a river, canal, etc. and the land near it. With the
context, humans can easily know that “bank” here refers to the sense (b). However,
it is challenging for machines to do so because the interpretation made by humans is
contingent upon their comprehension of the fact that the probability of getting one’s
shoes wet is higher when walking alongside a river bank as compared to a financial
institution. Machines rarely take the commonsense into account when inferring the
meaning of “bank”4, because they do not have human-like cognition and reasoning
abilities by nature.
There are two main technical trends in addressing the task of WSD, namely
knowledge-based methods and supervised methods. Knowledge-based WSD utilizes
the word relations from knowledge graphs, e.g., WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) and
BabelNet (Navigli and Ponzetto, 2012b) to achieve the disambiguation of word
senses. In supervised methods, the WSD task is usually defined as a classification
task by word senses. A WSD model is trained with annotated data. Two examples of
supervised WSD are illustrated in Fig. 3.3. As shown in the figure, a naïve strategy
of the knowledge-based WSD is that the sense that shares the most relations with
the context words is selected as the best-matched one. For supervised WSD systems,
the predictive model predicts the potential senses, given the target word and its
context words as input. In recent times, the use of knowledge bases has proven
advantageous for several modern supervised systems. As a result, there has been a
growing trend in integrating knowledge-based and supervised methods to enhance
their performance (Wang and Wang, 2020).

4 Current methods likely disambiguate word senses by word co-occurrences. However, word co-
occurrences are not commonsense.
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation 119

Fig. 3.3: Simplified examples of the knowledge-based and supervised WSD.

WSD has been recognized as a crucial module in numerous NLU tasks that
heavily rely on word senses, such as polarity detection, information retrieval, and
machine translation. The application of WSD techniques has been demonstrated to
be beneficial for these NLU tasks. While prior surveys (Bevilacqua et al., 2021;
Navigli, 2009) have conducted extensive reviews for WSD, the works discussed in
them are outdated.

3.2.1 Theoretical Research

[Link] Distributional Semantics

The hypothesis from distributional semantics (Firth, 1957) argued that word mean-
ings can be inferred from word co-occurrences. Words that appear in similar con-
texts tend to have similar meanings. Such a hypothesis has been the most significant
foundation of developing semantic representations in the computational linguistics
community, e.g., vector space representations (Turney and Pantel, 2010; Mikolov
et al., 2013b; Pennington et al., 2014) and PLMs (Devlin et al., 2018; Liu et al.,
2019c). Based on such a hypothesis, dense semantic vectorial representation re-
search commonly follows a similar training paradigm, e.g., using context words to
predict a target word. Currently, ChatGPT further proves that learning to use words
that have appeared before to predict the next possible word can achieve the skills
of analogy and reasoning with the help of a very large Transformer (Vaswani et al.,
2017)-based model.
120 3 Semantics Processing

[Link] Selectional Preference

Wilks (1973) proposed a concept of selectional preference. It is a procedure for rep-

resenting the meaning structure of natural language. Compared to the “derivational
paradigm” of transformational grammar and generative semantics, Wilks (1973) be-
lieved that selectional preference is a more efficient procedure in NLU. It focuses
on determining preferences between various possible interpretations of a text, rather
than identifying a solitary and unequivocally correct interpretation. Selection pref-
erence theory allows more flexibility and nuance in understanding word senses and
language. Besides, the theory is computation-friendly. Wilks (1973) showed how the
procedure could be computed and implemented. The work of Wilks (1973) supports
that there are multiple possible meanings for a word. The meaning can be defined
by the sectional preference of contexts.

[Link] Construction Semantics

Goldberg and Suttle (2010) argued that the meanings of words are frequently derived
from larger language units, termed constructions. Constructions consist of a form and
a meaning, ranging from single words to full sentences in size. The interpretation of a
construction is reliant on both its structure and the situations in which it is employed.
Goldberg and Suttle (2010) argued that semantic restrictions are better linked with
the construction as an entirety rather than with the lexical semantic framework of the
verbs. The work of Goldberg and Suttle (2010) highlights that the interpretation of
meanings of language units can be extended from individual words to constructions.
It shows the necessity of defining language units in WSD.

[Link] Frame Semantics

Fillmore et al. (2006) proposed frame semantics that provides a distinct viewpoint
on the meanings of words and the principles behind language construction. Frame
semantics emphasizes the significance of the surrounding context and encyclope-
dic knowledge in comprehending word meanings. Petruck (1996) explained that a
“frame” refers to a collection of concepts interconnected in a manner that understand-
ing any one concept depends on the understanding of the complete system. In frame
semantics, the meaning of “cooking” is beyond its dictionary meaning. It also as-
sociates with the concept of “food”, “cook”, “container”, and “heating instrument”.
Frame semantics motivates later ontology research, e.g., FrameNet (Ruppenhofer
et al., 2016) and FrameNet-based WSD systems, significantly.
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation 121

3.2.2 Annotation Schemes

For knowledge-based WSD, the data are normally presented as ontology, such as
WordNet, FrameNet, and BabelNet, where words and concepts are connected by
relations. The relations include hyponyms, hypernyms, holonyms, meronyms, at-
tributes, entailment, etc. An explanation (gloss) and a few example sentences are
given for each synset. Synsets of the same POS are connected under some relations
independently. However, there exist relations when the basic concept of two words
is the same but in a different POS (for example, “propose” and “proposal” were
characterized as “derivationally related synsets” in WordNet). For supervised WSD,
a particular word in a given sentence is annotated with a sense ID that corresponds
to one of the potential senses in a knowledge base, such as WordNet. A sample of
annotation is shown in the next section.

3.2.3 Datasets

Our surveyed datasets and their statistics can be viewed in Table 3.2. The biggest
manually annotated English corpus currently accessible is SemCor5 (Miller et al.,
1993). It has 200K content terms tagged with their related definitions and around
40K phrases. Although SemCor serves as the principal training corpus for WSD,
its limited coverage of the English vocabulary for both words and meanings is
its most significant drawback. In essence, SemCor merely includes annotations
for 22K distinct lexemes in WordNet, the most extensive and commonly employed
computerized English dictionary, which corresponds to less than 15% of all words. To
augment the coverage of words, Vial et al. (2019) incorporated the English Princeton
WordNet Gloss Corpus (WNG)6, which contains more than 59K WordNet senses,
as a complemented data. The WNG is annotated manually or semi-automatically.
SemCor and its variations (Bentivogli and Pianta, 2005; Bond et al., 2012) lack an
acceptable multilingual equivalent in the majority of global languages, which limits
the scaling capabilities of WSD models beyond English. To address the aforemen-
tioned issues, numerous automatic methods for creating multilingual sense-annotated
data have been developed (Pasini and Navigli, 2017; Pasini et al., 2018; Scarlini et al.,
2019). In an English-Italian parallel corpus known as MultiSemCor (Pianta et al.,
2002), senses from the English and Italian versions of WordNet are annotated. The
Line-hard-serve corpus (Leacock et al., 1993) contains 4K samples of the nomi-
nal, adjective, and verbal words with sense tags. The data were sourced from Wall
Street Journal (WSJ) corpus and the American Printing House for the Blind (APHB)
corpus. The Interest corpus (Bruce and Wiebe, 1999) contains 2,369 occurrences
of the term interest that have been sense-labeled. The data were sourced from the
HECTOR word sense corpus (Atkins, 1992).

5 [Link]
6 [Link]
122 3 Semantics Processing

Table 3.2: WSD datasets and statistics. EMEA, KDEdoc, and EUB denote European
Medicines Agency documents, KDE manual corpus, and the EU bookshop corpus,
respectively.

Dataset Source # Samples Reference

SemCor WordNet 200,000 Miller et al. (1993)
WordNet,
MultiSemCor 51,847 Pianta et al. (2002)
bilingual Collins
Line-hard-serve WSJ, APHB 4,000 Leacock et al. (1993)
Interest HECTOR 2,369 Bruce and Wiebe (1999)
DSO Brown, WSJ 192,800 Ng and Lee (1996)
OMWE Web 29,165 Chklovski and Pantel (2004)
OMSTI UN documents 1,357,922 Taghipour and Ng (2015b)
SensEval-2 Unknown 2,282 Edmonds and Cotton (2001)
Editorial, news
SensEval-3 1,850 Snyder and Palmer (2004)
story, & fiction
SemEval-2007 Brown, WSJ 455 Pradhan et al. (2007)
SemEval-2013 SMT workshop 1,644 Navigli et al. (2013)
EMEA, KDEdoc,
SemEval-2015 1,022 Moro and Navigli (2015)
EUB

The Defence Science Organisation (DSO), based in Singapore, created the DSO
corpus7 (Ng and Lee, 1996), which contains 192,800 sense-tagged tokens from 191
words from the Brown and WSJ corpora. The Open Mind Word Expert (OMWE)
dataset8 (Chklovski and Pantel, 2004) is a corpus of sentences with 288 noun oc-
currences that were jointly annotated by Web users. One Million Sense-Tagged for
WSD and Induction (OMSTI)9 (Taghipour and Ng, 2015b) is a semi-automatically
annotated WSD dataset with WordNet sense inventory. The data were sourced from
MultiUN corpus, which is a collection of United Nation documents. The OMSTI
includes 687,871 nouns, 412,482 verbs, and 251,362 adjectives and 6,207 adverbs
after including selected samples from SemCor and DSO.
The SensEval and SemEval datasets are created from the SensEval/SemEval eval-
uation campaigns. Now, these datasets have been the most widely used benchmarking
datasets in WSD. Raganato et al. (2017b) collected these datasets together10 and de-
veloped a unified evaluation framework for empirical comparison. The statistics of
the following datasets are from the collection of Raganato et al. (2017b). SensEval-
2 (Edmonds and Cotton, 2001) used WordNet 1.7 sense inventory, including 2,282
sense annotations for nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. SensEval-3 (Snyder and
Palmer, 2004) employed WordNet 1.7.1 sense inventory, including 1,850 sense anno-
tations. SemEval-2007 Task 17 (Pradhan et al., 2007) employed WordNet 2.1 sense
inventory, including 455 nominal and verbal sense annotations.

7 [Link]
8 [Link]
9 [Link]
10 [Link]
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation 123

SemEval-2013 Task 12 (Navigli et al., 2013) used WordNet 3.0 sense inven-
tory, including 1,644 nominal sense annotations. SemEval-2015 Task 13 (Moro and
Navigli, 2015) utilized WordNet 3.0 sense inventory, including 1,022 sense annota-
tions. It is worth noting that some of the SemEval tasks are multilingual, including
SemEval-2013 and SemEval-2015, which facilitates multilingual WSD.
All of these corpora are annotated using various WordNet sense inventories, with
the exception of the Interest corpus (tagged with LDOCE senses) and the SensEval-1
corpus. The Interest corpus and the SensEval-1 corpus were sense-labeled using the
HECTOR sense inventories, a lexicon and corpus from a joint Oxford University
Press/Digital project (Atkins, 1992) Generally, the data and labels in WSD datasets
are organized in the following forms. Then, the task is to identify the sense classes,
given contexts, and target words.

context: “You perform well in the exam, I will reward you.”,

target word: “perform”,
pos: “VB”,
sense: “3”

context: “She worked in a renowned university for a long time.”,

”target word”: “university”,
”pos”: “NN”,
”sense”: “2”

3.2.4 Knowledge Bases

[Link] Machine-Readable Dictionaries

Machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs) have been a useful source for WSD due to
their structured knowledge and easy access (Navigli, 2009). Dictionaries frequently
contain extensive information about the various meanings of a word, as well as il-
lustrative examples of their usage within context. Therefore, dictionaries can serve
as valuable knowledge bases for the task of WSD. Additionally, MRDs may provide
further information such as synonyms, antonyms, and related words, which can aid
in facilitating a more comprehensive comprehension of a word’s meaning. Through
the analysis of this information, a system may make more precise determinations
about which meaning is most fitting in a given context. There are many electronic
dictionaries available for machines to refer to, such as the Longman Dictionary
of Contemporary English (LDOCE) (Mayor, 2009), the Oxford Dictionary of En-
glish (Dictionary, 2010), Collins English Dictionary (Dictionary, 1982), and the
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (OALD) (Hornby and
Cowie, 1974).
124 3 Semantics Processing

Table 3.3: Useful knowledge bases for WSD. LDOCE means Longman Dictionary
of Contemporary English. ODE means Oxford Dictionary of English. CED means
Collins English Dictionary. OALD means Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
of Current English. Unstructured or structured means the knowledge base contains
unstructured or structured lexical knowledge by concepts.

Name Knowledge # Entities Structure

LDOCE 6th ed. Lexical 230,000 Unstructured
ODE 2022 Lexical 600,000 Unstructured
CED 12th ed. Lexical 722,000 Unstructured
OALD 8th ed. Lexical 145,000 Unstructured
WordNet Lexical 95,600 Graph
FrameNet Lexical 13,687 Graph
BabelNet Lexical & Multilingual 26,044,643 Graph
SyntagNet Lexical 78,000 Graph

[Link] WordNet

WordNet (Miller, 1995) is a sizable, manually curated lexicographic database of En-

glish. It is arranged as a network with synsets, or collections of contextual synonyms,
as nodes. A synset of synonyms each represents one of a word’s senses. Through
edges that express lexical-semantic links like meronymies (partof) and hypernymies
(is-a), synsets and senses are connected to one another. WordNet additionally offers
definitions (glosses) and uses examples for each synset as additional lexical informa-
tion. The most current English WSD works use the 3.0 version, which was published
in 2006 and has 117,659 synsets. Following the initial WordNet for English, many
WordNets for other languages have been proposed, including languages such as
Chinese (Wang and Bond, 2013), Arabic (Black et al., 2006), Dutch (Postma et al.,
2016), and more11.

[Link] FrameNet

FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al., 2016) is an English lexical repository that is readable

by both humans and machines, established by annotating real-life textual examples
that depict the usage of words. It was developed based on the theory of frame
semantics, containing 1,224 frames (a frame refers to a diagrammatic representation
of a scenario encompassing diverse elements such as participants, props, and other
conceptual roles), and 13,687 lexical units (lemmas and their POS) that evoke frames.
In FrameNet, the lexical units of a sentence are associated with frame elements.
Frame elements are the semantic role of lexical units. For example, given a sentence
“I ate an apple this afternoon”, “apple” would fill the role of “food” (a frame element).

11 [Link]
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation 125

[Link] BabelNet

BabelNet (Navigli and Ponzetto, 2012b) is a multilingual dictionary that covers

both lexicographic and encyclopedic entries from 520 languages. These entries were
created by semi-automatically mapping numerous sites, including WordNet, Multi-
lingual WordNet, and Wikipedia. The topology of BabelNet is that of a semantic
network, where the nodes are multilingual synsets (collections of synonyms that
have been lexicalized in several languages), and the edges represent the semantic
connections between them.

[Link] SyntagNet

SyntagNet (Maru et al., 2019) is a manually developed lexical resource that integrates
semantically disambiguated lexical combinations, e.g., noun-verb and noun-noun
pairs. The development of SyntagNet involved initially extracting lexical combina-
tions from English Wikipedia and the British National Corpus, which were then
subjected to a process of manual disambiguation, based on the WordNet. SyntagNet
covers five major languages, e.g., English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

3.2.5 Evaluation Metrics

In the WSD task, given a sentence of n words T = {x1, . . . , xn }, the model predicts
a sense for each word given the dictionary. Normally, the F1 score is adopted, which
is a specialization of the F score when ↵ = 1:
1
F= (3.1)
↵ P1 + (1 ↵) R1
Where P denotes precision and R denotes recall:
correct predictions
P= (3.2)
total predictions
correct predictions
R= (3.3)
n
These metrics do not accurately represent how well systems can produce a level
of confidence for a particular sensory choice. To this end, Resnik and Yarowsky
(1999) developed an evaluation criterion that considers the discrepancies between
the accurate and selected senses to weigh misclassification mistakes. Errors get
penalized less severely than coarser sense distinctions if the chosen sense is a fine-
grained distinction of the true sense. There have been evaluation metrics for even
more precise measurements, including the receiver operation characteristic (ROC).
These metrics, however, are not frequently utilized as precision, recall, and F1 .
126 3 Semantics Processing

3.2.6 Annotation Tools

LX-SenseAnnotator12 (Neale et al., 2015) provides a user interface for manually

annotating word senses. The software has the capability to process lexical data in
any language, on the condition that the data is compliant with the format of Princeton
WordNet. Human annotators can view the preprocessed text in three different modes,
including the source text, sense-annotated text, and raw text, which can be switched
between by using a tab widget. The source text mode displays the original text
along with all tags, while the sense-annotated text mode displays the same text but
with newly added sense tags. This allows the annotator to monitor the output file
continually. Annotators can view the sense options in real time when annotating the
sense for a word. LexTag13 is another useful tool for WSD, it has been used to create
a recent 10-language parallel dataset ELEXIS-WSD 1.014.

3.2.7 Methods

[Link] Knowledge-based WSD

Knowledge-based WSD utilizes knowledge bases to disambiguate word senses. Com-

pared with supervised WSD, this class of WSD methods achieves lower performance
but better data efficiency and transparency.

A. Semantic Space Matching

This matching algorithm looks for similarities between the context of a term whose
sense needs to be disambiguated and its sense representation, such as the definition
of a potential sense and its associated sense that was retrieved from a knowledge
base. Lesk is a naïve knowledge-based WSD algorithm that looks for terms that
are similar to the target word in the context of each sense (Lesk, 1986). It enumer-
ates the intersections among lexicon definitions of the diverse connotations of every
target word contained within a given sentence. Banerjee et al. (2003) proposed an
advanced version of the Lesk where the standard TF-IDF method is employed for
word weighting. Another improved version of Lesk (Basile et al., 2014) includes
word embeddings to improve the accuracy of determining how close the definition
and context of the target word are. Finally, SREFK B (Wang and Wang, 2020) is a
vector-based technique that disambiguates word senses by using sense embeddings
and contextualized word representations. It applies BERT to represent WordNet
instances and definitions, as well as the automatically obtained contexts from the
Web.

12 [Link]
13 [Link]
14 [Link]
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation 127

A. Graph-based matching

This other matching algorithm creates a graph using the context and connections
retrieved from knowledge bases. Synsets and the relationships between them become
graph nodes and edges, respectively. Senses are then disambiguated based on the
constructed graphs. A variety of graph-based techniques, such as LDA (Blei et al.,
2003), PageRank (Brin and Page, 1998), Random Walks (Agirre et al., 2014), Clique
Approximation (Moro et al., 2014b), and Game Theory (Tripodi and Navigli, 2019),
are used to disambiguate the meaning of a given word using the created graph. Agirre
and Soroa (2009) presented a graph-based unsupervised WSD system that employs
random walk over a WordNet semantic network. They employed a customized ver-
sion of the Page Rank algorithm (Haveliwala, 2002). The technique leverages the
inherent structural properties of the graph that underlies a specific lexical knowledge
base, and shows the capability of the algorithm to identify global optima for WSD,
based on the relations among entities. Agirre et al. (2014) evaluated this algorithm
with new datasets and variations of the algorithm to prove its effectiveness.
Navigli and Lapata (2007) also introduced a graph-based unsupervised model
for WSD, which analyzed the connectivity of graph structures to identify the most
pertinent word senses. A graph is constructed to represent all possible interpretations
of the word sequence, where nodes represent word senses and edges represent sense
dependencies. The model assessed the graph structure to determine the significance
of each node, thus finding the most crucial node for each word. Babelfy (Moro
et al., 2014b) is also a graph-based WSD method that uses random walk to identify
relationships between synsets. It used BabelNet (Navigli and Ponzetto, 2012b) and
performed random walks with Restart (Tong et al., 2006). In addition, it incorporated
the entire document at the time of disambiguation. The candidate disambiguation
is upon automatically developed semantic interpretation graph which used a graph
structure to represent various possible interpretations of input text.
SyntagRank (Scozzafava et al., 2020) is a high-scoring knowledge-based WSD
algorithm. It is an entirely graph-based algorithm that uses the Personalized PageR-
ank algorithm to incorporate WordNet (for English), BabelNet (for non-English) and
SyntagNet. SyntagRank is generally considered a stronger method than SREFK B .
BabelNet enabled SyntagRank to improve its ability to scale across a wide range of
languages, whereas SREFK B has only been evaluated in English.

[Link] Supervised WSD

Currently, supervised approaches, especially deep learning-based supervised learn-

ing approaches, have become mainstream in the WSD community. Earlier deep
learning-based approaches focused on architectures where WSD was defined as to-
ken classification over WordNet senses (Kågebäck and Salomonsson, 2016). Even
though they performed well, these structures showed a lot of flaws, particularly when
it came to predicting uncommon and invisible senses.
128 3 Semantics Processing

To address these issues, numerous works began to supplement the training data by
utilizing various lexical knowledge, such as sense definitions (Kumar et al., 2019a;
Blevins and Zettlemoyer, 2020), semantic relations (Bevilacqua and Navigli, 2020;
Conia and Navigli, 2021), and data generated via novel generative methods (Barba
et al., 2021b). In this section, we review representative works in supervised WSD.

A. Data-Driven Machine Learning Approaches

Data-driven machine learning approaches refer to methodologies and techniques

in which the design, training, and optimization of machine learning models heavily
rely on large amounts of data. In these approaches, the model’s ability to generalize
patterns and make predictions is learned directly from the provided data, rather than
being explicitly programmed by humans. The data-driven nature of these approaches
allows models to learn complex patterns, relationships, and representations present
in the data itself. Singh et al. (2014) employed 5-gram and position features, and a
decision tree algorithm to represent classification rules in a tree structure where the
training dataset is recursively partitioned. Each leaf node indicates the meaning of
a word. They developed a dataset, containing 672 Manipuri sentences to test their
method. The sentences were sourced from a local newspaper, termed “The Sangai
Express”. O’Hara et al. (2004) proposed a class-based collocation method that in-
tegrates diverse linguistic features in a decision tree algorithm. For the collocation,
three distinct word relatedness scores are used: the first is based on WordNet hyper-
nym relations; the second is based on cluster-based word similarity classes; and the
third is based on dictionary definition analysis. The authors also utilized POS and
word form features. The It Makes Sense (IMS) WSD system (Zhong and Ng, 2010)
used an SVM classifier. Different positional and linguistic features were considered,
including nearby words, nearby words’ POS tags, and nearby collocations. Later,
word embeddings became important features in WSD. Taghipour and Ng (2015b);
Rothe and Schütze (2015); Iacobacci et al. (2016) used IMS as the base model to
examine word embeddings. Iacobacci et al. (2016) offered many approaches where
different word embeddings were applied as features to test how many parameters im-
pact the effectiveness of a WSD system. The authors found that word2vec which was
trained with OMSTI can yield the strongest results on the three examined all-word
WSD tasks.

B. Data-Driven Neural Approaches

Data-driven neural approaches refer to methodologies and techniques that utilize

neural networks to learn patterns and representations directly from data. These ap-
proaches leverage the power of neural networks, which are computational models
inspired by the structure and functioning of the human brain, to automatically learn
complex relationships, features, and representations present in the provided data.
Neural networks consist of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers, al-
lowing them to capture hierarchical and non-linear patterns.
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation 129

Popov (2017) proposed to use BiLSTM (Graves and Schmidhuber, 2005), GloVe
word embeddings, and word2vec lemma embeddings. Yuan et al. (2016) suggested
another LSTM-based WSD approach that was trained in a semi-supervised fashion.
SSL was achieved by employing label propagation (Talukdar and Crammer, 2009) to
assign labels to unannotated sentences by assessing their similarity to labeled ones.
The best performance on the SensEval-2 dataset can be observed from the model that
was semi-supervision-trained with OMSTI and 1,000 additional unlabeled sentences.
Additionally, Le et al. (2018) looked more closely at how many elements affect
its performance, and several intriguing conclusions were drawn. The initial point
to highlight is that achieving strong WSD performance does not necessitate an
exceedingly large unannotated dataset. Furthermore, this method provides a more
evenly-distributed sense assignment in comparison to prior approaches, as evidenced
by its relatively strong performance on infrequent cases. Additionally, it is worth
noting that the limited sense coverage of the annotated dataset may serve as an upper
limit on overall performance.
With the development of self-attention-based neural architectures and their ca-
pacity to extract sophisticated language information (Vaswani et al., 2017), the use
of transformer-based architectures in fully supervised WSD systems is becoming
more and more popular. The WSD task is usually fine-tuned on a pretrained trans-
former model, which is a popular strategy. The task-specific inputs are given to the
pretrained model, which is then further trained across a number of epochs with the
task-specific objective. Likewise, in recent token classification models for WSD,
the contextualized representations are usually generated by a pretrained model and
then fed to either a feedforward network (Hadiwinoto et al., 2019) or a stack of
Transformer layers (Bevilacqua and Navigli, 2019). These methods outperform ear-
lier randomly initialized models (Raganato et al., 2017a). Hadiwinoto et al. (2019)
tested different pooling strategies of BERT, e.g., last layer projection, weighted sum
of hidden layers, and Gated Linear Unit (Dauphin et al., 2017).
The best performance on SensEval-2 is given by the strategy of the weighted sum
of hidden layers, accounting for 76.4% F1 . Bevilacqua and Navigli (2019) proposed a
bi-directional Transformer that explicitly attends to past and future information. This
model achieved 75.7% F1 on SensEval-2 by training with the combination of SemCor
and WordNet’s Tagged Glosses15. It is worth noting that, the categorical cross-
entropy, which is frequently utilized for training, limits the performance. In reality, it
has been demonstrated that the binary cross-entropy loss performs better (Conia and
Navigli, 2021) because it enables the consideration of many annotations for a single
instance in the training set as opposed to the use of a single ground-truth sense alone.
In the above-mentioned approaches, each sense is assumed to be a unique class, and
the classification architecture is limited to the information provided by the training
corpus.

15 [Link]
130 3 Semantics Processing

[Link] Knowledge-augmented Supervised WSD

The edges that connect the senses and synsets are a valuable source of knowledge
that augments the annotated data. Traditionally, graph knowledge-based systems,
such as those based on Personalized PageRank (Scozzafava et al., 2020), have taken
advantage of this information. Moreover, utilizing WordNet as a graph has benefited
many modern supervised systems. Thus, formally, knowledge-augmented supervised
WSD is defined as a methodology that combines traditional supervised machine
learning techniques with external knowledge resources to improve the accuracy and
performance of WSD.
Wang and Wang (2020) used WordNet hypernymy and hyponymy relations to
devise a try-again mechanism that refines the prediction of the WSD model. The
SemCor corpus was utilized to acquire a supervised sense embedding for every
annotated sense in their supervised method (SREFSup ). Vial et al. (2019) reduced
the number of output classes by mapping each sense to an ancestor in the WordNet
taxonomy, then yielding a smaller but robust sense vocabulary. The authors used
BERT contextualized embeddings. By training with SemCor and WordNet gloss
corpora, the model achieved 79.7% F1 on SensEval-2. Different variations also
achieve outstanding performance on diverse WSD datasets.
Loureiro and Jorge (2019) created representations for those senses not appear-
ing in SemCor by using the averaged neighbor embeddings in the WordNet. The
token-tagger models EWISE (Kumar et al., 2019a) and EWISER (Bevilacqua and
Navigli, 2020) both leveraged the WordNet graph structure to train the gloss embed-
ding offline, where EWISER demonstrated how the WordNet entire graph feature
can be directly extracted. EWISE used ConvE (Dettmers et al., 2018) to obtain
graph embeddings. Conia and Navigli (2021) provided a new technique to use the
same edge information by replacing the adjacency matrix multiplication with a bi-
nary cross-entropy loss where other senses connected to the gold sense are also
taken into account. The edge information was obtained from WordNet. In general,
edge information is increasingly used in supervised WSD, gradually blending with
knowledge-based techniques. However, it can only be conveniently utilized by to-
ken classification procedures, whereas its incorporation into sequence classification
techniques has not yet been researched.
It has also been extensively studied how to use sense definitions as an additional
source for supervised WSD apart from the traditional data annotations. It consid-
erably increased the scalability of a model on the senses that are underrepresented
in the training corpus. Huang et al. (2019a) argued that WSD has traditionally been
approached as a binary classification task, whereby a model must accurately decide
if the sense of a given word in context aligns with one of its potential meanings
in a sense inventory, based on the provided definition. define the WSD task as a
sentence-pair classification task, where the WordNet gloss of a target word is con-
catenated after an input sentence. Blevins and Zettlemoyer (2020) used a bi-encoder
to project both words in context and WordNet glosses in a common vector space.
Disambiguation is then carried out by determining the gloss that is most similar to
the target word.
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation 131

Glosses are employed similarly by more advanced techniques like SensEm-

BERT (Scarlini et al., 2020b), ARES (Scarlini et al., 2020a), and SREF (Wang
and Wang, 2020). They used quite different approaches to find new contexts auto-
matically in order to develop the supervised portion of the sense embedding. ARES
achieved 78.0% F1 on the SensEval-2 dataset by utilizing collocational relations be-
tween senses to get novel example sentences from websites. SensEmBERT leveraged
BabelNet and Wikipedia explanations, achieving significant improvements on nom-
inal WSD tasks over 5 major datasets. Barba et al. (2021a) proposed to solve WSD
as a text extraction problem where, given a word in context and all of its potential
glosses, models extract the definition that best matches the term under consideration.
The authors demonstrated the advantages of their approach in that it does not require
huge output vocabularies and enables models to take into account both the input
context and all meanings of the target word simultaneously. By using sparse cod-
ing, Berend (2020) has demonstrated that it is also possible to make existing sense
embeddings sparse. All of these methods handle each word independently of the
others when disambiguating multiple words that co-occur in the same context. Thus,
a word’s explicit meaning is neither taken into account during word disambiguation
nor does it have an impact on the disambiguation of surrounding words.

3.2.8 Downstream Applications

[Link] Polarity Detection

WSD has been applied in many Sentiment Analysis works to improve accuracy
and explainability. Farooq et al. (2015) proposed a WSD framework to enhance the
performance of sentiment analysis. To determine the orientation of opinions related
to product attributes in a particular field, a lexical dictionary comprising various word
senses is developed. The process involves extracting relevant features from product
reviews and identifying opinion-bearing texts, followed by the extraction of words
used to describe the features and their contexts to form seed words. These seed words,
which consist of adjectives, nouns, verbs, and adverbs, are manually annotated with
their respective polarities, and their coverage is extended by retrieving their synonyms
and antonyms. WSD was utilized to identify the sentiment-orientated senses, such as
the positive, negative, or neutral senses of a word in a sentence, because a word may
have different sentiment polarities by taking different senses in different contexts.
Nassirtoussi et al. (2015) offered a novel approach to forecast intra-day directional
movements of the EUR/USD exchange rates based on news headline text mining in an
effort to address semantic and sentiment components of text-mining. They evaluated
news headlines semantically and emotionally using the lexicons, e.g., WordNet and
SentiWordNet (Baccianella et al., 2010). SentiWordNet is a publicly accessible
lexical resource designed for sentiment analysis that allocates a positivity score,
negativity score, and objectivity score to each synset within WordNet.
132 3 Semantics Processing

Nassirtoussi et al. (2015) found that both positive and negative emotions may
influence the market in the same way. WSD worked as a technique to abstract semantic
information in their framework. Thus, it enhances the feature representations and
explainability in their downstream task modeling. SentiWordNet has served as a basis
for various sentiment analysis models. In the work of Ohana and Tierney (2009), the
feasibility of using the emotional scores of SentiWordNet to automatically classify
the sentiment of movie reviews was examined. Other applications, e.g., business
opinion mining (Saggion↵ and Funk, 2010), article emotion classification (Devitt and
Ahmad, 2007), word-of-mouth sentiment classification (Hung and Lin, 2013; Hung
and Chen, 2016) also showed that SentiWordNet as a semantic feature enhancement
knowledge base can deliver accuracy gains in sentiment analysis tasks.

[Link] Information Retrieval

The impacts of using WSD for information retrieval have been examined in many
works. Krovetz and Croft (1992) disambiguated word senses for terms in queries
and documents to examine how ambiguous word senses impact information retrieval
performance. The researchers arrived at the conclusion that the advantages of WSD
in information retrieval are marginal. This is due to the fact that query words have
uneven sense distributions. The impact of collocation from other query terms already
plays a role in disambiguation. WSD was used as a parser to study this task. However,
the findings from Gonzalo et al. (1998) are different. They examined the impact of
improper disambiguation using SemCor. By accurately modeling documents and
queries together with synsets, they achieved notable gains (synonym sets). Addition-
ally, their study showed that WSD with a 40%-50% error rate could still improve
information retrieval performance when using synset representation with synonyms.
Gonzalo et al. (1999); Stokoe et al. (2003) further confirmed the significance of
WSD to information retrieval. Gonzalo et al. (1999) also found that POS informa-
tion has a lower utility for information retrieval. Based on artificially creating word
ambiguity, Sanderson (1994) employed pseudo words to explore the effects of sense
ambiguity on information retrieval. They came to the conclusion that the high accu-
racy of WSD is a crucial condition to accomplish progress. Blloshmi et al. (2021)
introduced an innovative approach to multilingual query expansion by integrating
WSD, which augments the query with sense definitions as supplementary semantic
information in multi-lingual neural ranking-based information retrieval. The results
demonstrated the advantages of WSD in improving contextualized queries, resulting
in a more accurate document-matching process and retrieving more relevant doc-
uments. Kim et al. (2004) labeled words with 25 root meanings of nouns rather
than utilizing fine-grained sense inventories of WordNet. Their retrieval technique
preserved the stem-based index and changed the word weight in a document in
accordance with the degree to which it matched the query’s sense. They credited
their coarse-grained, reliable, and adaptable sense tagging system with the improve-
ment on TREC collections. The detrimental effects of disambiguation mistakes are
somewhat mitigated by the addition of senses to the conventional stem-based index.
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation 133

[Link] Machine Translation

The challenge of ambiguous word senses poses a significant barrier to the develop-
ment of an efficient machine translator. As a result, a number of researchers have
turned their attention to exploring WSD for machine translation. Some works tried
to establish datasets to quantify the WSD capacity of machine translation systems.
Rios Gonzales et al. (2017) proposed a test set of 6,700 lexical ambiguities for
German-French and 7,200 for German-English. They discovered that WSD remains
a difficult challenge for NMT, especially for uncommon word senses, even with
70% of lexical ambiguities properly resolved. Campolungo et al. (2022) proposed a
benchmark dataset that aims at measuring WSD biases in machine translation in five
language combinations. They also agreed that state-of-the-art systems still exhibited
notable constraints when confronted with less common word senses. Raganato et al.
(2019) proposed MUCOW, a multilingual contrastive test set automatically created
from word-aligned parallel corpora and the comprehensive multilingual sense inven-
tory of BabelNet. MUCOW spans 16 language pairs and contains more than 200,000
contrastive sentence pairs. The researchers thoroughly evaluated the effectiveness
of the ambiguous lexicons and the resulting test suite by utilizing pretrained NMT
models and analyzing all submissions across nine language pairs from the WMT19
news shared translation task.
Some works analyzed the internal representations to understand the disambigua-
tion process in machine translation systems. Marvin and Koehn (2018) examined the
extent to which ambiguous word senses could be decoded through the use of word
embeddings in relation to deeper layers of the NMT encoder, which were believed
to represent words with contextual information. In line with prior research, they
discovered that the NMT system frequently mistranslated ambiguous terms. Tang
et al. (2019) trained a classifier to determine if a translation is accurate given the
representation of an ambiguous noun. The fact that encoder hidden states performed
much better than word embeddings suggests that encoders are able to appropriately
encode important data for disambiguation into hidden states. Liu et al. (2018a) dis-
covered that an increase in the number of senses associated with each word results
in a decline in the performance of word-level translation. The root of the issue may
be the mapping of each word to similar word vectors, regardless of its context. They
proposed to integrate techniques from neural WSD systems into an NMT system to
address this issue.

3.2.9 Summary

WSD as a computational linguistics task most closely related to lexical semantics

research, has won extensive discussions among researchers from different fields. Lin-
guists came up with important hypotheses to guide the modeling of word senses. We
have observed that some hypotheses have been well grounded in NLU, e.g., learning
and representing word meanings with their contexts and word co-occurrences.
134 3 Semantics Processing

However, we also observe some important linguistic arguments were rarely studied
in the computational linguistic domain, e.g., defining the scope of linguistic units for
WSD and integrating relevant concepts (frames) for word sense representations. The
development of WSD datasets has greatly ignited the research enthusiasm of scholars
in WSD. However, we also observed that the computational research on WSD is
also limited by these well-defined datasets because WSD datasets generally follow
a very similar labeling paradigm. Relevant linguistic studies have shown broader
possibilities in WSD. Finally, we find that many of WSD modeling techniques do
not link well with downstream applications. The research of WSD methods has
intersections with downstream applications, whereas they cannot well cover the
needs of downstream tasks. This also shows that the research opportunities in WSD
can be largely extended besides word sense classification.

[Link] Technical Trends

Table 3.4 shows the technical trends of WSD methods. As seen in the table, ear-
lier approaches likely used knowledge-based and supervised approaches. WordNet
and BabelNet are useful knowledge bases that were frequently used by knowledge-
based methods. Word embeddings, PLMs, and linguistic features, e.g., POS tags
and semantic relatedness were frequently used by supervised methods. For old pure
knowledge-based methods, the PageRank framework was likely used, because many
knowledge bases are represented as graphs. PageRank is an algorithm used in graph
computation to measure the importance of nodes in a graph. Classical machine learn-
ing techniques, e.g., decision trees and SVM, were commonly used by supervised
WSD methods. Supervised learning algorithms demonstrate superior performance
in comparison to knowledge-based approaches. Nevertheless, it is not always rea-
sonable to assume the availability of substantial training datasets for different areas,
languages, and activities. Ng (1997) predicted that a corpus of around 3.2 million
sense-tagged words would be necessary in order to produce a high-accuracy, wide-
coverage disambiguation system. The creation of such a training corpus requires an
estimated 27 person-years of labor. The accuracy of supervised systems might be
greatly improved above state-of-the-art methods with such a resource. However, the
success of this hypothesis is at the cost of huge resource consumption.
We observe more hybrid approaches that leverage knowledge bases in a super-
vised learning fashion in recent years. This is because researchers have observed the
limitations of typical supervised WSD in processing rare or unseen cases. Knowledge
bases provide additional information to support the learning of unseen cases. Knowl-
edge bases provide additional knowledge for the languages whose annotated data are
scarce. In this case, multilingual knowledge bases can enhance the representations
of word senses in a new domain. As a result, we can observe the accuracy of the
hybrid approaches surpasses the pure knowledge-based or supervised approaches.
Most existing WSD datasets define the task as a word sense classification task. Then,
the following methodology research upon the datasets focused on improving the
accuracy of mapping the sense of a word to its dictionary sense class.
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation 135

Table 3.4: A summary of representative WSD techniques. Knwl denotes knowledge-

based methods. Sup. denotes supervised methods. KB denotes knowledge bases. WN
denotes WordNet. BN denotes BabelNet. DSM denotes Distributional Semantics
Models. Prob. denotes probability. SE2013-EN denotes the SemEval-2013 English
WSD task.
Task Reference Tech Feature and KB. Framework Dataset Score Metric
Lesk (1986) Prob. Statistics, OALD
Count def. overlaps - - -
Banerjee et al. (2003) ML Emb., WN Score function SensEval-2 34.6% F1
Navigli and Lapata (2007) Graph Sense graph, WNConnectivity measures SemCor 31.8% F1
Basile et al. (2014) Prob. Emb., BN DSM SE2013-EN 71.5% F1
Knwl
Wang and Wang (2020) K B DL BERT, WN Vector represent. SensEval-2 72.7% F1
Agirre and Soroa (2009) Graph WN PageRank SensEval-2 58.6% Recall
Moro et al. (2014b) Graph Sem. graph, BN PageRank SE2013-EN 69.2% F1
Scozzafava et al. (2020) Graph WN, SN PageRank SensEval-2 71.6% F1
Singh et al. (2014) ML 5-gram, position
Decision Tree Manipuri 71.7% Acc
O’Hara et al. (2004) ML Relatedness score
Decision Tree SensEval-3 65.9% F1
Zhong and Ng (2010) ML Position, POS SVM SensEval-2 68.2% F1
Iacobacci et al. (2016) ML Emb., POS SVM SensEval-2 68.3% F1
Sup. Popov (2017) DL Emb. BiLSTM SensEval-2 70.1% Acc
Yuan et al. (2016) DL Emb., label prop.
LSTM SensEval-2 74.4% F1
Le et al. (2018) DL Emb. LSTM SensEval-2 72.0% F1
Hadiwinoto et al. (2019) DL BERT Transformer SensEval-2 76.4% F1
Bevilacqua and Navigli (2019) DL Emb. BiTransformer SensEval-2 75.7% F1
Wang and Wang (2020) S u p DL BERT, WN Vector represent. SensEval-2 78.6% F1
Vial et al. (2019) DL BERT, WN Transformer SensEval-2 79.7% F1
Loureiro and Jorge (2019) DL BERT, WN Transformer SensEval-2 76.3% F1
Graph emb., BiLSTM, Att.
Kumar et al. (2019a) DL SensEval-2 73.8% F1
emb., WN ConvE
Bevilacqua and Navigli (2020) DL BERT, WN Trans., Struct. logit 5 datasets 80.8% F1
Conia and Navigli (2021) DL BERT, WN Transformer SensEval-2 78.4% F1
Transformer, sentence-
Huang et al. (2019a) DL BERT, WN SensEval-2 77.7% F1
pair classification
Knwl
Blevins and Zettlemoyer (2020) DL BERT, WN Trasformer, Score Func. SensEval-2 79.4% F1
+
Transformer, Context Nouns of
Sup. Scarlini et al. (2020b) DL BERT, BN, Wiki 80.4% F1
Retrieval 5 datasets
Transformer, Context
Scarlini et al. (2020a) DL BERT, WN, SN SensEval-2 78.0% F1
Retrieval
Transformer, Extractive
Barba et al. (2021a) DL BERT, WN SensEval-2 81.7% F1
Sense Learning
Transformer, sparse
Berend (2020) DL BERT, WN SensEval-2 79.6% F1
coding, PMI

However, should the research on WSD be limited to word sense classification?

We have observed that many knowledge-based systems used existing knowledge
bases to conduct word sense classification tasks. They have realized the importance
of developing an effective knowledge base for WSD. However, it is rare to see that
WSD research tries to improve the construction of knowledge bases according to the
effectiveness of word sense classification. On the other hand, the meaning of WSD is
much larger than detecting the definition of words in a dictionary. Mapping a word to
a sense in a dictionary is just an aspect of WSD. Previous works rarely studied what
is an appropriate linguistic unit for WSD; what concepts are associated with a word
sense in a context. These are very interesting research topics from linguistic and
cognitive aspects. However, these topics were not well studied in the computational
WSD community.
136 3 Semantics Processing

Table 3.5: A summary of the representative applications of WSD in downstream

tasks. Xdenotes the role of WSD in a downstream task.

Reference Downstream Task Feature Parser Explainability

Farooq et al. (2015) Polarity Detection X
Nassirtoussi et al. (2015) Polarity Detection X X
Ohana and Tierney (2009) Polarity Detection X X
Saggion↵ and Funk (2010) Polarity Detection X X X
Devitt and Ahmad (2007) Polarity Detection X X
Hung and Lin (2013) Polarity Detection X X
Hung and Chen (2016) Polarity Detection X X X
Krovetz and Croft (1992) Information Retrieval X
Gonzalo et al. (1998) Information Retrieval X
Gonzalo et al. (1999) Information Retrieval X
Sanderson (1994) Information Retrieval X
Stokoe et al. (2003) Information Retrieval X
Kim et al. (2004) Information Retrieval X X
Blloshmi et al. (2021) Information Retrieval X X
Rios Gonzales et al. (2017) Machine Translation X
Raganato et al. (2019) Machine Translation X
Marvin and Koehn (2018) Machine Translation X X
Tang et al. (2019) Machine Translation X X
Liu et al. (2018a) Machine Translation X

[Link] Application Trends

The WSD task was commonly defined as a word sense classification task. However,
we observe that classifying words by sense classes is not the only need for downstream
NLU tasks. There are three main tasks that are strongly related to WSD, e.g., polarity
detection, information retrieval, and machine translation. One of the roles of WSD
on the three tasks is to deliver or enhance features to gain improvements on the
three tasks. On the other hand, we also observe many downstream works used WSD
techniques as a parser to obtain words with different levels of word sense ambiguity
or used WSD to gain insights into their model behaviors to improve the explainability
of a study. In these cases, defining WSD as a sense classification task may be sub-
optimal for downstream applications.
WSD has a huge potential in NLU research. For example, disambiguating word
senses in a large corpus can lead to a deeper understanding of language usage
patterns and the semantic relationships between words. WSD is also a significant
component in semantic explainable AI, because it helps researchers better understand
the decision-making process of a model on the semantic level. Researchers can
develop a more transparent and trustworthy model by explaining word senses in
contexts. As a feature generator, a WSD may be more effective if it can generate
contextualized word meanings in natural language, rather than predict a sense class
that maps to a predefined gloss in a dictionary. However, research in these fields is
rare in the WSD community.
3.2 Word Sense Disambiguation 137

Finally, according to Navigli (2009), the lack of end-to-end applications that

utilize WSD can be attributed to the insufficient accuracy of current WSD systems.
This suggests that in the future, more precise WSD systems may be developed, which
could potentially enable the use of more semantics-dependent applications.

[Link] Future Works

The task of WSD can be broader than the current word sense classification task setup
from either the theoretical research side or the downstream application side. Besides,
the improvements in WSD accuracy can also attract more downstream applications.
Thus, we come up with the following future work suggestions.

A. Extending the Form of WSD

WSD can have different learning forms, besides word sense classification, e.g., para-
phrasing an ambiguous word into a less ambiguous one (Mao et al., 2018, 2022a),
generating contextualized word senses in natural language. Such an extension may
have significance in downstream applications. From the perspective of linguistic and
cognitive research, studying how to define a language unit to better disambiguate
word senses, or studying how to link a word to its associated concepts in a context
can also improve the significance of WSD in the era of LLM-based NLP. Future
works may study how to define the task of WSD to better support the research in
different disciplines.

B. Rethinking Existing Knowledge Bases by WSD

Most of the existing knowledge bases were developed according to human-defined

ontologies and word senses. These knowledge bases have been considered as an
important resource for many knowledge-based systems. Although the knowledge
bases have been used on different tasks, few works analyzed the weakness of the
ontologies. Future WSD-related research may try to improve the knowledge bases
by rethinking the sense definition, concept node connections, and coverage, rather
than simply developing models to enhance the learning ability on a specific task.

C. Multilingual WSD

Most of the semantic representations are learned from monolingual corpora. As a

result, the semantic representations are different between different languages. How-
ever, the disambiguation of meanings is not characterized by languages (Boroditsky,
2011). It will significantly improve multilingual semantic research if WSD research
can break down language barriers from a cognitive perspective. As argued by frame
semantics (Fillmore et al., 2006), the meaning of a word is beyond its dictionary
definitions. It also associates with the concepts, interconnected with the word. Rep-
resenting word senses by concepts may achieve a more robust multilingual WSD.
138 3 Semantics Processing

D. Learning WSD as a Pretraining Task

Recent years witness great success of PLMs in various domains. Existing PLMs
followed the same hypothesis that the sense of a word can be learned from its as-
sociated context. However, there has not been a PLM that explicitly disambiguates
word senses to enhance the learning of semantic representations. Naïvely learning
the semantic representation of a target word by its associated context words cannot
learn the conceptual association of the target word. For example, many words can
associate with the word “apple”. How can we know an apple as fruit is red or green,
sweet, tree-growing, nutritious, etc? As an electronic device, Apple is associated
with an operating system, a circuit board, a brand, etc. Disambiguating word senses
before pretraining may build such connections between concepts.

E. Fusing WSD with other Tasks

As Bevilacqua et al. (2021) argued, WSD can also be integrated with an entity
linking task (Moro et al., 2014b), where the model predicts associated entities to
help WSD systems explore the related glosses and relations. Related fusion works
also include fusing WSD for sentiment analysis (Farooq et al., 2015), information
retrieval (Blloshmi et al., 2021) and machine translation (Campolungo et al., 2022).
The future study of WSD can be grounded on an end task so that the end task can
more effectively benefit from the fusion of a WSD model.

3.3 Named Entity Recognition

NER is a critical component of information extraction, which involves identifying

entity mentions in text, defining their boundaries, and assigning them entity types.
The most commonly recognized entity types by NER systems are Location, Person,
and Organization, but there are many other types including time expressions (Zhong
and Cambria, 2023). In the following example:
(2) Steve Jobs is the founder of Apple.
An NER system would recognize the entities that “Steve Jobs” is Person; “Apple” is
Organization. NER systems use pre-defined entity types, which may vary across dif-
ferent implementations. For example, Stanford’s widely used NER software (Finkel
et al., 2005) provides three versions that recognize three classes (Location, Person,
Organization), four classes (Location, Person, Organization, Misc), and seven classes
(Location, Person, Organization, Money, Percent, Date, Time), respectively. NER is
a critical component in the field of NLU (Jinjie et al., 2022; Gao et al., 2022; He
et al., 2021) and is often combined with other tasks, such as relation extraction, to
serve as a foundation for various NLP applications.
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 139

Besides, NER is also used in various data mining tasks to recognize keywords,
topics, and attributes (He et al., 2019a; Li et al., 2021d, 2019a). NER can be traced
back to the third Message Understanding Conference (MUC) (Chinchor et al., 1993).
The task for MUC-3 was designed to extract relevant information from the text and
convert it into a structured format based on a predefined template, e.g., incident, the
targets, perpetrators, date, location, and effects. Early NER systems that participated
in MUC-3 primarily relied on rule-based approaches, which involved the manual
creation of rules to identify named entities based on their linguistic and contextual
features. However, with the dominance of deep learning in the NLP community,
most NER tasks are now performed using neural networks.
One of the first neural networks for NER was proposed by Collobert and Weston
(2008), which used a single CNN with manually constructed feature vectors. Later,
this approach was replaced with high-dimensional continuous vectors, which were
learned from large amounts of unlabeled data in an unsupervised manner (Collobert
et al., 2011). With stronger models, now, the research in NER has been largely
extended to nested NER (Su et al., 2022), few-shot NER (Huang et al., 2022b),
joint entity and relation extraction (JERE) (Zhong and Chen, 2021). Compared to
standard NER whose entity relationship is absent, entities in nested NER have a
hierarchical or nested structure, where one entity is embedded within another entity.
For example, given
(3) The Ontario Supreme Court said ...
“Ontario” is a state entity that is embedded under the government entity of “Ontario
Supreme Court” (Ringland et al., 2019b). Given the very expensive annotation costs,
few-shot NER is also a very important research trend. It learns NER with a limited
amount of labeled data. JERE tasks are established based on the needs of downstream
applications. In many cases, people not only need to know what an entity is but also
need to know the relationship between entities. Thus, JERE needs to identify named
entities in text as well as extract the relationships that exist between them. In the
following example
(4) Greg Christie has been one of the greatest engineers at Apple.
For standard NER, “Greg Christie” should be identified as Person; “Apple” should
be identified as Company. However, for JERE, besides the above entity recognition,
an additional relationship label, “work_at” should also be predicted. Compared to
identifying entities that are hierarchically structured within each other in nested
NER tasks, the outcomes of JERE deliver another relationship dimension to connect
entities. Both tasks are helpful in developing a comprehensive knowledge graph.
Due to the wide range of applications of NER, there have been several surveys
conducted on this typical NLU task (Li et al., 2020b; Yadav and Bethard, 2018).
Song et al. (2021) focused specifically on NER in the biomedical field, also known
as Bio-NER. In this domain, the presence of meaningless characters in biomedical
data presents a significant challenge, particularly with regards to inconsistent word
distribution.
140 3 Semantics Processing

Similarly, Liu et al. (2022d) summarized and discussed the challenges specific to
Chinese NER, rather than the more general English NER tasks. Meanwhile, Nasar
et al. (2021) explored both NER and relation extraction tasks, as they are closely
linked and are typically composed of pipeline tasks. The above mentioned surveys
focus on the technical perspective of NER, based on deep learning technology,
while this section takes a different approach. Specifically, we begin by examining
the linguistic background of NER and its historical development, as well as current
approaches and future directions. By taking a longer-term view and a more funda-
mental approach, we aim to provide a broader and more comprehensive perspective
on the development of NER.

3.3.1 Theoretical Research

[Link] Prototype Theory

Rosch (1973) argued that our classification system, which includes the classification
of named entities, is based on a central or prototype example. A prototype is a typical
example of a category that represents the most common features or characteristics
associated with the category. For example, the prototype of “bird” must associate
the features, such as wings, feathers, and the ability to fly. Birds such as ostriches or
penguins, which do not perfectly possess these characteristics, may be viewed as less
typical examples. Rosch and Mervis (1975) discovered that individuals can identify
typical category examples faster and with greater precision than atypical examples.
Thus, learning from prototypes can help to quickly grasp the important features of a
named entity with a few examples.

[Link] Graded Membership

Rosch et al. (1976) argued that the classification of categories is frequently deter-
mined not by strict boundaries, but by various degrees of membership. We can use
this theory for NER because the NER task also categorizes entities by predefined
classes. The idea of Graded Membership implies how humans perceive and cate-
gorize the world around us. Some categories, e.g., “vegetable”, may be viewed as
less distinct and vaguer. The theory suggests that the borders between categories
may not be well-defined in some cases, leading to ambiguities when attempting to
classify certain items, such as tomatoes or mushrooms. The ambiguity can be fur-
ther compounded by cultural or regional differences in how categories are defined
or classified.
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 141

[Link] Conceptual Blending

According to Fauconnier and Turner (2008), the act of blending different elements
and their corresponding relationships is an unconscious process that is believed to be
ubiquitous in everyday thought and language. This process involves the combination
of various mental spaces or cognitive domains that are drawn from different scenarios
and experiences. These scenarios may be derived from personal experiences, cultural
practices, or societal norms, among others. Concept blending allows us to create a
new concept by combining existing ones in novel ways. For example “SpaceX”
may be mapped to mental spaces related to “aerospace” and “technology”; “Tesla”
may be mapped to mental spaces related to “car” and “clean energy”. Conceptual
blending provides an explanation for the recognition and comprehension of newly
named entities by mapping them onto existing mental spaces or concepts.

[Link] Grammatical Category

From the aspect of computational linguistics, the core issue of NER is how to
define a named entity. Marrero et al. (2013) group the criteria of a named entity
as grammatical category, rigid designation, unique identification, and the domain
of applications. However, many of the entity definitions in the NER domain are
imperfect. From the view of grammatical category, a named entity is traditionally
defined as a proper noun or a common name for a proper noun. Previous work has
described NER as the recognition of proper nouns in general. However, as pointed out
by Borrega et al. (2007), the classic grammatical approach to proper noun analysis
is insufficient to deal with the challenges posed by NER applications. For instance,
in a toy QA task such as
(5) Do crocodiles live in the sea or on land?
“crocodiles”, “sea”, and “land” are not proper nouns, while they are commonly
recognized as the essential entities for a proper understanding of the question. Con-
sequently, a proper noun is no longer considered a criterion for identifying named
entities in current NER research.

[Link] Rigid Designation

The rigid designation is a concept in the philosophy of language which suggests

that certain names or labels are inherently linked to the things they represent, e.g.,
“Barack Obama” rigidly designates the person who is the 44th President of the US,
and it cannot be used to refer to any other person or entity. NER can be viewed as
a form of rigid designation as it assigns labels to entities based on their intrinsic
identity (Kripke, 1972), rather than on their usage in the text. However, LaPorte
(2006) noted that not all expressions that appear to designate rigidly can be analyzed
as directly referring to an object in every possible world.
142 3 Semantics Processing

This highlights the difficulty of defining entities with complex concepts in real-
world applications. As a result, annotators likely make subjective judgments when
labeling complex entities, which may be affected by entity descriptions and annota-
tors’ understanding.

[Link] Unique Identification

From the view of unique identification, MUCs require that NER tasks annotate
the “unique identification” of entities for all expressions (Grishman and Sundheim,
1996). However, determining what is unique depends on contextual elements, and
can be a subjective process. While this “unique identification” is typically considered
to be the reference being referred to, the definition itself poses a challenge in terms
of defining what is truly unique.

[Link] Domain of Applications

The definition of named entities was frequently grounded in the domain of applica-
tions. Entity definitions can be different between different NER tasks. For instance, in
drug-drug interaction tasks (Deng et al., 2020), diseases may not be considered enti-
ties, whereas they are entities in adverse drug events (Demner-Fushman et al., 2019).
Inconsistent entity definitions create challenges for machine learning. Because in-
consistent entity definitions mean that for the same semantic unit, the machine has to
summarize different entity representations to distinguish their labels under different
tasks. This is also not conducive to training an all-around NER classifier on different
application domains.

3.3.2 Annotation Schemes

NER is typically approached as a sequence labeling task, where each token in

a sentence is assigned a label. Three common annotation schemes are shown in
Table 3.6. The IO scheme is a classification task that distinguishes between two
classes, namely “Inner” and “Other”, to determine whether a token belongs to an
entity or not. On the other hand, the BIO scheme employs three labels, namely
“Beginning”, “Inner”, and “Other”, to identify tokens that represent the start of an
entity, tokens that belong to an entity, and tokens that do not belong to any entity. The
BIOES scheme expands on the BIO scheme by incorporating two additional labels,
namely “Single” and “End”, to more precisely define the boundaries of entities. By
employing the IO scheme, the binary classification of tokens is simplified, as each
token is labeled as either belonging to an entity or not. This straightforward labeling
system makes it easier to identify entities in a text, but it fails to specify the position
of the entities within the text.
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 143

Table 3.6: The three common annotation schemes for NER.

Tokens: West African Crocodile are semiaquatic reptiles that live in Africa
IO I I I O I I O O O I
BIO B I I O B I O O O B
BIOES B I E O B E O O O S

In contrast, the BIO scheme provides more precise annotations by identifying the
beginning and continuation of an entity in the text. This labeling system allows for
more accurate recognition of entities in a text and better classification of individual
tokens. The BIOES scheme further extends the BIO scheme by providing more
precise boundaries for entities, thereby allowing for better recognition of entity
boundaries in a text. The “Single” label is used to denote an entity that consists
of a single token, whereas the “End” label is used to indicate the final token of an
entity. By incorporating these additional labels, the BIOES scheme provides a more
nuanced approach to entity recognition and annotation.

3.3.3 Datasets

The surveyed popular NER datasets and their statistics can be viewed in Table 3.7.
The first NER-focused dataset was published in the 6th MUC (Grishman and Sund-
heim, 1996). This task consists of three subtasks, including entity names, temporal
expressions, and number expressions.

Table 3.7: NER datasets and statistics.

Dataset Source # Sample Reference

MUC-6 Newswire 318 articles Grishman and Sundheim (1996)
ACE-05 Social media 12,548 sentences Walker et al. (2006)
TACRED Newswire 106,264 instances Zhang et al. (2017b)
CoNLL-2003 Reuters 1,499 articles Sang and De Meulder (2003)
I2B2 ECI Corpus 1,600 patient records Stubbs and Uzuner (2015)
ADE MEDLINE 2,972 document Gurulingappa et al. (2012)
DDI DrugBank 1,025 document Herrero-Zazo et al. (2013)
WNUT-17 Social media 2,295 documents Derczynski et al. (2017)
OntoNote 5.0 Social media - Weischedel et al. (2013)
CPR MEDLINE - Krallinger et al. (2017)
MultiNERD Wikipedia 10 languages Tedeschi and Navigli (2022)
HIPE-2020 Newspapers 17,553 mentions Ehrmann et al. (2022)
NNE Newswire 49,208 sentences Ringland et al. (2019b)
GENIA MEDLINE 18,546 sentences Kim et al. (2003)
144 3 Semantics Processing

The defined entities include organizations, persons, and locations. The defined
time expressions include dates and times. The defined quantities include monetary
values and percentages. An example of this dataset is shown as follows.

text: “Taga Co.”,

type: “ORGANIZATION”.

MUC was replaced by Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) program after 1997.
ACE05 (Walker et al., 2006) is another popular NER dataset published at ACE
Conference. ACE05 is a multilingual dataset, which contains English, Arabic, and
Chinese data. The corpus consists of data of various types annotated for entities, re-
lations, and events. Its data source includes broadcast conversation, broadcast news,
newsgroups, telephone conversations, and weblogs. An example of this dataset is
shown below.

entity id: “NN_ENG_20030630_085848.18-E1”,

type: “GPE”,
subtype: “State-or-Province”,
class: “SPC”,
start: “82”,
end: “91”,
name: “california”.

After MUC, the Text Analysis Conference (TAC) published the Knowledge Base
Population challenge. In this challenge, the Stanford NLP Group developed TAC Re-
lation Extraction Dataset (TACRED) (Zhang et al., 2017b), which contains 106,264
instances with annotated entities, relations and some other NLP tasks. An example
of this dataset is shown as follows.

id: “e7798fb926b9403cfcd2”,
docid: “APW_ENG_20101103.0539”,
relation: “per:title”,
token: “[‘At’, ‘the’, ‘same’, ‘time’, ‘,’, ‘Chief’, ...]”,
subj_start: “8”,
subj_end: “9”,
obj_start: “12”,
obj_end: “12”,
subj_type: “PERSON”,
obj_type: “TITLE”,
stanford_pos: “[‘IN’, ‘DT’, ‘JJ’, ‘NN’, ‘,’, ‘NNP’, ‘NNP’, ...]”,
stanford_ner: “[‘O’, ‘O’, ‘O’, ‘O’, ‘O’, ‘O’, ‘O’, ‘O’, ...]”
stanford_head: “[4, 4, 4, 12, 12, 10, 10, 10, 10, 12, ...]”,
stanford_deprel: “[‘case’, ‘det’, ‘amod’, ‘nmod’, ‘punct’, ...]”.
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 145

CoNLL-2003 (Sang and De Meulder, 2003) is another widely used NER dataset.
This task concerned language-independent NER, which concentrates on four kinds
of named entities: locations, persons, organizations, and names of miscellaneous
entities that do not belong to the previous three kinds. The related data files are
available in English and German. An example of this dataset is shown as follows.

text: “[‘U.N.’, ‘official’, ‘Ekeus’, ‘heads’, ...], “,

pos: “[‘NNP’, ‘NN’, ‘NNP’, ‘VBZ’, ...], “,
syntactic chunk: “[‘I-NP’, ‘I-NP’, ‘I-NP’, ‘I-VP’, ...], “,
named entity tag: “[‘I-ORG’, ‘O’, ‘I-PER’, ‘O’, ...]”.

Besides the above famous datasets, MultiNERD (Tedeschi and Navigli, 2022),
HIPE-2020 (Ehrmann et al., 2022), and NNE (Ringland et al., 2019a) are also
popular NER datasets in general domain. NER tasks have garnered considerable
attention in numerous specialized domains. Informatics for Integrating Biology and
the Bedside (I2B2) (Stubbs and Uzuner, 2015) is a national biomedical computing
project sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 2004 to 2014.
I2B2 actively advocates mining medical value from clinical data and has organized
a series of evaluation tasks and workshops for unstructured medical record data,
and these evaluation tasks and open datasets have gained wide influence in the
medical NLP community. I2B2 is maintained in the Department of Biomedical
Information at Harvard Medical School and continues to conduct assessment tasks
and workshops, and the project has been renamed National NLP Clinical Challenges
(N2C2). Besides, there also exist many other biomedical datasets for specific medical
NER tasks, including Adverse Drug Events (ADE) (Gurulingappa et al., 2012; Alvaro
et al., 2017), Drug-Drug Interaction (Herrero-Zazo et al., 2013), and Chemical
Protein Reaction (CPR) (Krallinger et al., 2017), and GENIA (Shibuya and Hovy,
2020).

3.3.4 Knowledge Bases

Table 3.8 illustrates useful knowledge bases for NER. The biggest ones are Wikidata16
and Wikipedia17, which are multilingual free online encyclopedias maintained by
worldwide volunteers. There are also knowledge bases in a specific field. SNOMED
CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms) (Donnelly et al.,
2006) is a systematically organized collection of medical terms that provides a
standardized representation of clinical information, which is often used in NER
tasks involving clinical data. MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) (Lipscomb, 2000)
is another controlled vocabulary, developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
It is used for indexing and organizing biomedical literature.

16 [Link]
17 [Link]
146 3 Semantics Processing

Table 3.8: Useful knowledge bases for NER.

Name Knowledge # Entities structure

Wikipedia World 13,489,694 unstructured
Wikidata World 100,905,254 graph
DrugBank Medical over 500,000 structured
UMLS Medical 16,857,345 structured
BioModels Medical unclear structured
SNOMED CT Medical over 350,000 structured
ICD-10 Medical unclear structured
MIMIC-III Medical unclear structured
MeSH Medical over 28,000 structured
GeoNames Geographical over 25,000,000 structured
EDGAR Financial unclear structured
EduKG Educational 5,452 structured

Other medical knowledge bases include UMLS (Unified Medical Language Sys-
tem) (Wheeler et al., 2007; Bodenreider, 2004), ICD-10 (Hirsch et al., 2016),
MIMIC-III (Johnson et al., 2016), DrugBank (Wishart et al., 2018), and bioinfor-
matics knowledge base BioModels (Li et al., 2010). GeoNames (Ahlers, 2013) is a
comprehensive geographic knowledge repository that encompasses over 25 million
geographical names and comprises over 11 million distinctive features, including
cities, countries, and landmarks. EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and
Retrieval) (Branahl, 1998) is a database maintained by the U.S. Securities and Ex-
change Commission (SEC), containing financial filings and reports from publicly
traded companies. EduKG (Hu et al., 2016) is an educational knowledge base.

3.3.5 Evaluation Metrics

In the process of NER task evaluation, the main evaluation metrics are also Precision,
Recall, and F-value.

[Link] Annotation Tools

One AI18 is an online platform that offers NLP-as-a-service. The utilization of

APIs enables developers to effectively analyze, manipulate, and transform natural
language inputs within their programming code without requiring any specialized
knowledge of NLP. One AI facilitates the interpretation of both the meaning and
information conveyed in textual data, and can produce structured data in context via
language processing.

18 [Link]
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 147

GATE Teamware19 (Bontcheva et al., 2013a) is an integrated annotation tool for

comprehensive language processing tasks, especially for Information Extraction sys-
tems. The University of Sheffield developed GATE Teamware that enables collab-
orative semantic annotation projects through a shared annotation environment. The
software comprises several beneficial attributes such as the ability to load document
collections, create project templates that can be used multiple times, initiate projects
based on templates, assign project roles to individual users, monitor progress and
obtain various project statistics in real-time, report project status, annotator activity,
and statistics, and apply automatic annotations or post-annotation processing via
GATE-based processing routines.

MAE20 (Rim, 2016) (Multi-document Annotation Environment) is a general-

purpose and lightweight natural language annotation tool. The tool enables users
to specify and create their customized annotation tasks, annotate any text spans of
their choice, utilize non-consuming tags, effortlessly establish links between anno-
tations, and produce annotations in stand-off XML format. It also provides a simple
adjudication process with a visualization feature that displays the extent tags, link
tags, and non-consuming tags of any XML standoff annotated documents.

UIMA21 (Ferrucci and Lally, 2004) (Unstructured Information Management Ap-

plications) is a framework that falls under the purview of the Apache Software
Foundation. It serves as a comprehensive platform for managing language process-
ing projects and is licensed under Apache’s open-source license. With its versatile
capabilities, UIMA can effectively handle a diverse array of language processing
tasks and extract various types of information. The UIMA’s Regular Expression
Annotator is capable of identifying entities such as email addresses, phone numbers,
URLs, zip codes, or any other entities based on the utilization of regular expressions
and concepts. The tool can generate an annotation for each detected entity or update
an existing annotation with relevant feature values.

Brat22 (Browser-based Rapid Annotation Tool) is a free data labeling tool that offers
a seamless browser-based interface for annotating text. It streamlines numerous
annotation tasks related to NLU. With a thriving support community, Brat is a
well-known and widely used tool in NER. It also offers the option of integrating
with external resources, such as Wikipedia. Moreover, Brat enables organizations
to establish servers that allow multiple users to collaborate on annotation tasks.
However, implementing this feature does necessitate some technical proficiency and
server management skills.

19 [Link]
20 [Link]
21 [Link]
22 [Link]
148 3 Semantics Processing

3.3.6 Methods

[Link] Nested NER

A. Multi-label Method

Due to the fact that nested named entities can have multiple labels for a single
token, traditional sequence labeling methods are not directly applicable to the recog-
nition of nested named entities. To address this issue, researchers have attempted to
convert the multi-label problem into a single-label problem or adjust the decoder
to assign multiple labels to the same entity. Katiyar and Cardie (2018) proposed a
method to address nested NER by modifying the label representation in the train-
ing set. Instead of using one-hot encoding, they used a uniform distribution over
the specified classes as the label. During inference, a hard threshold is set and any
class with probability above this threshold is predicted for the token. However, this
approach has two limitations: it is difficult to determine the objective for model
learning; the method is sensitive to the manually chosen threshold value.
Straková et al. (2019) changed nested NER from multi-label to single-label tasks
by modifying the annotation schema. They combined any two categories that may
co-occur to produce a new label (e.g., combine B-Location with B-Organization to
construct a new label B_Loc_Org). One benefit of this approach is that the final
classification task is still a single category because all possible classification targets
had been covered in the schema. Nonetheless, this method brought about a prolif-
eration of label categories in an exponential manner, leading to sparsely annotated
labels that proved difficult to learn, particularly in the context of entities nested
across multiple layers. In order to address the issue of label sparsity, Shibuya and
Hovy (2020) proposed a hierarchical approach. If the classification of nested entities
cannot be resolved in a single pass, the classification is continued iteratively until
either the maximum number of iterations is reached or no new entities can be gen-
erated. Nevertheless, this approach is susceptible to error propagation, whereby an
erroneous classification in a preceding iteration could impact subsequent iterations.

B. Generation-based Method

Li et al. (2020g) proposed a unified framework to accomplish flat and nested NER
tasks by formulating NER as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) task (Liu
et al., 2023a). In this approach, the extraction of each entity type corresponds to
specific questions. For instance, when the model is given the question “which loca-
tion is mentioned in the sentence?” along with the original sentences, it generates an
answer such as “Washington”. This approach is similar to Prompt Tuning (Liu et al.,
2021c), which avoids the labor-intensive process of constructing manual questions.
However, in this method, the generated tokens must be mapped to pre-defined named
entity types.
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 149

Yan et al. (2021b) proposed a novel pointer generation network. Given an input
sentence, the model generates the entity indexes in this sentence that belong to
entities. In such a way, flat, nested, and discontinuous entities can be recognized in
a unified framework. Skylaki et al. (2020); Fei et al. (2021a); Yang and Tu (2022);
Su et al. (2022) are also following the idea of generating indexes of a sentence to
recognize nested entities.

C. Hypergraph-based Method

A hypergraph is a generalized variant of a normal graph, which is characterized

by an edge that can connect an arbitrary number of vertices (Feng et al., 2019c). It
is widely used in the NLP community for the tasks of syntactic parsing, semantic
parsing, and machine translation because it can accurately describe the relationship
between objects with multiple associations. A set of objects with only binary re-
lations can be described by a normal graph. However, when the objects are often
related to each other in a more complex one-to-many or many-to-many, e.g., nested
named entities, hypergraphs become a more appropriate data structure. A typical
example of nested NER with a hypergraph solution is shown in Fig. 3.4.

O PER_S O O O O O

O PER_B PER_I PER_E O O O

O PER_B PER_I PER_I PER_I PER_E O

... that her fellow pilot Erik Satie is ...

(a) Instance of a nested label result

O O O O O O

PER_S PER_E PER_E

PER_B PER_I PER_I PER_I

... that her fellow pilot Erik Satie is ...

(b) Corresponding hypergraph structure

Fig. 3.4: A typical example for nested NER with hypergraph solution

Finkel and Manning (2009) firstly introduced hypergraphs into nested NER tasks,
named Mention Hypergraph. In their model, Mention Hypergraph utilized nodes and
directed hyper-edges to jointly represent named entities and their combinations. To
compute the training loss, the proportion of accurate structures was calculated and di-
vided by a normalized term. This term was obtained using a dynamic programming
algorithm that aggregated feasible nested sub-graphs for NER. However, the nor-
malized terms obtained from this algorithm included fractions of pseudo-structures,
which led to errors.
150 3 Semantics Processing

To deal with the problem of pseudo-structures, Muis and Lu (2017) proposed a

gap-based marker model to identify nested entity structures by combining mention
separators with features. In this method, the authors manually designed 8 types of
mention separators for various scenarios. Based on the mention separators’ states
for any two consecutive tokens, they defined accurate and novel graph structures.
However, since this approach only utilized local information to construct the graph
structures, it may not be unambiguous for long-nested named entities. For instance,
when presented with the nested entity “a West African Crocodile”, which includes
two separate entities, “West African” and “a West African Crocodile”, their approach
may also recognize “a West African” as a named entity.
This ambiguous problem was solved by Wang and Lu (2018), which proposes a
segmental hypergraphs method. The method used an unambiguous ambiguity-free
compact hypergraph representation to encode all possible combinations of nested
named entities. Upon Mention Hypergraph (Finkel and Manning, 2009), segmen-
tal hypergraphs employed an inside-outside message-passing algorithm that can
summarize the features of child nodes to the parent node and achieve efficient inter-
ference. Besides the above work, Wan et al. (2021) introduced the concept of regional
hypernodes and a combination method of graph convolutional network (GCN) and
BiLSTM to generate hypernodes for each region. Yan and Song (2022) employed
start token candidates and generated corresponding queries with related contexts,
then used a query-based sequence labeling module to form a local hypergraph for
each candidate.

[Link] Few-shot NER

A. Metric Learning

Metric Learning is a common technology in various few-shot tasks. Prototypical

Networks (Snell et al., 2017) is a milestone in few-shot metric learning. Prototypical
Networks compute the centroid of each category based on the support set. They de-
termine the distance between the samples in the query set and the prototype center,
followed by updating the model by optimizing this distance. Upon completion of the
training phase, the embedding of each sample will be situated in closer proximity
to the centroid of the corresponding category. Such an idea was largely inspired by
Prototype Theory (see Section [Link]).
Fritzler et al. (2019) adopted the prototypical network into few-shot NER tasks.
They argued that words in a sentence are interdependent and, therefore, the label-
ing of adjacent words should be taken into account. To address this issue, they
substituted the conventional token input of Prototypical Networks with complete
sentences. However, this method ignores the problem of the Outside (O) class in
NER tasks, which actually represent different semantic meanings. This problem
would significantly affect the model’s performance under few-shot settings.
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 151

To avoid the above issues, Yang and Katiyar (2020) followed the nearest neighbor
inference (Wiseman and Stratos, 2019) to assign labels to tokens. In contrast to
Prototypical Networks, which learn a prototype for each entity class, this study
characterized each token by its labeled instances in the support set alongside its
context. The approach determined the nearest labeled token in the support set,
followed by assigning labels to the tokens in the query set that require prediction.
Das et al. (2022) proposed CONTaiNER, which optimized the inter-token dis-
tribution distance. CONTaiNER employed generalized objectives to different token
categories based on their Gaussian-distributed feature vectors. Such a method has
the potential to mitigate overfitting problems that arise from the training domains.

B. Prompt Tuning

Recently, prompt tuning has shown great potential on few-shot tasks by reformulat-
ing other tasks as mask language tasks (He et al., 2023a; Mao et al., 2023c; Schick
and Schütze, 2021). Prompt tuning-based methods need construct prompts to obtain
masked word predictions and then map predicted works into pre-defined labels, as
shown in Fig. 3.5.

( Label )
Person Label words Mapping People

Mask Language Model

... that her fellow pilot Erik Satie is .... Erik Satie is [MASK] entity.

( input sentence ) ( prompt )

Fig. 3.5: A typical prompt tuning example for NER tasks.

Cui et al. (2021) proposed a template-based method for NER, which first ap-
plied the prompt tuning to NER tasks. However, their method had to enumerate
all possible spans of sentences combined with all entity types to predict labels,
which suffered serious redundancy when entity types or sentence lengths increased.
Manually defined prompts were labor-intensive and made the algorithm sensitive to
these prompts. To avoid the manual prompt constructions, Ma et al. (2022a) tried to
explore a prompt-free method for few-shot NER. The present study introduced an
entity-oriented language model that decodes input tokens into their corresponding
label words if they belong to entities. In cases where the tokens are not entities,
the entity-oriented language model decodes the original tokens. Nevertheless, this
approach encounters difficulties in labeling word engineering. While this study pro-
posed an automated label selection technique, the associated experiments revealed
some degree of instability.
152 3 Semantics Processing

COPNER (Huang et al., 2022b) introduced class-specific words to construct

prompt tuning. By comparing each token with manually selected class-specific
words, this method needed neither manual prompts nor label words engineering.
The selected class-specific words (a representative word corresponding to a class)
were directly concatenated with original sentences as prompts. However, the manual
selection of class-specific words is subjective, and a single word may not entirely cap-
ture the semantics of an entity category. To deal with such a problem, TFP (He et al.,
2024a) encoded external description sentences to represent an entity class, thereby
facilitating the integration of external knowledge into prompts and providing com-
prehensive representations of entity types. TFP also proposed a semantic-enhanced
hybrid granularity contrastive loss to guide prompt tuning.

[Link] Joint NER and Relation Extraction

A. Parameter Sharing-based Multi-Task Learning

Considering that NER is usually combined with relation extraction tasks applied
in various downstream tasks, jointly recognizing named entities and classifying rela-
tions is a hot topic in related fields. MTL is the most common solution in joint NER
and relation extraction. Miwa and Bansal (2016) firstly employed a shared BiLSTM
encoder to obtain token representations, and then fed encoded representations into
NER and relation extraction classifiers, respectively. Sun et al. (2020) utilized a GCN
as a shared encoder to enable joint inference of both entity and relation types. The
core idea of the above study is that multi-task models can enhance the interactions
between the learning of NER and relation extraction, and further alleviate the error
propagation by sharing common parameters (He et al., 2021). However, this work
cannot ensure that the sharing of information is useful and proper. NER and relation
extraction might need different features to result in precise predictions. To this end,
Yan et al. (2021c) proposed an information filtering mechanism to provide valid
features for NER and relation extraction. Their method used an entity and relation
gate to divide cell neurons into different parts and established a two-way interaction
between NER and relation extraction. In the final network, each neuron contained a
shared partition and two task-specific partitions.

B. Table Filling

While MTL can improve the interdependence between NER and relation extrac-
tion, the relation extraction process still requires the pairing of all entities from the
NER tasks to classify relations, making it impossible to completely eliminate error
propagation. To solve the problem, Miwa and Sasaki (2014) proposed a table-filling
strategy to achieve joint NER and relation extraction by labeling input tokens in a
table. The method utilized token lists of sentences to form rows and columns.
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 153

Sentence The United States president Biden will visit ...

The -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
United LOC_B -- -- CP -- -- --
States LOC_E -- CP -- -- --
president -- -- -- -- --
Biden PER_S -- -- --
will -- -- --
visit -- --
... ...

Fig. 3.6: The illustration of the table-filling strategy.

Then, they extracted entities using the diagonal elements and classified relations
with a lower/upper triangular matrix of the table. This basic table-filling strategy can
be seen in Fig. 3.6. Nonetheless, this approach involved the explicit integration of
entity-relation label interdependence, which necessitated the use of intricate features
and search heuristics. Gupta et al. (2016b) incorporated neural networks with a
table-filling strategy via a unified multi-task RNN. This method detected both entity
pairs and the related relations with an entity-relation table, which alleviated the
need for search heuristics and explicit entity-relation label dependencies. Zhang
et al. (2017a) further integrated global optimization and syntax information into
the table-filling strategy to combine NER and relation extraction tasks. Ren et al.
(2021a) argued that the above table-filling-based studies only focus on utilizing
local features without the global associations between relations and pairs. Ren et al.
(2021a) first produced a table feature for every relation, followed by extracting two
types of global associations from the generated table features. Finally, the table
feature for each relation was integrated with the global associations. Such a process
is performed iteratively to enhance the final features for joint learning of NER and
relation extraction tasks.

C. Tagging Scheme

The table-filling approach can mitigate issues related to error propagation. How-
ever, these techniques require the pairing of all sentence elements to assign labels,
resulting in significant redundancy. To address the redundancy and avoid error prop-
agation, Zheng et al. (2017) proposed a novel tagging scheme that converted joint
NER and relation extraction into a united task. The idea was similar to the solution for
nested entities Straková et al. (2019), which combined NER labels with relation ex-
traction labels by modifying the annotation schema. For example, given the sentence
“The United States president Biden will visit ...”, by allocating the customized labels
“Country-President_B_1”, “Country-President_E_1” for tokens “United”, “States”,
and “Country-President_E_2” for token “Biden”, the proposed method can directly
obtain the triplet (United State, Country-President, Biden).
154 3 Semantics Processing

Yu et al. (2020); Wei et al. (2019) proposed two similar methods. In contrast to
conventional joint approaches for NER and relation extraction, which involve rec-
ognizing entities followed by relation classification, the two methods first identified
all head entities. Next, for each identified head entity, they simultaneously predicted
corresponding tail-entities and relations, achieving cascade frameworks combined
with a customized tagging scheme. The typical joint NER and relation extraction
tasks learn to model the conditional probability:

P(h, r, t) = P(s)P(t | h)P(r | h, t), (3.4)

where h represent head entity; r represent relation; h represent tail entity. The above
methods combined the last two parts in Eq. 3.4, yielding

P(h, r, t) = P(s)P(t, r | s). (3.5)

3.3.7 Downstream Applications

[Link] Knowledge Graph Construction

Knowledge graphs are structured semantic knowledge bases for rapidly describing
concepts and their interrelationships in the physical world, aggregating large amounts
of knowledge by reducing the data granularity from the document level to the instance
level (Yao et al., 2022). Thus, knowledge graphs enable rapid response and reasoning
about knowledge. At present, the application of knowledge graphs has become
prevalent in industrial domains, such as Google search. Generally, the construction of
Knowledge Graphs consists of three main parts: information extraction, information
fusion, and information processing. The task of information extraction involves the
identification of nodes through NER and the establishment of edges via relation
extraction. The task of information fusion is utilized for normalizing nodes and
edges. The normalized nodes and edges need to go through a quality assessment
with the task of information processing to be added to knowledge graphs.
He et al. (2021) proposed an MTL-based method for the construction of ge-
nealogical knowledge graphs. At first, He et al. (2019b) collected unstructured
online obituary data. Then, they extracted named entities as nodes and classified
family relationships for these recognized people as edges to construct genealogical
knowledge graphs. Similarly, Jiang et al. (2020) utilized NER and relation extraction
for obtaining the nodes and edge in biomedical knowledge graphs. They proposed
a customized tagging schema to convert the construction of biomedical knowledge
graphs into a sequence labeling task with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. Li
et al. (2020c) proposed a systematic approach for constructing a medical knowledge
graph, which involves extracting entities such as diseases and symptoms, as well as
related relationships, from electronic medical records. Silvestri et al. (2022), Peng
et al. (2019), and Shafqat et al. (2022) aimed to collect and utilize medical knowledge
for NER.
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 155

Furthermore, constructing knowledge graphs requires the task of Entity Link-

ing (Tedeschi et al., 2021a) to normalize entities with different names. Entity Linking
and NER are typically performed as pipeline tasks to yield more nodes and edges for
the constructed graphs. Additionally, Entity Linking can be seen as a downstream
task for NER, as it further refines the identified entities by linking them to a specific
reference entity in a knowledge graph.

[Link] Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems can be classified into two primary categories based on

their solutions, namely content-based recommenders and collaborative filtering-
based recommenders (Batmaz et al., 2019). For both of these groups, gathering data
on users and products is a crucial step in the entire process. In this regard, NER
modules play a pivotal role. For example, Kim et al. (2012) introduced the 5W1H
model, which utilizes NER to extract contextual information, specifically Who, Why,
Where, What, When, and How, to generate contextual recommendations.
Zhou et al. (2020b) argued that recommendation systems currently in use suffer
from a deficiency of contextual information in conversational data, as well as a se-
mantic gap between natural language expressions and the preferences of individual
users for specific items. To overcome these challenges, word- and entity-oriented
knowledge graphs were incorporated to enhance the data representations. Mutual
Information Maximization was adopted to align the word-level and entity-level se-
mantic spaces. The aligned semantic representations were used to develop a knowl-
edge graph-enhanced recommender component to make accurate recommendations,
and a knowledge graph-enhanced dialogue component that can generate informative
keywords or entities in the response text. An NER module is a crucial component in
creating such a knowledge graph-enhanced system (Wu et al., 2023).
Iovine et al. (2020) proposed a domain-independent, configurable recommenda-
tion system framework, named ConveRSE (Conversational Recommender System
framEwork). ConveRSE utilized various interaction mechanisms, including natu-
ral language, buttons, and a combination of the two. The framework comprised a
dialogue manager, an intent recognizer, a sentiment analyzer, an entity recognizer,
and a set of recommendation services. The entity recognizer component specifically
focused on identifying relevant entities that were mentioned in the user’s input,
and linking them to an appropriate concept in the knowledge base. The ConveRSE
framework’s success is heavily reliant on the performance of the NER component,
as it plays a crucial role in enhancing the system’s overall performance.
Wang et al. (2019a) proposed RippleNet, an end-to-end framework that incor-
porates the knowledge graph into a recommender system. RippleNet overcame the
limitations of previous embedding-based and path-based approaches to knowledge
graph-aware recommendation by incorporating the knowledge graph as a form of sup-
plementary information. RippleNet included both inward aggregation and outward
propagation models. The inward aggregation version aggregated and incorporated
neighborhood information when computing the representation of a given entity.
156 3 Semantics Processing

By extending the neighborhood to multiple hops away, it was possible to model

high-order proximity, thereby capturing users’ long-distance interests. On the other
hand, the outward propagation model propagated users’ potential preferences and
explored their hierarchical interests in knowledge graph entities. Upadhyay et al.
(2021) proposed an explainable job recommendation system by matching users with
the most pertinent jobs, based on their profiles. The system also provided a human-
readable explanation for each recommendation. The NER module was customized
to extract pertinent details from both job postings and user profiles. These details
were utilized to create comprehensible explanations for each recommendation. By
identifying and categorizing entities, the NER module enhanced the accuracy and
understandability of the textual explanations, providing a clear representation of the
reasoning behind the recommendation system.

[Link] Dialogue Systems

Commonly, dialogue systems can be categorized into three main types, namely task-
oriented, QA, and open-domain (Ni et al., 2022). NER plays a role in enhancing
NLU for the three types of dialogue systems, organizing original user messages into
semantic slots, and classifying data domain and user intention (Li et al., 2017b). Abro
et al. (2022) proposed an argumentative dialogue system with NER and other NLU
tasks. The approach can enhance comprehension of user intent by comprehending
injected entities and relationships. For QA (Dimitrakis et al., 2020) and open-domain
dialogue systems, NER also plays a crucial role in the part of intent recognition and
knowledge retrieval. For example, Zhang et al. (2021a) developed a sequence of
sub-goals with external knowledge to improve generation performance. External
knowledge refers to a range of named entities and relationships that are associated
with a conceptual entity. Leveraging external knowledge allows the dialogue system
to deliver a more cohesive small talk from the open domain.

3.3.8 Summary

NER is a very important NLU subtask that enhances the accuracy of other subtasks,
e.g., concept extraction. It is the manifest of cognitive semantics, because named
entities are not simply categorized by their semantics. The classified named entities
also reflect their inherent attributes in people’s cognition. According to Prototype
Theory (see Section [Link]), the inherent attributes of named entities can be repre-
sented by prototypes. It is gratifying to observe that a theory has had a significant
influence on research related to few-shot NER. On the other hand, the ambiguity of
named entity classification argued by Graded Membership (see Section [Link]) and
Grammatical Category (see Section [Link]) was rarely analyzed from computational
linguistic aspects.
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 157

We also do not see explainable NER studies that explain why an entity is clas-
sified into a particular category from the perspective of conceptual blending (see
Section [Link]). NER research on these aspects is helpful for achieving human-
like intelligence in categorizing named entities. The availability of numerous NER
datasets, both in general and medical domains, has significantly enhanced computa-
tional research in this area. This may be attributed to the great application value of
NER, as well as a wide range of data annotation tools. Encyclopedias knowledge and
domain-specific knowledge also provide external information to help NER models
better understand the context and commonsense. Now, NER has developed many
practical task setups to the need of technical applications, e.g., nested NER, few-shot
NER, joint NER and relation extraction, and downstream tasks, e.g., knowledge
graph construction (KGC), recommendation systems, and dialogue systems.

[Link] Technical Trends

Due to the extensive research conducted on typical NER methods over the years,
researchers are shifting their focus towards NER techniques that are more applicable
to practical scenarios, for example, nested NER, few-shot NER, and joint NER and
relation extraction. Recent technological trends for the aforementioned NER tasks
are summarized in Table 4.21. Overall, nested NER can be addressed by multi-
label, generation-based, and hypergraph-based methods. Among them, multi-label
methods are straightforward and easy to implement. However, there are several
limitations in the surveyed multi-label methods.

Table 3.9: A summary of representative NER techniques. The study with ⇤ means it
cannot be compared with other studies since it did not report 5-shot results.

Task Reference Tech Feature and KB. Framework Dataset Score Metric
Katiyar and Cardie (2018) DL Emb. BiLSTM ACE-05 70.2% F1
Straková et al. (2019) DL Emb. LSTM-CRF ACE-05 84.3% F1
Shibuya and Hovy (2020) DL Emb. LSTM-CRF ACE-05 84.3% F1
Nested NER Li et al. (2020g) DL BERT, Wikipedia Unified Framework ACE-05 86.9% F1
Yan et al. (2021b) DL BERT Pointer Networks ACE-05 84.7% F1
Finkel and Manning (2009) Graph Emb., Constituency Parsing Hypergraph GENIA 72.0% F1
Muis and Lu (2017) Graph Emb., Multigraph Representation Hypergraph GENIA 70.8% F1
Wang and Lu (2018) Graph Emb., Segmental Hypergraphs Hypergraph GENIA 75.1% F1
Yang and Tu (2022) DL BERT Pointer Networks ACE-05 85.0% F1
Su et al. (2022) DL BERT Pointer Networks CONLL04 88.6% F1
Fritzler et al. (2019)⇤ DL Prototypical network RNN+ CRF Ontonotes - F1
Yang and Katiyar (2020) DL BERT Nearest Neighbor I2B2 22.1% F1
Few-shot NER Das et al. (2022) DL BERT Contrastive Learning I2B2 31.8% F1
(5 shot) Cui et al. (2021) DL BERT Prompt Tuning I2B2 36.7% F1
Huang et al. (2022b) DL BERT Prompt Tuning I2B2 43.7% F1
He et al. (2024a) DL BERT, Wikipedia Prompt Tuning I2B2 52.7% F1
Miwa and Bansal (2016) DL Emb. BiLSTM ACE-05 55.6% F1
Sun et al. (2020) Graph Emb., Bipartite Graph ACE-05 59.1% F1
Joint NER Yan et al. (2021c) DL BERT Partition Filter ACE-05 66.8% F1
and relation extraction Gupta et al. (2016b) ML Emb., Table filling CoNLL04 72.1% F1
Zhang et al. (2017a) DL Emb., Table filling ACE-05 57.5% F1
Zheng et al. (2017) DL Emb., Tagging scheme NYT 49.5% F1
Yu et al. (2020) DL Emb., Tagging scheme NYT 59.0% F1
Shafqat et al. (2022)⇤ DL Emb., ICD-10 BiLSTM no public - F1
Task-driven NER Hirsch et al. (2016)⇤ DL Emb., UMLS BiLSTM no public - F1
Peng et al. (2019)⇤ DL BERT, MIMIC-III Fine Tuning no public - F1
158 3 Semantics Processing

For example, thresholds for multi-label selection are hard to decide empiri-
cally (Katiyar and Cardie, 2018); multiple labels are suffering sparsity (Straková
et al., 2019) or error propagation (Shibuya and Hovy, 2020), which can lower
model performance. Generation-based methods are flexible. By reformulating NER
tasks as QA, they can generate any results which satisfied the pre-defined require-
ments (Shibuya and Hovy, 2020; Li et al., 2020g). These methods are used for
handling Flat NER (Skylaki et al., 2020), nested NER (Yan et al., 2021b), and dis-
continuous NER (Fei et al., 2021a). However, a generation-based method is hard
to control what is generated, even if some studies (Skylaki et al., 2020; Fei et al.,
2021a; Yang and Tu, 2022; Su et al., 2022) have attempted to restrict the outputs
of generation-based methods to a specific set of indexes (pointer network). The
core point of the hypergraph-based method is about how to establish a hypergraph
data structure to better represent interaction among all tokens in a sentence. These
methods are good at modeling the interactions among all tokens in a sentence. It
is important to note that the majority of hypergraph-based methods exhibit a task-
specific nature, indicating a limited scope of applicability. These methods may not
be universally applicable, and their effectiveness may be constrained by the specific
task they are designed for.
Few-shot NER is usually achieved by metric learning and prompt tuning. Metric
learning has demonstrated its effectiveness in various few-shot tasks (Kaya and Bilge,
2019; Fritzler et al., 2019). For few-shot NER tasks, some works predict the final
labels by comparing token-to-token distance (Yang and Katiyar, 2020; Das et al.,
2022) or token-to-prototype distance (Huang et al., 2022b). These methods have
to decide different distance calculation functions according to different task (Kulis
et al., 2013) and suffer instability introduced by insufficient data. By exploiting the
full potential of language models, prompt tuning is proposed and demonstrated as
a promising technology for few-shot tasks (Liu et al., 2021c; He et al., 2023a; Liu
et al., 2022e). Prompt tuning reformulate NER as a mask language model task to
reduce the gap between NER and employed pretraining LMs. The backward is that
prompt tuning needs extra template construction and label word mappings and some
studies have tried to deal with such problems (Huang et al., 2022b; He et al., 2024a).
For Joint NER and relation extraction tasks, we summarize related studies into
three groups, including parameter sharing-based MTL, table-filling strategy, and
customized tagging scheme. Parameter sharing is the basic idea in MTL, which
can be used to enhance the interaction between NER and relation extraction (Li
et al., 2017a; Bekoulis et al., 2018). This method can provide some relief from
error propagation, but it cannot completely eliminate the issue. Also, this method
has to pair every two entities for relation extraction, which introduces unnecessary
redundancy. Table filling-based joint NER and relation extraction can completely
eliminate error propagation by converting NER and relation extraction into a whole
sequence-tagging task (Gupta et al., 2016b; Ren et al., 2021a; Ma et al., 2022b).
However, these methods have to label every two token pairs in an input sentence in
an enumerable fashion. If relation extraction is defined as an unidirectional task, the
half of calculations are wasted.
3.3 Named Entity Recognition 159

Following the idea of the table filling strategy, tagging scheme-based methods
also model the NER and relation extraction as an integrated task. The fundamental
concept of the tagging scheme is to merge the labels assigned for NER with those
assigned for relation extraction into a unified label (Zheng et al., 2017; Straková
et al., 2019). Such a method has the potential to circumvent issues related to both
error propagation and redundancy; however, it may also lead to a sparsity of labels.

[Link] Application Trends

We have discussed three main downstream applications of NER, including KGC,

dialogue systems, and recommendation systems. Table 3.10 illustrate related stud-
ies. Usually, NER is the basic module for providing recognized entities for further
utilization. In this case, an NER model works as a parser to mine knowledge from
unstructured text. The recognized entities and relations can be used as nodes and
edges for KGC. The entities can also serve as intent recognition methods in rec-
ommendation systems, and slot-filling methods in dialogue systems. For example,
Wu et al. (2020a) proposed a pretrained task-oriented dialogue BERT, which sig-
nificantly boosts the performance of a dialogue system by improving the intent
detection subtask. Wang et al. (2020) proposed a method for recognizing related
spans and value normalization with slot attention to improve the dialogue system.
Besides, we also observe that using the identified named entities as features can
also improve the performance of recommendation systems, because NER can help
identify important entities that could be useful for making recommendations. The
most common problem is error propagation between NER and other components in
a downstream system. Kim et al. (2018) employed a two-step neural dialogue state
tracker to alleviate the impact of the original error.

Table 3.10: A summary of the representative applications of NER in downstream

tasks. Xdenotes the role of NER in a downstream task.

Reference Downstream Task Feature Parser Explainability

Yao et al. (2022) Knowledge Graph Construction X
He et al. (2021) Knowledge Graph Construction X
Jiang et al. (2020) Knowledge Graph Construction X
Li et al. (2020c) Knowledge Graph Construction X
Kim et al. (2012) Recommendation Systems X X
Adomavicius et al. (2011) Recommendation Systems X
Zhou et al. (2020b) Recommendation Systems X
Iovine et al. (2020) Recommendation Systems X
Wang et al. (2019a) Recommendation Systems X
Li et al. (2017b) Dialogue Systems X
Abro et al. (2022) Dialogue Systems X
Dimitrakis et al. (2020) Dialogue Systems X
Zhang et al. (2021a) Dialogue System X X
160 3 Semantics Processing

With the development of PLMs and LLMs, many downstream tasks are organized
as end-to-end processing tasks to achieve higher accuracy and mitigate error propa-
gation issues. However, we can still observe that NER can improve the explainability
in recommendation and dialogue systems (Kim et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2021a),
which is also an important aspect of AI research. There is still a considerable un-
tapped potential for integrating NER with other downstream tasks, e.g., explaining
how concepts blend each other between different entities; what the inherent attribute
of a group of entities the selected prototypes represent; how robust an identified
named entity is.

[Link] Future Works

Open-domain NER

Compared with typical single-domain NER, open-domain NER has more cate-
gories. Besides, the entity classes are hardly defined in advance. For such reason,
open-domain NER is more capable of handling rapidly expanding data, and mining
more potential knowledge which is hidden in massive unstructured text data (Hohe-
necker et al., 2020; Kolluru et al., 2020). Open-domain NER is significant because it
discovers and connects world knowledge via automatic text mining. Many manually
developed lexical resources, e.g., WordNet can only cover limited concepts. When
the concepts come to MWEs, manually mining, structuring and updating those con-
cepts can result in the exponential growth of human efforts. Open-domain NER is
helpful for mitigating human efforts and delivering a knowledge base that connects
entities from different domains.

Multilingual NER

In light of the fact that a significant number of languages in existence lack suf-
ficient annotated data, knowledge transfer from high-resource languages to low-
resource languages can serve as a viable solution to compensate for the paucity of
data (Rahimi et al., 2019; Tedeschi et al., 2021b; Zhou et al., 2022). Developing
robust multilingual NER systems that can perform across multiple languages will
achieve more comprehensive knowledge graphs, linking entities from different lan-
guages. It is valuable because it may lead to a united concept representation system
covering different languages. On the other hand, the task of developing multilingual
NER systems is fraught with difficulties, primarily due to the inherent dissimilari-
ties in entity types and language structures across different languages. As a result,
aligning entities and transferring knowledge learned from one language to another
can present significant challenges for multilingual NER systems.
3.4 Concept Extraction 161

Unified Framework for NER

In real-world scenarios, there exist flat-named entities, nested entities, and dis-
continuous entities. Most NER-related studies only focus on the combination of flat
with nested entities or flat discontinuous entities. Both of them cannot recognize all
kinds of entities. Developing a unified framework to simultaneously handle such a
problem becomes an urgent need for NER (Fei et al., 2021a). Hierarchical concept
representation knowledge bases may provide a preliminary ontology that can be used
for organizing entities and their relationships. However, most of the ontology systems
were manually developed by experts. This manually constructed knowledge may be
invalid in specific application scenarios. A potential avenue for future research in
NER is the development of a unified and robust framework for organizing entities.
Such a framework could create comprehensive knowledge graphs that capture entity
relationships and support downstream tasks.

Continual-learning for NER

Humans exhibit a remarkable aptitude for transferring acquired knowledge from

one task to another and retain their ability to perform the former task even after
learning the latter. This ability is called continuous learning or life-long learning,
which a regarded as an important characteristic of an intelligent system. Also, such
ability can help us continue to use already deployed models when a new class of entity
to be identified appears, rather than developed a new model from scratch (De Lange
et al., 2021). There are some exploratory studies started to pay attention to such
a problem. However, a satisfactory solution has not been found yet and existing
methods still suffer the severe Catastrophic Forgetting (Monaikul et al., 2021; Xia
et al., 2022; Vijay and Priyanshu, 2022). Continual learning is a critical skill for NER
because NER is corpus-dependent. It is very important to update entity collections
and the associated label sets, when a new corpus arrives (He et al., 2022b). Detecting
new entities and labels with a previously trained NER model is a challenging yet
promising research avenue.

3.4 Concept Extraction

Concept extraction is a process to extract concepts of interest from the text. To the best
of our knowledge, the task of computational concept extraction was first proposed
by Montgomery (1982). He argued that taxonomic hierarchies could be constructed
to allow property inheritance of concepts, and therefore to perform rudimentary
inference and analogical reasoning based on the taxonomies. He also highlighted two
important subtasks of concept extraction for the next-generation knowledge-based
systems from the perspective of 1982, namely lexicon development and conceptual
structure construction.
162 3 Semantics Processing

Recent research on concept extraction has been conducted in various fields of AI

research, including NLP and data mining (Miner et al., 2012). Keyphrase genera-
tion (Alami Merrouni et al., 2020) is one of the most common concept extraction
tasks. It is a summarization task focusing on extracting keyphrases from a full passage
to help readers quickly understand the passage, where keyphrases can be understood
as the important concepts within a passage. Methods for keyphrase extraction can
be both extractive (copying from existing words) and abstractive (not copying but
summarizing and abstracting from existing texts).
The process of generating keyphrases facilitates the creation of a lexicon that
corresponds to a specific set of concepts. Another stream of concept extraction aims
at the development of ontological knowledge bases to represent, e.g., commonsense
knowledge (Havasi and Speer, 2007), hypernym and synonym knowledge (Snow
et al., 2006), and affective knowledge (Cambria et al., 2024). These tasks tried to
extract concepts to fit into pre-defined knowledge structures. Then, the structured
knowledge can be directly used in downstream tasks.
Current concept extraction research is also grounded on related application sce-
narios, such as clinical concept extraction (Fu et al., 2020b), course concept extrac-
tion (Pan et al., 2017), and patent concept extraction (Liu et al., 2020a). The main
difference between concept extraction and NER tasks is that the extracted concepts
or keyphrases are not identified by pre-defined entity classes. In contrast, they reflect
the general idea of their contexts or target domain whose concepts are being dis-
cussed, while the goal of NER is to extract important factual information from the
text. However, there are overlaps between NER and concept extraction when some
concepts of interest, e.g., proper nouns can be also defined as named entities. Many
domain-specific concept extraction tasks, e.g., clinical concept extraction, course
concept extraction, and patent concept extraction can also be categorized as NER
tasks because they aim at extracting concepts that are related to specific events.
These events are also factual information. We review them in this section because
they define themselves as concept extraction tasks in their original works. It also has
become a trend of domain-specific concept extraction.
Another related field is relation extraction, which is a sub-field of information
extraction. Relation extraction extracts information from raw text and represents it
in the form of a semantic relation between entities (Kartik Detroja, 2023). The main
difference is that, relation extraction targets at extracting relations between entities,
while concept extraction targets at extracting noun entities. Concept extraction has
also accelerated and contributed to multiple downstream applications, such as po-
larity detection (Cambria et al., 2024), information retrieval (Xiong et al., 2017),
commonsense explanation generation (CEG) (Fang and Zhang, 2022). These appli-
cations mostly leverage explicitly extracted concepts. In this section, we provide a
more comprehensive review on concept extraction.
3.4 Concept Extraction 163

3.4.1 Theoretical Research

[Link] Exemplar Theory

Medin and Schaffer (1978) argued that concepts are represented by a collection of
particular exemplars or individual instances that are linked to the category. When
we categorize an instance, we compare it with multiple specific exemplars of the
category. This is different from Prototype Theory where a new instance is cate-
gorized by comparing the instance to the abstract prototype of the category (see
Section [Link]). Medin and Schaffer (1978) formed the task of concept categoriza-
tion as a classification task. Experiments showed that the classification judgments
made by participants were impacted by various factors. These factors included the
extent of resemblance between the probe item and exemplars previously acquired,
the number of prior exemplars that shared resemblances with the probe item, and the
similarity present both within and between the categories of the previously learned
exemplars. For concept extraction, Exemplar Theory may suggest that models may
take categorized instances into account when categorizing a new instance.

[Link] Semantic Primitives

Wierzbicka (1972) believed that it is possible to describe every human language by

using a limited number of universal semantic primitives. These primitives are repre-
sentative of fundamental concepts that form the basis of human communication and
thinking. She established 64 universal semantic primes (basic words that cannot be
defined in relation to more elementary concepts), which can be utilized to describe all
other concepts present within a language. Semantic Primitives suggest that concepts
should be organized as multiple layers from the concrete to abstract ones. Decision-
making that runs on concrete concepts can be completed through the upper-level
abstract concepts that contain those concrete concepts. Thus, it is critical to rep-
resent the hierarchical and linking relationships between concepts. There are other
theories mentioned before, e.g., Frame Semantics (see Section [Link]), that may
guide concept structure development. Frame Semantics highlights the connection of
related concepts, while Semantic Primitives suggest the hierarchical relationships
between concepts and the distinction between primitive concepts and others.

[Link] Conceptual Spaces

Gardenfors (2004) defined concept as the “theoretical entities that can be used to
explain and predict various empirical phenomena concerning concept formation”.
The author believed that concept representations are multi-dimensional, where each
dimension is indicative of a different characteristic or property associated with the
concept. For example, one could represent the concept of a car within a conceptual
space that includes dimensions such as size, speed, color, and shape.
164 3 Semantics Processing

This is very similar to current vectorial representations of words or entities in

NLU, while the dimensionality of Conceptual Spaces is explainable by concept
properties. Gardenfors (2004) also placed significant emphasis on the role of context
in understanding and representing concepts. This is due to the fact that different
contexts may emphasize different features or dimensions of concepts. Then, the
connections between concepts are determined by the relationships between their
property similarity in the conceptual space. For example, “dog” and “cat” are similar
in the animal concept space, because their properties are similar; “mammals” can be
separated from “reptiles” by a property difference boundary, although both are in the
animal space. This may encourage concept extraction tasks to extract both concept
entities and properties associated in contexts. This is because properties define how
concepts are connected from the view of Gardenfors (2004).

3.4.2 Annotation Schemes

From the goal of the keyphrase annotation aspect, there are in general two types of
annotation schemes for keyphrase extraction-like concept extraction. The first is to
precisely select existing keyphrases from input text, but not to create semantically-
equivalent phrases. The second is to both select existing keyphrases and create
“absent keyphrases” that are necessary but do not exist in the input text (Hulth,
2003). From the format of assigned annotations aspect, there are in general two
annotation schemes as well. The first scheme is to directly give the keyphrases ex-
isting in the source text. The second scheme treats the keyphrase extraction task as a
sequence labeling task, and assigns a label to each of the tokens in source text (Hulth,
2003). The assigned labels in the current dataset follow a BIO scheme defined in
Table 4.18. Specifically, three labels are used: B (Beginning), I (Inner), and O (Other).

abstract: “[ ‘A’, ‘scalable’, ‘model’, ‘of’, ‘cerebellar’, ‘adaptive’, ‘timing’,

‘and’, ‘sequencing’, ‘:’, ...]”
doc bio tags: “[ ‘O’, ‘B’, ‘I’, ‘O’, ‘B’, ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘O’, ‘O’, ‘O’, ...]”
extractive keyphrases: “[ ‘scalable model’, ‘cerebellar adaptive timing’, ... ]”
abstractive keyphrase: “[ ‘cerebellar sequencing’, ...]”

3.4.3 Datasets

Table 3.11 lists some of the most popular concept extraction datasets, providing
detailed statistics for each. It includes information such as task, source, and size
of the dataset. Overall a main thread of dataset development is (1) larger scale of
datasets; (2) attending to both extractive keyphrases and abstractive keyphrases; (3)
more fine-grained annotations for tags; (4) more application domains.
3.4 Concept Extraction 165

Table 3.11: Concept extraction datasets and statistics. KE denotes Keyphrase Ex-
traction. ClCE denotes Clinical Concept Extraction. CoCE denotes Course Concept
Extraction. PCE denotes Patent Concept Extraction.

Dataset Task Source # Samples Reference

Inspec KE Inspec database 2,000 Hulth (2003)
NUS KE Google SOAP API 211 Nguyen and Kan (2007)
Krapivin KE ACM Digital Library 2,304 Krapivin et al. (2009)
SemEval-2010 KE ACM Digital Library 244 Kim et al. (2010)
X KE X 1,000 Zhang et al. (2016)
ACM Digital Library,
KP-20K KE ScienceDirect, 567,830 Meng et al. (2017)
and Web of Science
CCF KE China Computer Federation 13,449 Wang et al. (2018c)
MLDBMD KE Academic Conferences 128.1k Li et al. (2018a)
TempEval ClCE Mayo Clinic 600 Bethard et al. (2016)
i2b2-2010 ClCE Clinical Records 826 Uzuner et al. (2011)
n2c2-2018 ClCE Clinical Records 505 Henry et al. (2020)
MIMIC ClCE MIMIC-III Database 1,610 Gehrmann et al. (2018)
MOOCs CoCE Coursera and XuetangX 4375 videos Pan et al. (2017)
EMRCM CoCE Chinese Textbooks 3,730 pages Huang et al. (2019b)
USPTO PCE USPTO Database 94,000 Liu et al. (2020a)

Hulth (2003) proposed one of the first keyphrase extraction datasets, termed
Inspec, which is based on scientific papers. Paper abstracts are used as the keyphrase
extraction context and paper keywords are used as keyphrases. Each abstract has
two sets of keywords: a set of controlled terms, i.e., terms restricted to the Inspec
thesaurus; and a set of uncontrolled terms that can be any suitable terms that may or
may not be present in the abstracts. They collected 1000 abstracts as a train set, 500
as a validation set, and 500 as a test set.
Nguyen and Kan (2007) proposed the NUS dataset with the motivation that
keyphrase extraction requires multiple judgments and cannot rely merely on the
single set of author-provided keyphrases. They first used Google Search API to
retrieve scientific publications, and then recruited student volunteers to participate
in manual keyphrase assignments. They finally collect 211 documents, each with
two sets of keyphrases: one is given by the original authors of the paper, and the
other is given by student volunteers. The data format of NUS is the same as Inspec.
Krapivin et al. (2009) proposed the Krapivin dataset, consisting of around 2,000
scientific papers as well as their keywords assigned by the original authors. The
scientific papers were published by ACM in the period from 2003 to 2005, and
were written in English. One of the novelties of this dataset is that the text data in
the scientific papers were collected with three distinct categories: title, abstract, and
main body. They finally collect 460 test data and 1.84k validation data. The data
format is similar to Inspec but has a title and body in addition to the abstract.
166 3 Semantics Processing

SemEval-2010 Task 5 (Kim et al., 2010) is on automatic keyphrase extraction

from scientific articles. Input for this task is a document from either of the four
domains: distributed systems, information search, and retrieval, distributed AI, and
social and behavioral sciences. Outputs are manually annotated keyphrases for the
document. This dataset contains 144 documents as a train set, and 100 documents
as a test set. It also selects 40 documents from the train set to compose a trial set.
For each set, documents are evenly distributed from the four topics. The annotation
follows the first scheme in Section 3.4.2. The data format is the same as Inspec.
Zhang et al. (2016) constructed a keyphrase extract dataset from X using an au-
tomatic text mining method. Their core assumption is that hashtags in a tweet can
be used as keyphrases for the tweet. To construct the dataset, they first collected 41
million tweets, and then filtered them which contain non-Latin tokens. URL links,
and reply tweets were removed. Thus, the remaining text only contains tweets and
a hashtag. They finally kept 110K tweets. To evaluate the quality of the collected
tweets, they sampled 1000 tweets and chose three volunteers to score them. As a
result, 90.2% tweets are suitable, and 66.1% are perfectly suitable. The annotation
follows the first scheme in Section 3.4.2.

tweet: “Hard to believe it but these are REAL state alternatives to taking
Obamacare funds from the gov’t (via @Upworthy)”
keyphrase: “obamacare”

Pan et al. (2017) proposed a keyphrase extraction dataset, where data were sourced
from online course captions. Labels are existing phrases in the captions. The courses
are computer science and economics courses, selected from two famous MOOC
platforms — Coursera and XuetangX. Labels were first filtered from captions using
automatic methods and then annotated by two human annotators. A candidate con-
cept was only labeled as a course concept if the two annotators were in agreement.
As a result, they collected captions from 4375 videos, and 16720 labeled concepts.

course caption: “You might learn how to write a bubble

sort and learn why a bubble sort is not as good as a heapsort.”
keyphrase: “[ ‘bubble sort’, ‘heapsort’ ]”

KP-20K (Meng et al., 2017) is a testing dataset, where the input texts are titles
and abstracts of computer science research papers collected from ACM Digital
Library. The labeled keyphrases are the keyphrases shown in the research papers.
The annotation follows the second scheme in Section 3.4.2, since the keyphrases
given by authors were not necessarily existing keyphrases in the papers. KP-20K
has the same data format as Inspec. Huang et al. (2019b), instead, were motivated
to automatically construct an educational concept map, showing concepts that will
be learned in courses, as well as the temporal relation between the concepts (e.g., to
learn concept A, it is a prerequisite to learn concept B; Concept A and concept B
can help with the understanding of each other).
3.4 Concept Extraction 167

To construct the dataset written in Chinese, they first used OCR to obtain the text
from textbooks, then manually labeled key concepts for each textbook (as “key con-
cept” or “not key concept”) and finally manually annotated the relationships among
the labeled key concepts (as “wi is w j ’s prerequisite”, “wi and w j has collaboration
relationship”, or “no relationship”).
keyword: “[ ‘average’, ‘weighted average’, ... ]”
relation: “[ ‘average : weighted average’, ... ]”

As a result, they collected 3730 pages in textbooks, 1092 key concepts, 818
prerequisite relations, and 916 collaboration relations. However, in their GitHub
repo, only keyphrases and relations between keyphrases can be found, while the
text cannot be found. Other concept extraction datasets focused on specific domains
such as clinical concepts, e.g., TempEval (Bethard et al., 2016), i2b2-2010 (Uzuner
et al., 2011), n2c2-2018 (Henry et al., 2020), and MIMIC (Gehrmann et al., 2018),
course concepts, e.g., MOOCs (Pan et al., 2017) and EMRCM (Huang et al., 2019b),
and patent concepts, e.g., USPTO (Liu et al., 2020a). They also followed keyphrase
extraction setups, whereas the targets are to extract concepts of interest.

3.4.4 Knowledge Bases

Besides classical lexicon resources such as WordNet, encyclopedias (including Baidu

Encyclopedias and Wikipedia) can also be used to provide external knowledge for
concepts (Pan et al., 2017). Methods for extracting concepts based on embedding
techniques may encounter issues with low frequency, where some of the concepts
have infrequent occurrences. Pan et al. (2017) utilized word embeddings (Mikolov
et al., 2013b) trained on encyclopedias to obtain the semantic embedding for each
concept. Inspec database is a scientific and technical database storing scientific
papers. The papers of this database have been used to construct a keyphrase extraction
dataset.

Table 3.12: Useful knowledge bases for concept extraction.

Name Knowledge #Entities Structure

WordNet Lexical 155,327 Tree
SenticNet Sentiment 400,000 Graph & Dictionary
Baidu Encyclopedia World 6,223,649 Unstructured
Wikipedia World 9,834,664 Unstructured
Inspec Science 20,000,000 Unstructured
168 3 Semantics Processing

3.4.5 Evaluation Metrics

The field of concept extraction also uses Precision, Recall, and F1 score as evaluation
metrics. Some keyphrase extraction research considered the task as an information
retrieval task. Then, the information retrieval metric, e.g., mean average precision
(MAP) was also used for keyphrase extraction as the main measure. It is calculated
by taking the average of the average precision scores for each query in a dataset.

1’
n
M AP = Avg_Precisioni, (3.6)
n i=1

where n is the total number of queries. Avg_Precisioni denotes the averaged preci-
sion of query i. In the context of keyphrase extraction, the MAP score is determined
by comparing the generated list of keyphrases with a predefined gold standard set,
and evaluating the average precision of the top n keyphrases, where n corresponds
to the total number of keyphrases in the gold standard set. Each generated keyphrase
is considered as a query. The gold standard set serves as the relevant document.

3.4.6 Annotation Tools

Numerous studies have investigated the utilization of pre-existing keywords in sci-

entific publications (Hulth, 2003; Nguyen and Kan, 2007; Krapivin et al., 2009; Kim
et al., 2010; Chen et al., 2018c) or hashtags in tweets (Zhang et al., 2016), whereby
such in-context information can serve as labels without requiring additional anno-
tation efforts, provided that the labels align with the research objectives. Given the
similarities between the two tasks, NER annotation schemes can also be applied to
annotating concept extraction data.

3.4.7 Methods

[Link] Keyphrase Extraction

The task of keyphrase extraction is to obtain keyphrases from a document to represent

and summarize the document with such keyphrases. There are two main methods,
namely: extractive and generative keyphrase extraction. Extractive methods appear
first but have a systematic disadvantage in that they can only extract existing phrases
in the documents. For example, Meng et al. (2017) argued that in addition to present
keyphrases, there are also absent keyphrases, which can better summarize a document
but are not explicitly present in it. Generative methods, instead, can generate every
possible word but they require more sophisticated models to accurately catch the
“semantic meaning” of a document to precisely generate relevant keyphrases.
3.4 Concept Extraction 169

A. Extractive Keyphrase Extraction

Zhang et al. (2016) focused on the task of keyphrase generation on X data, and
framed this task as a sequence labeling task. They proposed a joint-layer RNN
model. For each input token, the joint-layer RNN model outputs two indicators ( ŷ1
and ŷ2 ), where ŷ1 has two values True and False, indicating whether the current
word is a keyword. ŷ2 has 5 values Single, Begin, Middle, End and Not indicating
the current word is a single keyword, the beginning of a keyphrase, the middle of
a keyphrase, the ending of a keyphrase, or not a part of a keyphrase, respectively.
Their experiments show that the joint-layer RNN model outperforms both the vanilla
RNN model and the LSTM model. However, when ŷ1 and ŷ2 have contradictions, it
might be hard to find an optimal strategy to determine which indicator to refer to. In
addition, joint-layer RNN can only extract an existing sequence as a keyphrase, but
cannot abstractively obtain a (non-existing but better) keyphrase.
Wang et al. (2018c) hypothesized that the performance of keyphrase extrac-
tion could be improved in the unlabeled or insufficiently labeled target domain by
transferring knowledge from a resource-rich domain. They accordingly proposed a
topic-based adversarial neural network (called TANN) that can learn transferable
knowledge across domains efficiently by performing adversarial training. The ex-
periment section shows that TANN largely outperforms joint-layer RNN (Zhang
et al., 2016). Li et al. (2018a) proposed an unsupervised method for concept mining,
which was motivated by the fact that supervised methods might be hard to generalize
to unseen domains. They assumed that the quality of an extracted concept can be
measured by its occurrence contexts and proposed a pipeline method for concept
mining. The method first populates many raw concepts extracted from text, and then
evaluates the concepts by comparing the embedding of concepts against the current
local context.
Al-Zaidy et al. (2019) identified two limitations of previous supervised ap-
proaches: 1) They classify the labels of each candidate phrase independently without
considering potential dependencies between candidate phrases; 2) They do not in-
corporate hidden semantics in the input text. Correspondingly, Al-Zaidy et al. (2019)
addressed keyphrase extraction as a sequence labeling task, and proposed a model
named BiLSTM-CRF that unite both the advantages of LSTM (capturing semantics)
and CRF (capturing dependencies). Their results show that BiLSTM-CRF outper-
forms CopyRNN (Meng et al., 2017) by a large margin.
Fang et al. (2021a) hypothesized that previous extractive methods ignore struc-
tured information in the raw textual data (title, topic, and clue words), which might
lead to worse performance. They accordingly proposed a model named GACEN
that can utilize the title, topic, and clue words as additional supervision to provide
guidance. GACEN also utilized CRF to model dependencies in the output. The ex-
periment section shows that GACEN outperforms Joint-layer-RNN (Zhang et al.,
2016) and CopyRNN (Meng et al., 2017).
170 3 Semantics Processing

B. Generative Keyphrase Extraction

Meng et al. (2017) were motivated that classic keyphrase generation methods can
only extract the keyphrases that appear in the source text. Those methods are un-
able to reveal and leverage the full semantics for keyphrase ranking. Consequently,
they proposed an RNN-based generative model incorporating a CopyRNN. Their
method uses an encoder-decoder architecture to catch the semantics of the input text.
Previous methods suffered from both coverage (not all keyphrases are extracted)
and repetition (similar keyphrases are extracted) problems (Meng et al., 2017). For
the coverage issue, Chen et al. (2018c) integrated a coverage mechanism (Tu et al.,
2016) into their approach, which enhances the attention distributions of multiple
keyphrases in order to cover a wider range of information within the source doc-
ument and effectively summarize it into keyphrases. For the repetition issue, they
constructed a target side review context set that contains contextual information of
generated phrases.
Ye and Wang (2018) believed that although Seq2Seq models have achieved good
performance, model training still relies on large amounts of labeled data. Corre-
spondingly, they leveraged unsupervised learning methods such as TF-IDF and
self-learning algorithms to create keyphrase labels for large amounts of unlabeled
data. Then, they train their model with a mixture of self-labeled and labeled data
together for training. They also used MTL to train their model. Experiments show
that their performance outperforms previous works. Chen et al. (2019) argued that
prior research on keyphrase generation has treated the document title and main body
in the same manner, overlooking the significant role that the title plays in shaping the
overall document. Hence, they proposed a Title-Guided Network (TG-Net) where
the title is additionally employed as a query-like input to particularly assign attention
to the title. The performance of TG-Net outperforms CopyRNN (Meng et al., 2017).

[Link] Structured Concept Extraction

Compared with keyphrase extraction-like concept extraction, structured concept

extraction aims to develop an ontology where concepts are connected with each
other by certain relationships. This approach allows for a more interconnected and
hierarchical representation of knowledge. Here, we introduce three knowledge bases
commonly used in concept extraction: WordNet, ConceptNet, and SenticNet.
WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) is a manually developed knowledge base, where words
and concepts are hierarchically organized. Snow et al. (2006) proposed a taxonomy
induction method to expand WordNet 2.1 concepts by automatic noun hyponym
acquisition. Compared to previous methods that relied on individual classifiers to
uncover new relationships based on pre-designed or automatically extracted textual
patterns, the proposed approach considers input from multiple classifiers to enhance
the overall structure of the taxonomy and prioritizes the optimization of the entire
taxonomy structure with a probabilistic architecture.
3.4 Concept Extraction 171

ConceptNet (Havasi and Speer, 2007) grew out of the Open Mind Common Sense
(OMCS) project (Singh et al., 2002), which aimed at commonsense knowledge ac-
quisition. Contributors delivered knowledge by fulfilling blanks within a sentence,
For example, given “[ ] can be used to [ ]”, the concepts, e.g., “ink” and “print” and
the associated relationship “UsedFor” can be obtained. The nodes of ConceptNet
are words and MWEs and its edges are one of the 21 basic relation types, such as
“IsA”, “PartOf”, and “UsedFor”. In the latest ConceptNet 5.5 (Speer et al., 2017),
the relations are increased to 36. Concepts and predicates were obtained via pattern
matching. Each collected sentence is compared with pre-defined regular expres-
sions, e.g., “NP is used for VP”(UsedFor), “NP is a kind of NP”(IsA), “NP can VP”
(CapableOf). NP (noun phrases) and VP (verb phrases) are concepts, while “Used-
For”, “IsA”, and “CapableOf” are predicates. In the case of a complex sentence that
contains several clauses, the patterns are employed to extract a simpler sentence
from it, which can then be subjected to the concept and predicate extraction process.
To evaluate ConceptNet, its assertions were compared with those in similar lexical
resources to determine their alignment.
SenticNet (Cambria et al., 2024) is a commonsense knowledge base for concept-
level sentiment analysis built by means of neurosymbolic AI. Concepts are extracted
using a graph-based semantic parsing method termed Sentic Parser (Cambria et al.,
2022), which analyzes text at both MWE-level and word-level (Fig. 3.7). The key
novelties introduced by this parser with respect to previous work are that it leverages
morphology for syntactic normalization and it uses primitives for semantic normal-
ization. Sentic Parser is superior to standard concept parsers because it focuses on the
extraction of root words from text and, hence, it normalizes complex natural language
constructs to a sort of primitive-based protolanguage. This is done by leveraging a
graph-based approach which enables nested affix handling, microtext normaliza-
tion, and compound word processing. Preliminary experiments on other alphabetic
languages showed that the proposed methodology could be language-agnostic.

Fig. 3.7: Sentic Parser analyzes text at both MWE-level (left) and word-level (right).
172 3 Semantics Processing

An important task of concept extraction is to abstract concept representations from

entities. Unlike SenticNet which obtains abstract concepts (primitives) by selecting
the most typical entities from a group of extracted similar entities, Ge et al. (2022)
proposed a conceptualization method that can directly abstract concepts from input
text. The task is realized in the metaphor identification and interpretation domain.
The authors aimed to generate concept mappings from metaphorical word pairs
to explain the metaphoricity of the word pairs. For example, given “blind alley”,
“ is ” can be automatically generated. This work is the realization of
conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) (see Section [Link])
that the generated concept mapping explains the mapping of source (e.g., )
and target (e.g., ) concepts of a metaphor. The conceptualization (e.g., from
“alley” to “ ”) was achieved by selecting the most appropriate hypernym on
the chain from the leaf node of “alley” to the root node “entity” in WordNet. The
most appropriate hypernym is defined as the node that can cover the major senses
of the leaf, meantime, keeping it as concrete as possible23. Subsequently, within
MetaPro (Mao et al., 2023b), the conceptualization algorithm is synergistically
integrated with sequential metaphor identification and interpretation techniques,
culminating in the attainment of end-to-end concept mapping generation from full
sentences.

[Link] Domain-specific Concept Extraction

A. Clinical Concept Extraction

The task of clinical concept extraction is to extract structural information from

unstructured clinical narratives (Fu et al., 2020b). Li and Huang (2016) constructed
a dataset for a seminal task called “UTA-DLNLP at SemEval-2016 Task 12” for
clinical concept extraction. A system developed for this task should task raw clinical
notes or pathology reports as input, and identify event expressions consisting of the
“the spans of the expression in the raw text”, “contextual modality”, “degree”, “po-
larity”, and “type”. As a baseline for this task, they propose a CNN to learn hidden
feature representations for predictions, taking text and POS tags as input.
Liu et al. (2017c) adopted a BiLSTM to recognize the entity in clinical text. They
found that BiLSTM outperforms the CRF baselines. Gehrmann et al. (2018) com-
pared CNN with classic rule-based methods, bag of words, n-grams, and embedding-
based logistic regression. They found that CNN is a valid alternative to rule-based
and classic NLP methods, and should be further investigated. Yang et al. (2020b)
comprehensively explored 4 widely used transformer-based architectures, including
BERT (Devlin et al., 2018), RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019c), ALBERT (Lan et al.,
2020), and ELECTRA (Clark et al., 2020a).

23 Intuitively, “entity” can cover all possible senses of the “alley” in WordNet, while it is not the
ideal concept representation of “alley”, because it is too abstract. Thus, the authors aimed at a
concrete concept representation that can cover the majority senses of a word.
3.4 Concept Extraction 173

They compared the 4 models to LSTM-CRFs (Huang et al., 2015) baselines and
found that transformer-based models are effective for clinical concept extraction
tasks. Lange et al. (2020) proposed a joint model for both clinical concept extraction
and de-identification tasks. De-identification is important since in some clinical
concept extraction scenarios, the privacy of patients should be protected. They
hypothesized that jointly modeling the two tasks can be beneficial, and proposed
two end-to-end models. One is a multi-task model where the tasks share the input
representation across tasks; the other is a stacked model, which used the privacy
token predictions to mask the corresponding embeddings in the input layer and only
use the masked embeddings for concept extraction. They found that the performance
of the concept extraction model can be improved by training and evaluating it on
anonymized data, thereby confirming their initial hypothesis.

B. Course Concept Extraction

In tasks involving the extraction of course concepts, the concepts are typically
defined as the knowledge concepts that are taught in the course videos, as well as
the related topics that aid in the students’ comprehension of the course videos. Iden-
tifying course concepts at a fine level is very important, as students with different
backgrounds need different concepts to quickly understand the main content of a
course.
Pan et al. (2017) contributed the first attempt to systematically investigate the
problem of course concept extraction in MOOCs. In the past, course concepts were
presented by instructors at a general level, with only a few concepts being covered
in an entire course video. However, they emphasized the significance of identifying
course concepts at a granular level, i.e., automatically identifying all course concepts
from each video clip, to facilitate easier comprehension. They identified a challenge
for the task that the course concept appears at a low frequency mainly because the
different courses have different concepts. They accordingly proposed to utilize word
embedding to catch the semantic relations between words and incorporate online
encyclopedias to learn the latent representations for candidate course concepts. They
also proposed a graph-based propagation algorithm to rank the candidates based on
learned representations.
Later, Wang et al. (2018b) argued that external knowledge must be involved to
solve the concept extraction problem and proposed to utilize both the structured and
unstructured data in Wikipedia to provide external knowledge to concept extraction.
Their results show that their method outperforms the work of Pan et al. (2017).

C. Patent Concept Extraction

Liu et al. (2020a) developed a framework to extract technical concepts from patents.
Patent documents have different structures than other documents. For instance, they
have “title”, “abstract”, and “claim”, which exhibit a multi-level of information.
Motivated by this, the authors proposed a framework named UMTPE, which can
effectively leverage multi-level information to extract concepts.
174 3 Semantics Processing

3.4.8 Downstream Applications

[Link] Polarity Detection

As discussed earlier, Sentic Parser (Cambria et al., 2022) can be used for polar-
ity detection by leveraging the SenticNet knowledge base. Unlike deep learning
techniques, SenticNet performs polarity detection in a completely explainable and
interpretable way, e.g., by providing a list of key polar concepts that most contributed
to the final polarity value.
Li et al. (2023b) proposed a neurosymbolic system for conversational emotion
recognition. ConceptNet was used as a knowledge base to acquire commonsense
knowledge out of context. For example, if a person mentions that he will “chop
all onions we have and cry”, another conversation participant expresses “disgust”
emotion. This is because “onion IsA lacrimator” is a commonsense in ConceptNet.
Such a commonsense cannot be obtained from the dictionary meanings of “onion”
and the context, while ConceptNet commonsense knowledge provides the evidence
and explainability to infer such an emotional status from the context. The authors used
an utterance dependency parser and a neural network to learn symbolic knowledge
to enhance the explainability and accuracy of their method.
By using the concept mapping method from the work of Ge et al. (2022), Han et al.
(2022a) used concept mappings to support depression detection and explanation.
The hypothesis is that depression patients may have similar cognition patterns that
are reflected in their metaphorical expressions. Thus, they used concept mappings as
additional features besides tweets. The concept mappings were generated from tweets
that contain metaphors. They also proposed an explainable encoder that can identify
significant concept mappings that contribute to depression detection. The concept
mappings also improve the accuracy of depression detection, besides explaining the
common concept mapping patterns.

[Link] Information Retrieval

Xiong et al. (2017) manually analyzed the potential problems of a literature search
website [Link], and found that the issue of “Concept Not Understood”
represents one of the most significant challenges. The reason is that previous methods
measure similarity based on text, but not on their semantic embeddings. As a result,
they proposed an embedding-based similarity matching method, which extracts the
concepts in both query and documents and measures the similarity between these
concepts to obtain the similarity between a query and a document. Liu et al. (2018b)
used extracted knowledge concepts as one of the inputs to obtain a unified semantic
representation for educational excises. The representation is further used to retrieve
similar excises based on similarity with other representations.
3.4 Concept Extraction 175

[Link] Dialogue Systems

Young et al. (2018) integrated commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet in their

dialogue system. They believed that in human dialogues, individuals responding to
each other is not dependent on the most recent utterance only, but also on recol-
lecting pertinent information related to the concepts addressed within the dialogue,
e.g., commonsense. Thus, in retrieval-based dialogue generation, the model consid-
ers both the message content and relevant commonsense knowledge to effectively
choose a suitable response. Huang et al. (2020a) proposed a new dialogue coherence
evaluation metric, termed Graph-enhanced Representations for Automatic Dialogue
Evaluation (GRADE). Liu et al. (2016) argued that traditional BLEU-like statistic-
based metrics are biased in response coherence. Thus, Huang et al. (2020a) were
motivated to propose a metric that measures the coherence by the topics of utterances.
They believe that a cohesive exchange of dialogues is characterized by a seamless
transition between topics. Thus, they used a ConceptNet-based method to construct
topic-level dialogue graphs. Topic-level dialogue graphs were constructed by con-
necting the concepts that are extracted from utterances. The edge was weighted and
undirected, which was derived from the shortest path between two nodes in Concept-
Net. Such an evaluation metric can better represent the coherence of topics between
utterances as it measures the relatedness of concepts from different utterances.

[Link] Commonsense Explanation Generation

Fang and Zhang (2022) grounded concept extraction in the context of CEG. CEG
aims to generate an explanation in natural language to explain the reason why a
statement is anti-commonsense. For example, given “he took a nap in the sink”, the
model aimed to generate “a sink is too small and dirty to take a nap in”. The concepts,
“small” and “dirty” (bridge concepts), are obtained via a prompt-tuning method. The
authors developed a masked word prediction template to query the bridge concepts
that are most likely to appear in the “mask” position. Then, they use a generator to
generate the explanation with the concatenation of the original statement and the
discrete bridge concepts. This method improves the explainability in explaining why
a statement is anti-commonsense.

3.4.9 Summary

A concept is an abstract idea that is reflected in the mind. Concept extraction is the
foundation of detecting the main idea of a context and developing conceptual knowl-
edge bases. Related theoretical research showed that concepts may be abstracted
from multiple specific exemplars (Medin and Schaffer, 1978) or prototypes (Rosch,
1973). There are limited primitives that construct human cognition and reasoning,
which are the foundation of complex concepts (Wierzbicka, 1972).
176 3 Semantics Processing

According to Gardenfors (2004), conceptual space is multi-dimensional. The

similarity between concepts can be measured by the similarity between concept
properties. These theoretical research works frame the tasks of concept extraction
from the perspectives of lexicon development and conceptual structure construction.
On the other hand, current computational concept extraction methods divide this
task into three categories, namely keyphrase extraction, structured concept extrac-
tion, and domain-specific concept extraction. We found that existing computational
approaches inadequately address the tasks that have been put forth by the academic
community’s theoretical research. Although current concept extraction methods are
limited, this task has greatly improved the explainability of downstream tasks such as
polarity detection, information extraction, and counter-commonsense recognition.

[Link] Technical Trends

Within the domain of keyphrase extraction, generative keyphrase extraction takes

advantage of generating “absent keyphrases”, compared to extractive keyphrase ex-
traction. Both tasks followed the general development of the NLP fields. They likely
considered the task as a sequence labeling task (extractive keyphrase extraction) or
a generation task (generative keyphrase extraction), and used typical NLP frame-
works, e.g., sequence labeling and Seq2Seq frameworks. However, it is unclear if
these general NLP frameworks have really learned how to summarize the main idea
of context or just have learned by label distributions. There were no task-specific
mechanisms proposed to explicitly learn the keyphrase extraction task on the concept
level, with an explainable decision-making process. On the other hand, keyphrase
extraction-based concept extraction is helpful for obtaining concept lexicons. How-
ever, compared to structured concept extraction, keyphrase extraction cannot learn
the relationships between concepts.
The theoretical research of Conceptual Spaces from Gardenfors (2004) suggested
that the similarity between concepts can be measured by their properties. It sug-
gests that keyphrase extraction-based concept extraction should consider extracting
properties together with keyphrases. Thus, the later works can use keyphrases and
the associated properties to structure concepts by similarities. In contrast, structured
concept extraction research likely utilized statistical learning and syntactic parsing
methods. This is because the aim of structured concept extraction is to develop a
large knowledge base or detect structured relationships between concepts.
Labeled data are insufficient in these areas. Thus, unsupervised methods are
preferred. However, the concept knowledge base development is task-specific. As
a result, the concepts in different knowledge bases share different relationships.
For example, ConceptNet parses concepts through 36 commonsense relationships,
Stanford WordNet (Snow et al., 2006) was expanded in synonyms and hypernyms
relationships, SenticNet grouped concepts and extract primitives for polarity detec-
tion, and Ge et al. (2022) abstracted concepts for concept mappings.
3.4 Concept Extraction 177

Table 3.13: A summary of representative concept extraction techniques. KE denotes

keyphrase extraction. CE denotes concept extraction. SL denotes statistical learning.
Knwl. eng. denotes knowledge engineering. We do not show the evaluation results
for structured concept extraction methods, because they all used very task-specific
evaluation methods and datasets, where the results are not comparable.

Task Reference Techniques Feature and KB Framework Dataset Score Metric

Zhang et al. (2016) DL word2vec Joint-layer RNN X 86.40% F1
Wang et al. (2018c) DL word2vec BiLSTM, adversarial loss CCF 29.60% F1
Extractive KE Li et al. (2018a) Pipeline word2vec Similarity matching MLDBMD 97.00% MAP
Al-Zaidy et al. (2019) DL word2vec BiLSTM-CRF KP-20K 35.63% F1
Fang et al. (2021a) DL word2vec Attention; CRF KP-20K 45.69% F1
Meng et al. (2017) DL word2vec RNN KP-20K 32.80% F1 @5
Chen et al. (2018c) DL word2vec Seq2Seq Krapivin 31.80% F1 @5
Generative KE Ye and Wang (2018) DL word2vec Seq2Seq, semi-supervised KP-20K 30.80% F1 @5
Seq2Seq, additional
Chen et al. (2019) DL word2vec Title input KP-20K 37.20% F1 @5

Havasi and Speer (2007) Knwl. eng. textual patterns Pattern matching - - -
Snow et al. (2006) SL feature vectors, WordNet Probabilistic - - -
chunking,
Structured CE
Cambria et al. (2022) sem. pars., syntactic patterns Syntactic parsing - - -
POS tag.
Ge et al. (2022) SL statistics, WordNet Elbow algorithm - - -
token mention, pos
Li and Huang (2016) DL tag, word shape CNN TempEval 78.80% F1
Liu et al. (2017c) DL word2vec, character2vec BiLSTM i2b2-2010 85.78% F1
Clinical CE Gehrmann et al. (2018) DL word2vec CNN MIMIC 76.00% F1
Yang et al. (2020b) DL word2vec Transformer n2c2-2018 88.36% F1
Lange et al. (2020) DL word2vec Multi-task-biLSTM i2b2-2010 88.90% F1
Pan et al. (2017) Graph word2vec; Encyclopedia Graph-based propagation MOOCs 41.60% MAP
Course CE
Wang et al. (2018b) Graph word2vec, Wikipedia Graph-based propagation MOOCs 47.50% MAP
self pretrained
Patent CE Liu et al. (2020a) ML word2vec, DBpedia Clustering USPTO 43.37% F1

The evaluation of different concept extraction methods is different. Most of the

evaluation was implemented on different downstream tasks. It shows domain-specific
concept extraction is very similar to NER tasks. They used graph, machine learning
methods, and external knowledge, e.g., encyclopedias and Wikipedia to discover
concepts in a domain, e.g., clinical, course, or patent concepts. Similar to keyphrase-
based concept extraction, these domain-specific concept extraction methods did not
try to structure concepts after extraction. This is important because it distinguishes
concept extraction from current NER tasks in specific domains.

[Link] Application Trends

Concept extraction methods have been widely used in downstream tasks, e.g., polarity
detection, information retrieval, dialogue systems, and CEG. Compared to other low-
level semantic processing techniques, the roles of concept extraction are more diverse
in downstream applications. For all the surveyed downstream tasks, the products of
concept extraction can be used as additional features to improve the performance
of downstream tasks. Moreover, concept extraction can add interpretability to such
downstream tasks, e.g., explaining anti-commonsense (Fang and Zhang, 2022) and
concept mapping patterns of depressed patients (Han et al., 2022a).
178 3 Semantics Processing

Table 3.14: A summary of the representative applications of concept extraction in

downstream tasks.

Reference Downstream Task Feature Parser Explainability

Cambria et al. (2022) Polarity Detection X X X
Li et al. (2023b) Polarity Detection X X
Han et al. (2022a) Polarity Detection X X X
Xiong et al. (2017) Information Retrieval X X
Liu et al. (2018b) Information Retrieval X X
Young et al. (2018) Dialogue Systems X
Huang et al. (2020a) Dialogue Systems X X
Fang and Zhang (2022) Commonsense Explanation Generation X X

In the era of PLM and LLM, it seems many complex tasks can be achieved from
end-to-end with deep neural networks. However, black-box-like neural networks pre-
vent humans from understanding their decision-making mechanisms. This may be
contrary to the original intention of human beings to build AI, e.g., giving machines
the ability to think like humans. Neurosymbolic AI which combines the knowledge
of symbolic representations with neural networks, seems to be able to compensate for
the lack of model interpretability of pure neural networks because symbolic repre-
sentations in natural language, e.g., words and concepts are human-readable. We can
explain a prediction by viewing what symbolic knowledge is activated. Meantime,
symbolic knowledge can represent commonsense knowledge, which is difficult for
neural networks to learn from corpora. As the fundamental technique of knowledge
base development, concept extraction has a huge potential in downstream applica-
tions.

[Link] Future Works

A. Open Domain Concept Extraction

Prior research on concept extraction has primarily concentrated on extracting con-

cepts within a particular domain, while other concept extraction efforts aimed at
developing knowledge bases have focused on extracting concepts with predefined
relations. These approaches severely limit the application scope of knowledge bases.
It would be more practical to extract concepts and relations in an open domain, where
both the concepts and relations are not focused on specific types. This requires an
ontology study to guide the concept extraction, e.g., what can be defined as concepts
and relations. It is a more challenging task than the joint NER and relation extraction
task, because relationships and concepts are self-aware within a learning model,
rather than pre-defined by humans.
3.4 Concept Extraction 179

B. Multimodal Concept Extraction

“Concept” is also very relevant to human visual recognition. It is argued that for
humans, the ability of visual classification is obtained from concept learning, which
learned the generalized concept description from sample observations such that a
given observation can be identified as a learned concept (Seel, 2011; Xiong et al.,
2021). On the other hand, the abstractness of concepts is strongly related to im-
agery (Paivio, 1965), because abstract concepts are those that are not applicable to
tangible, perceptible objects that can be observed through touch, sight, hearing, or
other sensory experiences (Löhr, 2022). Thus, learning the relationships between
concepts and imagery can help concept extraction research hierarchically organized
concepts, e.g., primitives, concepts, and entities. However, till now, there is a lack
of research papers working on multimodal concept extraction to the best of our
knowledge. It could be also interesting to investigate possible synergies in concept
extraction between different modalities.

C. Concept Extraction Evaluation

Current concept extraction methods were evaluated on an application task, e.g.,

sentiment analysis to SenticNet or testing specific relationships, e.g., hypernym and
hyponym relationship to ConceptNet and WordNet extension. The issue with such
an evaluation method is that it can only reflect the effectiveness of a developed
knowledge base or concept extraction method on a specific domain. Since different
knowledge bases have different application targets, it is hard to evaluate and compare
them with unified criteria. It would be valuable to propose a framework for knowl-
edge base evaluation that is independent of specific tasks. It would be helpful to
understand the quality of included concepts, relationships, and their representations.

D. More Concept Extraction Applications

Despite the attention some scholars have given to neurosymbolic AI, the body of
related works remains relatively scant in comparison to end-to-end neural network
models. One possible explanation for this disparity is that, at present, there is greater
emphasis placed on the accuracy of the model rather than the transparency of its
decision-making process. Thus, there is a need for more concept extraction applica-
tions, which can aid in enhancing the explainability of neural network-based models.
It offers insights for the development of knowledge bases, prompting researchers to
reassess how they extract and organize concepts in order to more effectively support
subsequent applications.
180 3 Semantics Processing

3.5 Anaphora Resolution

In computational linguistics, Ruslan Mitkov defined anaphora as a phenomena of

pointing back a previously mentioned item in the text (Mitkov, 2022). The pointing
back phrase is called an anaphor while the previously mentioned item is called an
antecedent. The concept of anaphora should not be confused with co-reference. On
the one hand, either anaphora or cataphora (e.g., the phenomena of pointing ahead to
a subsequently mentioned item) could be a kind of co-reference. On the other hand, an
anaphor and its antecedent are not always co-referential. By definition, the difference
between anaphora and co-reference is that anaphora does not require identify-of-
reference while co-reference requires. In other words, anaphora may describe a
relation between expressions that do not have the same referent. For example, in
sentence (6), the anaphor “one” has the same sense as its antecedent “a dog”, but
they do not refer to the same dog.
(6) Jack has a dog and Mary also has one.
Building on this, in relation to anaphora, both anaphor and its antecedent are not
necessarily referring expressions. For instance, an anaphor can be a verb (henceforth,
verb anaphora). In the following example from Mitkov (2014),
(7) When Manchester United swooped to lure Ron Atkinson away from the
Albion, it was inevitable that his midfield prodigy would follow, and in 1981
he did.
the anaphor “did” is a verb, having an antecedent “follow”. Another example is the
bound anaphora where the antecedent is a quantified expression (Reinhart, 1983):
(8) Each manager exploits the secretary who works for “him”.
The anaphor “him” refers to the quantified expression “each manager”. Since an-
tecedents in both above two examples are not referring expressions, neither of them
is a co-reference.
Given the definition of anaphora, the task of anaphora resolution is to identify the
antecedent of an anaphor. In this chapter, we decided to merely focus on anaphora
resolution (rather than co-reference resolution) because, on the one hand, most
semantic processing tasks only require identifying antecedents. On the other hand,
we are not only interested in referring to noun phrases but also other phrases that an
anaphor can refer to (e.g., verb phrases and quantified expressions; see the discussion
above). It is worth noting that there have been reviews in the past 20 years about
anaphora resolution from both computer scientists (Sukthanker et al., 2020; Liu
et al., 2023c) and linguists (Mitkov, 2022; Poesio et al., 2023).
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 181

3.5.1 Theoretical Research

[Link] Constraints

When human beings resolute co-reference, there are semantic and syntactic con-
straints. As for the semantic constraints, agreements such as gender and number
agreements are the strongest type (Garnham, 2001). However, most recently, agree-
ment mismatch problems (especially for gender agreements) have been becoming
more frequent since more people have started to use plural pronouns to avoid gender
bias. As for syntactic constraints, according to the binding theory (Büring, 2005), in
the sentence (a) of the following example, “John” cannot co-refer with “him” while
in the sentence (b) “John” can.
(9) a. John likes him.
b. John likes him in the mirror.

[Link] Centering Theory

Centering Theory (Joshi and Kuhn, 1979; Grosz et al., 1983, 1995) was introduced
as a model of local coherence24 based on the idea of center of attention. The theory
assumes that, during the production or comprehension of a discourse, the discourse
participant’s attention is often centered on a set of entities (a subset of all entities in
the discourse) and such an attentional state evolves dynamically. It models transitions
of the attentional state and defines three types of transitions: CONTINUE, RETAIN, and
SHIFT. For each utterance, the transition is decided by its backward-looking center
(defined as the most salient entity in the previous utterance that is also realized in
the current utterance and denoted as Cb ) as well as forward-looking center (defined
as the most salient entity in the current utterance and denoted as C f ). Consider the
following discourse adopted from Kehler (1997):
(10) a. Terry really gets angry sometimes.
b. Yesterday was a beautiful day and he was excited about trying out his
new sailboat. [Cb = Terry, C f = Terry]
c. He wanted Tony to join him on a sailing expedition, and left him a
message on his answering machine. [Cb = Terry, C f = Terry]
d. Tony called him at 6AM the next morning. [Cb = Terry, C f = Tony]
e. Tony was furious with him for being woken up so early. [Cb = Tony,
C f = Tony]
where we annotate each utterance with its backward-looking and forward-looking
centers. The transition from utterance (10-a) to (10-b) is a CONTINUE as both
backward-looking and forward-looking centers are unchanged.

24 Instead of focusing on the whole discourse, centering theory focuses only on the discourse
segment.
182 3 Semantics Processing

The next one is a RETAIN transition since although the most salient entity changes
(i.e., C f ), the forward-looking center stays the same, whereas the transition from
utterance (10-d) to (10-e) is a SHIFT transition because of the change of backward-
looking transition. Intuitively, a discourse with more CONTINUE transitions is more
coherent than the one with more SHIFT transitions. Though Centering Theory is
not a theory of anaphora resolution, anaphora resolution can directly benefit from
modeling transitions, which provides certain information about the preference for
the referents of pronouns.

[Link] Discourse Salience

A prominent strand of work in psycholinguistics investigates how human beings

use anaphora. A referent is more likely to be realized as a pronoun if it is salient
in a given discourse (Givón, 1983) (aka. discourse salience). Discourse salience
is thought to be influenced by various factors, including givenness (Chafe, 1976;
Gundel et al., 1993), grammatical role (Brennan, 1995; Stevenson et al., 1994),
recency (Givón, 1983; Arnold, 1998), syntactic parallelism (Chambers and Smyth,
1998; Arnold, 1998), and many other factors. Similar to Centering Theory, most
research on discourse salience is about the production of anaphora (McCoy and
Strube, 1999; Orita et al., 2014, 2015; Chen et al., 2018a), but it also provides
insights about an antecedent’s relative likelihood for a given anaphor in a given
discourse. In this sense, it is plausible to use the aforementioned factors as features
to rank candidate antecedents of an anaphor (Lappin and Leass, 1994; Bos, 2003).

[Link] Coolness

Huang (1984) classified human languages into cool languages and hot languages. If
a language is “cooler” than another language, then understanding a sentence in that
language relies more on context. Specifically, cool languages (e.g., Mandarin) make
liberal use of zero pronouns. Consider the following conversation:
(11) a. ` )↵¡‘Ü⌫ (Did you see Bill today?)
b. *pro*↵¡*pro*Ü⇥(*I* saw *him*.)
where a *pro* represents a zero pronoun25. The first zero pronoun refers to one of
the speakers while the second zero pronoun refers to Bill. Zero pronouns of this kind
are called anaphoric zero pronouns (AZPs). In addition to Mandarin, a number of
other languages (i.e., cool languages) also allow zero pronouns, including examples
like Japanese, Arabic, and Korean. The current theory suggests that the anaphora
resolution of cool languages should also take AZPs into consideration, namely AZP
resolution (AZPR) (Chen and Ng, 2013).

25 In linguistics, a zero pronoun is a pronoun that is implied but not explicitly expressed in a
sentence.
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 183

3.5.2 Annotation Schemes

In this subsection, we introduce two commonly used annotation schemes for anaphora
resolution: MUC and MATE. There are also other schemes, for example, the Lan-
caster scheme (Fligelstone, 1992) and the DRAMA scheme (Passonneau, 1997).

[Link] MUC

MUC (Hirschman et al., 1997; Hirschman and Chinchor, 1998) is one of the very
first schemes, which is used for annotating the MUC (Chinchor and Sundheim, 1995)
and the ACE (Doddington et al., 2004) corpora and is still widely used these years.
It is primary goal is to annotate co-reference chains in discourse, in which MUC
defines and proposes to annotate the IDENTITY (IDENT) relation. Relations as
such are symmetrical (i.e., if A IDENT B, then B IDENT A) and transitive (i.e., if
A IDENT B and B IDENT C, then A IDENT C). Annotation is done using SGML,
for example:
(12) hCOREF ID=“100”iLawson Mardon Group Ltd.h/COREFi said hCOREF
ID=“101” TYPE=“IDENT” REF=“100”iith/COREFi ...
The annotation above construct a link between the pronoun “it” and the noun phrase
“Lawson Mardon Group Ltd.”. MUC proposes to annotate co-reference chains fol-
lowing a paradigm analogous to anaphora resolution. Annotators are first asked to
annotate markable phrases (e.g., nouns, noun phrases, and pronouns) and partition
the phrases into sets of co-referring elements. This helps the annotation task achieve
good inter-annotator agreement (i.e., larger than 95%). Nevertheless, it has been
pointed out by Deemter and Kibble (2000) that MUC has certain flaws: MUC does
not guarantee that the annotated relations are all co-referential. It includes non-
identity-of-reference relations or bound anaphora, resulting in a corpus that mixes
co-reference and anaphora.

[Link] MATE

Instead of annotating a single device INDENT, MATE (Poesio et al., 1999a; Poesio,
2004) was proposed to do so-called “anaphoric annotation” which is explicitly based
on the discourse model assumption (Heim, 1982; Gundel et al., 1993; Webber,
2016; Kamp and Reyle, 2013). The scheme was first proposed to annotate anaphora
in dialogues but was then extended to relations in discourse (see (Pradhan et al.,
2012) for more details). Such a good extensibility is a result of the fact that MATE
is a meta-scheme: It consists of a core scheme and multiple extensions. The core
scheme can be used to conduct the same annotation task as MUC and can be extended
with respect to different tasks. The annotation normally uses XML, but many of its
extensions use other their own formats.
184 3 Semantics Processing

[Link] Zero Pronoun, Bridging Reference, and Deictic Reference

In addition to the “co-referential” relation discussed above, many are also interested
in “hard” cases, each kind of which is often annotated as following an extension
of MATE. These include the following three: (1) zero pronoun: Pradhan et al.
(2012) annotated (both anaphoric and non-anaphoric) zero pronouns in Chinese and
Arabic (see Section [Link]); (2) bridging reference: bridging anaphora is a kind of
indirect referent, where the antecedent of an anaphor is not explicitly mentioned
but “associated” information is mentioned (Clark, 1975). Identifying such a relation
needs commonsense inference. Consider the following example from Clark (1975):
(13) I looked into the room. The ceiling was very high.
“the room” is an antecedent of “the ceiling” because the room has a ceiling; (3)
deictic reference: deixis (Webber, 1988) is a phrase that refers to the “speaker’s
position” (e.g., time, place, situation), which is always abstracted. For example, in
(14) I went to school yesterday.
the first person pronoun “I” and the word “yesterday” are deictic references, which
refer to the speaker and the day before the date when (14) was uttered, respectively.
Schemes like ARRAU (Poesio and Artstein, 2008) extended MATE and is able to
annotate bridging and deictic references.

3.5.3 Datasets

As we discussed when we introduced annotation schemes in Section 3.5.2, there is no

clear cut between co-reference and anaphora in computational linguistics research.
We hereby review either mainstream corpora utilized in anaphora resolution or co-
reference resolution, while being mindful of the scope of each of them. The datasets
and their statistics are summarized in Table 3.15.

Table 3.15: Anaphora resolution datasets and statistics.

Dataset Source #Samples Reference

MUC WSJ 200 Chinchor and Sundheim (1995)
ACE News 1,800 Doddington et al. (2004)
GNOME Multi-domain 505 Poesio (2000)
OntoNotes Multi-domain 4,560 Hovy et al. (2006)
WSC Manually Written 285 Levesque et al. (2012)
DPR Manually Written 1,880 Rahman and Ng (2012)
GAP Wikipedia 4,454 Webster et al. (2018)
NP4E Reuters 104 Hasler et al. (2006)
ECB+ News 982 Cybulska and Vossen (2014)
ARRAU Multi-domain 552 Poesio and Artstein (2008)
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 185

The 6th version of MUC (Chinchor and Sundheim, 1995) is the first corpus that
enables the co-reference resolution, where the task of co-reference resolution and the
MUC annotation scheme was first defined. Its texts are inherited from the prevision
MUCs and are English news. An example of MUC-6 is shown in Example (12).
(Chinchor, 1998) updated MUC-6 in 2001 and construct the MUC-7/MET-2 corpus.
MUC-7 was designed to be multilingual (NB: data in Chinese and Japanese are
included in MET-2, which has been considered as a part of MUC-7) and to be
more carefully annotated than MUC-6 by providing annotators with a clearer task
definition and finer annotation guidelines.
ACE is a multilingual (i.e., English, Chinese, and Arabic) multi-domain co-
reference resolution corpus (Doddington et al., 2004). In terms of co-reference reso-
lution, it was built with the same purpose as MUC26 and the same problems pointed
out by Deemter and Kibble (2000) (see Section 3.5.2 for more discussion). In addi-
tion to MUC and AEC, there are works following the MUC scheme, while targeting
domains other than news, which include GENIA (Kim et al., 2003), GUM (Zeldes,
2017), and PRECO (Chen et al., 2018b).
The GNOME corpus was first proposed to investigate the effect of salience on
language production (see Section [Link]) and then be used to develop and evaluate
anaphora resolution algorithms (Poesio, 2003; Poesio and Alexandrov-Kabadjov,
2004) targeting especially the bridging reference resolution, in the course of which
the MATE scheme was introduced (see Section 3.5.2). GNOME is an English multi-
domain corpus. The initial GNOME corpus (Poesio et al., 1999b) consists of data
from the museum domain (building on the SOLE project by Hitzeman et al. (1998))
and patient information leaflets (building on the ICONOCLAST project), which is
then expended to include tutorial dialogues (Poesio, 2000). GNOME followed the
MATE scheme. Each noun phrase is marked by an hnei and its anaphoric relations
(marked by) are annotated separately, for example:

hne ID=”ne07” ... i

Scottish-born, Canadian-based jeweller, Alison Bailey-Smith h/ne i
...
hne ID=”ne08” i hne ID=”ne09” i Her h/ne i materials h/ne i

hante current=”ne09” i
hanchor ID=”ne07” rel=”ident” ... i
h/ante i

OntoNotes (Hovy et al., 2006) is a multi-lingual (i.e., English, Chinese, and

Arabic) multi-domain dataset. It is one of the most commonly used anaphora/co-
reference resolution and was used in the CoNLL 2012 shared task (Pradhan et al.,
2012). It was annotated following an adapted version of the MATE, named M/O
scheme by Poesio et al. (2023).

26 Though, in terms of entity recognition, they do not have the same purpose.
186 3 Semantics Processing

Though it has been widely used in co-reference resolution tasks, many of its
relations are not co-reference. For example, bound anaphora frequently appear (see
the start of this section for more discussion). Additionally, OntoNotes annotates
zero pronouns in its Chinese and Arabic portions (see Section [Link]). There are
other corpora following M/O, but targeting different domains, including biomedical,
e.g., CRAFT (Cohen et al., 2017), Wikipedia, e.g., GAP (Webster et al., 2018) and
WikiCoref (Ghaddar and Langlais, 2016), and literary text, e.g., LitBank (Bamman
et al., 2020), and different anaphorical phenomena, including bridging anaphora,
e.g., ISNOTE (Hou et al., 2018), style variation, e.g., WikiCoref (Ghaddar and
Langlais, 2016), and ambiguity, e.g., GAP (Webster et al., 2018).
ARRAU is an English multi-domain (i.e., dialogue, narrative, and news) anaphora
resolution dataset, annotated following the MATE scheme (Poesio and Artstein,
2008; Uryupina et al., 2020). However, different from other corpora that also follow
MATE, ARRAU extended MATE to annotate anaphoric ambiguity explicitly (recall
that MATE is a meta-scheme). Poesio and Artstein (2008) introduced the Quasi-
identity relation, which is used for the situation when co-refer is possible but not
certain by annotators and allowed each anaphor to have two distinct interpretations.
In the example sample below, the footnote “1,2” of the anaphor “it” means ambiguity
exists and it can either refer to ‘engine E2’ or “the boxcar at Elmira”.

(u1) M: can we .. kindly hook up ... uh ... [engine E2]1 to [the boxcar at Elmira]2
(u2) M: +and+ send [it]1,2 to Corning as soon as possible please

The Winograd Scheme Challenge (Levesque et al., 2012) focuses on the “hard”
cases of CR, which often require lexical and commonsense knowledge. It can be
traced back to Terry Winograd’s minimal pair (Winograd, 1972):
(15) a. The city council refused the demonstrators a permit because they
feared violence.
b. The city council refused the demonstrators a permit because they
advocated violence.
The antecedent of “they” changes from “the city council” to “the demonstrators”
from (15-a) to (15-b). Levesque et al. (2012) introduced the WSC benchmark con-
sisting of hundreds of such minimal pairs. Since then, many larger-scale WSC-like
corpora have been constructed. This includes the DPR corpus (Rahman and Ng,
2012), the PDP corpus (Davis et al., 2017), and the Winogrande corpus (Sakaguchi
et al., 2021). Following a similar paradigm, GAP (Webster et al., 2018), Winogen-
der (Rudinger et al., 2018) and Winobias (Zhao et al., 2018) were proposed for
“hard” cases that link to gender bias.
NP4E (Hasler et al., 2006) and ECB+ (Cybulska and Vossen, 2014) are corpora for
investigating cross-document co-reference. They annotated both entities and events
co-reference and both within and cross-document co-reference. These corpora were
built by starting from a set of clusters of documents, the documents of each of which
describe the same fundamental events.
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 187

Table 3.16: Useful knowledge bases for anaphora resolution.

Name Knowledge #Entities Structure

WordNet Lexical 155,327 Graph
COW Lexical 157,112 Graph
ODW Lexical 92,295 Graph
AWN Lexical ⇡10,000 Graph
SenticNet Sentiment 400,000 Graph
Wikipedia World 13,489,694 Unstructured
Wikidata World 100,905,254 Graph
DBpedia World ⇡4,580,000 Graph
Freebase World ⇡2.4 B Graph
YAGO World 4,595,906 Graph
WikiNet World 3,347,712 Graph
OMCS World 62,730 Graph
Medical-KG World 22,234 Graph

The corpora mentioned above are all in English, some of which have Chinese
and Arabic portions. There are anaphora/co-reference resolution corpora that fo-
cus on languages other than them. These include ANCOR in French (Muzerelle
et al., 2013), ANCORA in Catalan and Spanish (Taulé et al., 2008), COREA in
Dutch (Hendrickx et al., 2008), NAIST in Japanese (Iida et al., 2007b), PCC in
Polish (Ogrodniczuk et al., 2013), PCEDT in Czech (Nedoluzhko et al., 2014), and
TUBA-DZ in German (Telljohann et al., 2004).

3.5.4 Knowledge Bases

Both lexical and world knowledge are useful for anaphor interpretation. See the
following examples from Martin (2015):
(16) a. There was a lot of Tour de France riders staying at our hotel. Several
of the athletes even ate in the hotel restaurant.
b. She was staying at the Ritz, but even that hotel didn’t offer dog walking
service.
We need the lexical knowledge that indicates “riders” are “athletes” while need the
world knowledge of the fact that “Ritz” is a “hotel”. As discussed earlier, WordNet
is a lexical knowledge base that could aid this process. Wikipedia has also been
an important world knowledge source for many anaphora resolution systems. These
knowledge bases consist of documents from Wikipedia as well as related meta-data.
Typical examples include bases from those directly dumped from raw Wikipedia
documents27 to better-structured ones, such as Wikidata (Vrandecic and Krötzsch,
2014), DBpedia (Auer et al., 2007), and Freebase (Bollacker et al., 2008).

27 [Link]
188 3 Semantics Processing

Knowledge graphs have become popular in anaphora/co-reference resolution tasks

because bases that build on raw Wikipedia are needed to be further processed (e.g.,
entity and relation extraction) before use. Popular knowledge graphs include those
that build on Wikipedia, e.g., YAGO (Suchanek et al., 2007), and WikiNet (Nastase
et al., 2010)), that are about commonsense, e.g., OMCS (Singh et al., 2002), and that
are about expert knowledge, e.g., Medical-KG (Uzuner et al., 2012). Search engines,
e.g., Bing and Google, were also used by a few works (Emami et al., 2018) to “hunt”
knowledge for the target entities in order to resolve hard anaphora like those in WSC
(see Section 3.5.3), in addition to the above knowledge bases in the strict sense.

3.5.5 Evaluation Metrics

Vanilla Precision, Recall and F1 . A plausible way to assess anaphora resolu-

tion systems is by viewing both mention detection and mention linking tasks as
simple classification tasks and measuring the performance using vanilla precision,
recall, and F1 scores. A good evaluation metric needs to be both interpretable and
discriminative. However, unfortunately, these measures cannot meet any of these
criteria (Moosavi and Strube, 2016), especially for the mention linking task as they
overlook the structure of these relations (most of which are chain-structured).

MUC and Beyond. Along with MUC-6 (see Section 3.5.3), Vilain et al. (1995)
proposed the MUC score. It computes the recall and precision of anaphora/co-
reference resolution outputs by considering co-reference chains in a document as a
graph. Vilain et al. (1995) first defined two sets: a set of key entities K, in which
there are gold standard reference chains (NB: a chain is sometimes named as a class
or a cluster), and a set of response entities R, in which there are system generated
chained. MUC score computes the recall based on the number of missing links in R
compared to K, formally:
Õ
ki 2K (|k i | |p(k i, R)|)
Recall = Õ (3.7)
ki 2K (|k i | 1)

where |k i | is the number of mentions in the chain k i and p(ki, R) is the set of
partitions that is constructed by intersecting ki with R. The computation of MUC
precision is done by switching K and R. However, it has been pointed out that MUC
has certain flaws: on the one hand, since MUC is merely building on mismatches
of links between the two sets, it is not discriminative enough (Bagga and Baldwin,
1998; Luo, 2005). For example, it does not tell the difference between an extra link
between two singletons or two prominent entities. On the other hand, Luo (2005);
Kübler and Zhekova (2011) argued that MUC prefers singletons. For instance, if we
merge all mentions in OntoNotes into singletons, the resulting MUC will be higher
than that of the state of the art (Moosavi and Strube, 2016).
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 189

Many metrics beyond MUC have been proposed by measuring recall and precision
using mentions instead of links. Bagga and Baldwin (1998) proposed B3 , which
considers the fractions of the correctly identified mentions in R:
Õ Õ |ki \r j | 2

Õ
ki 2K r j 2R |ki |
Recall = (3.8)
ki 2K |k i |

The precision is also computed by switching K and R. As pointed out by Luo

(2005) and Luo and Pradhan (2016), B3 still cannot fully properly handle singletons
and, additionally, repeated mentions. To solve this, Luo (2005) proposed CEAF to
incorporate measures of similarities between entities:
Õ
k 2K ⇤ (k i, g(k i ))
Recall = Õi (3.9)
ki 2K (k i, k i )

where K ⇤ is the set of key entities that have the optimal mapping with R, which is
found by the Kuhn-Munkres algorithm, and (·) is a similarity measure. Nevertheless,
CEAF has two shortcomings: it overlooks all unaligned response entities (Denis and
Baldridge, 2009) and weights entities equally (Stoyanov et al., 2009). In addition to
the above mentioned based metrics, to handle singletons, Recasens and Hovy (2011)
proposed BLANC to also consider non-coreference/non-anaphoric links. It measures
the fiction of both correctly identified co-reference links and non-coreference entities,
and averages them to obtain the final score. Moosavi and Strube (2016) conducted
controlled experiments and proved that all the aforementioned computations of
precision and recall are neither interpretable nor reliable as they suffer from the
so-called mention identification effect. They proposed the LEA metric, which was
claimed to be able to solve the above issues from two perspectives: (1) it considers
both links and mentions; (2) it weights entities with respect to their importance.

3.5.6 Annotation Tools

Text Editors. In the early years, anaphora/co-reference were annotated using text
editors or manipulation tools. For example, MUC-6 and ACE were annotated using
plain text editors while GNOME was annotated using the XML manipulation tool
developed by the University of Edinburgh28.

Co-reference Annotation Tools. Later, linguists and computer scientists developed

software that enables multi-layer annotation. The software that is designed for an-
notating co-reference or allows the annotations of relations between phrases can be
used for anaphora/co-reference annotation tasks.

28 [Link]
190 3 Semantics Processing

For example, ARRAU and PCC used MMAX2, which is a free, extensible,
general-purpose, and desktop-based annotation tool. It allows users to annotate re-
lations using fields in a form, and the form is customizable. The NP4E project used
PALinkA and ECB+ used CAT (Bartalesi Lenzi et al., 2012). Both of them were
designed for the event and reference annotation. More recently, co-reference anno-
tation tools that provide better visualization, allow drag-and-drop annotation, and
offer post-annotation analysis have been built. Typical examples include CorefAn-
notator (Reiter, 2018), which is open-sourced and desktop-based, SCAR (Oberle,
2018), which is open-sourced and web-based, and LightTag, which is not fully free
but provides good online teamwork services.

Annotation Tools with Advanced Functionalities. Some annotation tools provide

extra services that help to make sure the annotation procedure is fast and reliable. We
classify these services into three categories: (1) External Knowledge: BRAT (Stene-
torp et al., 2012) and INCEpTION (Klie et al., 2018) integrate external knowledge
bases, e.g., Freebase and Wikidata (see Section 3.5.4). Once an annotator identifies
an entity, these tools would search the linked base and return related entry; (2) Pre-
trained Models: Tools such as TagEditor, Togtag, INCEpTION, and MyMiner (Sal-
gado et al., 2012) can call embedded pretrained entity recognition models so that
they can suggest positions of possible name entities during annotation, in which
MyMiner was designed specifically for the medical domain (Neves and äeva, 2021).
Additionally, beyond name entities, TagEditor and INCEpTION can also suggest po-
tential reference chains based on their integrated pretrained co-reference resolvers,
enabling active learning for anaphora/co-reference resolution; (3) Cross-document
Annotation: using CROMER (Girardi et al., 2014) and CoRefi (Bornstein et al.,
2020), annotators can tag, link, or update entities across multiple documents. This
is done by allowing annotators to cluster documents based on topics and annotate
documents in a cluster together.

3.5.7 Methods

[Link] Rule-based Methods

A. Linguistically-inspired Approaches

Like many other tasks in NLP, early works on anaphora resolution built on rules
that are rooted cognitively and linguistically. Here, the term “early” represents the
age when systematic evaluations of anaphora resolution, e.g., MUC, had not been
introduced. The very first algorithm is the naïve algorithm proposed by Hobbs
(1978). It first does a breadth-first search from the parse tree of the sentence to
search for identifying mentions and links mentions based on constraints introduced
in Section [Link].
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 191

Later on, a series of anaphora resolution systems were proposed together with
computational investigations of the effect of salience (see Section [Link]). Based
on a set of factors that proved to influence salience, Sidner (1979) introduced rules
that are used to compute the expected focus of discourse and rules that are used
to interpret anaphora. As a matter of fact, this work was built on the “centering
view” rooted from Grosz (1977), which suggests that, during anaphora resolution,
the searching of antecedents should be restricted to the set of centered entities. It
could be seen as a prototype of the idea of “center of salience” of the centering
theory (see Section [Link]), but the rules proposed by Sidner (1979) are extremely
complex.
Starting from Sidner (1979), Carter (1987) focused on the rules about salience and
developed a system coined Shallow Processing Anaphor Resolver (SPAR). SPAR
maintains linguistically-inspired rules as domain knowledge and does commonsense
inference over them. As pointed out by Carter (1987), since maintaining domain
knowledge and reasoning rules is expensive, SPAR made them as simple as possible.
That is why it was called “shallow processing”. Carter assessed SPAR on a set of
322 test samples and found that SPAR could successfully resolve 93% pronominal
anaphors and 87% non-pronominal anaphora.
Hobbs et al. (1988) formalized commonsense inference in anaphora resolution as
abduction and introduced TACITUS. To do abduction, in TACITUS, knowledge (i.e.,
rules) is maintained in formal logic (FOL in this case). Focusing on salience, Lappin
and Leass (1994) proposed the Resolution of Anaphora Procedure (RAP) algorithm.
After selecting a set of candidate antecedents based on semantic and syntactic
constraints, RAP contains a rule-based procedure for assigning values to several
salience parameters, which are then used for resolute anaphors. An assessment
on 360 hand-crafted texts containing pronouns showed RAP defeated the naïve
algorithm by 2%.
Also starting from Sidner (1979), there were subsequent works that extended
the idea of “focus” on the basis of the introduction of the concept of “centering”.
Brennan et al. (1987) introduced the BFP algorithm for anaphora resolution, which
roughly has three stages: (1) construct a set of candidate antecedents with accordance
to the rules of the semantic constraint; (2) filter and classify the candidates based
on which action a candidate belongs to in centering theory (see Section [Link]);
and (3) select the best candidate in according to a pre-defined preference over the
actions. One limitation of the BFP algorithm is that its final choice is merely based
on a linear preference order.
To optimize this selection process, Beaver (2004) marries BFP with the optimal-
ity theory. Another limitation is that, by only considering the center theory, BFP
overlooked a key pattern of how human resolute pronouns, namely, incremental res-
olution (Kehler, 1997). In response to this problem, Tetreault (2001) proposed the
Left-to-Right Centering (LRC) algorithm, which is an incremental resolution algo-
rithm that adheres to centering constraints. An evaluation on the New York Time
corpus (Ge et al., 1998) suggests that LRC outperformed both BFP and the naïve
algorithm.
192 3 Semantics Processing

B. Knowledge-poor Approaches

After the introduction of the MUC-6 shared task, anaphora resolution systems are
able to be evaluated on a large scale. However, the trade-off is that the anaphora
resolution systems can no longer access inputs that are annotated with gold-standard
semantic and syntactic knowledge. Building on this setting, “knowledge-poor” ap-
proaches were proposed and most systems of this kind prefer rules that have high
precision but do not rely on knowledge. The most influential work is CogNIAC (Bald-
win, 1997), which is a heuristic precision-first anaphora resolver that relies on rules
that are almost always true. For example, CogNIAC contains a rule saying if there
is just one possible antecedent in entire the prior discourse, then that entity is the
antecedent. Its rules were selected based on the precision tested on a set of test sen-
tences. It is worth noting that rules in CogNIAC are still used in many state-of-the-art
practical anaphora resolution systems, e.g., the Stanford Deterministic Coreference
Resolver (Lee et al., 2013).

C. Approaches with Approximate Knowledge

As pointed out by Poesio et al. (2023), this encourages two major changes in anaphora
resolution: one this that instead of relying on perfect knowledge and doing reason-
ing on it, anaphora resolution systems started to syntactic parsers and approximate
knowledge like WordNet. The other is that the focus of anaphora resolution models
moved from being aware of only pronouns to all kinds of nominal phrases (that
function as referring).
Kameyama (1997) proposed to resolve anaphors that are proper names, descrip-
tions, and pronouns. It relies on syntactic and semantic constraints, but the related
information came from a syntactic parser and morphological filter based on person,
number, and gender features. Later on, approaches that marry rules with WordNet
were introduced (Harabagiu and Maiorano, 1999; Liang and Wu, 2003). They made
use of heuristic rules (as in CogNIAC), some of which consider lexical information
from WordNet.
The most famous rule-based anaphora resolution system is the one proposed
by Haghighi and Klein (2009), which is still frequently used as a strong baseline
in today’s research on anaphora resolution. In addition to aforesaid syntactic and
semantic constraints, Haghighi and Klein (2009) makes full use of the parse trees.
For example, it contains rules that rely on the distance between mentions, which is
obtained from computing the shortest path between two mentions in the parse tree. It
also uses Wikipedia as a resource for acquiring semantic knowledge of each entity.
One limitation of heuristic-based systems is that lower precision features often
overwhelm higher precision features. In response to this, more recently rule-based
systems (Raghunathan et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2013) categorized rules into sieves and
made decisions with an ordered set of rules. These works are often called multi-sieve
approaches.
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 193

[Link] Statistical-based Methods

The introduction of large-scale benchmarks also encourages the trend of using ma-
chine learning techniques in anaphora resolution. Basically, these learning-based
models treat anaphora resolution as a series of classification problems. We catego-
rize them on the basis of how they define the classification task.

A. Mention-pair Models

Mention-pair models train a classifier to determine whether two mentions co-refer or

not. It was first introduced by Aone and Bennett (1995) and then perfected by Soon
et al. (2001). To build a mention-pair model, there are five steps:
1) Identifying Mentions: As a practical anaphora resolution model, the first step of
this framework is to identify mentions. Soon et al. (2001) break down the mention
identification into two stages: they first used three statistical sequence taggers
to do POS tagging, noun phrase identification, and name entity recognition,
respectively. The outputs of them are noun phrases as well as name entities. Then,
they designed rules to recognize nested noun phrases based on the identified noun
phrases. For each discourse, the resulting set of mentions is the union of noun
phrases, name entities, and nested noun phrases.
2) Feature Engineering: Akin to many statistical models, feature engineering is
always needed. Soon et al. (2001) made use of not only syntactic and semantic
features as usual but also lexical features with the help of WordNet. Many other
works also used knowledge bases for feature engineering (Vieira and Poesio,
2000; Ponzetto and Strube, 2006). Later, Bengtson and Roth (2008) found that a
simple model with good feature engineering can perform well.
3) Generating Training Examples: They used a heuristic-based method to generate
training pairs (i.e., a pair of positive and negative examples). More specifically, a
positive instance consists of an anaphor A1 and its closest preceding antecedent
A2 while a negative instance consists of the same anaphor A1 and the mention that
intervenes A1 and A2 . There has been a number of modifications to this strategy.
For example, Ng and Cardie (2002b) forced that A1 can only be a non-pronominal
once A2 is also a non-pronominal. Harabagiu et al. (2001); Ng and Cardie (2002a);
Strube et al. (2002); Yang et al. (2003) further enhanced this process by applying
rule-based or learning-based filters.
4) Building a Classifier: In this step, statistical machine learning techniques have
been used. These include decision trees (Soon et al., 2001; McCarthy and Lehnert,
1995), random forests (Lee et al., 2017a), MaxEnt classifier (Berger et al., 1996;
Ge et al., 1998), and memory-based learning (Daelemans et al., 2003).
5) Generating Co-reference Chains: The last step is to partition these anaphora
into co-reference chains. Normally, clustering techniques are used in this step.
These include closest-first clustering (Soon et al., 2001), best-first clustering (Ng
and Cardie, 2002b), correlational clustering (McCallum and Wellner, 2004),
and graph partitioning algorithms (McCallum and Wellner, 2003; Nicolae and
Nicolae, 2006).
194 3 Semantics Processing

B. Entity-Mention Models

As a matter of fact, the task mention-pair anaphora resolution is counter-intuitive

from the perspective of linguists and cognitive scientists. Additionally, Poesio et al.
(2023) pointed out that mention-pair models also overlook features of entities (Ng,
2010). In response to this, entity-mention models were proposed. They directly link
mentions to entities by clustering. Specifically, Cardie and Wagstaff (1999) trained
a model to classify whether a mention belongs to a partially constructed cluster.
However, according to the evaluation by Luo (2005), the performance of the models
of this kind is not comparable to mention-pair models.

C. Mention-Ranking Models

Another problem of mention-pair models is that they only do binary classifica-

tion without comparing different potential antecedents. To remedy this, Denis and
Baldridge (2008) proposed an entity-ranking model, replacing the binary classifi-
cation loss with a ranking loss. Rahman and Ng (2011) combined entity-ranking
strategy with the entity-mention model, yielding good performance.

[Link] Neural Anaphora Resolution

A. Conventional Deep Learning Models

Wiseman et al. (2015) was the first to use deep neural networks in anaphora resolu-
tion. It is a non-linear mention-ranking model. Instead of conjunction features (as in
statistical models), the model of Wiseman et al. (2015) uses a neural network to learn
feature representations as an extension to the mention-ranking model. They defined
two feature vectors, each of which is obtained from pretraining the model on any
of the subtasks of anaphora resolution, namely, mention identification and mention
linking. The final decision is made through a non-linear classification, based on these
features. Both Wiseman et al. (2016) and Clark and Manning (2016b) augmented
the work of Wiseman et al. (2015) by inducing global features, but they followed
different schemes. Wiseman et al. (2016) ran an RNN to encode the representation
of each sequence of mentions corresponding to an entity (i.e., a cluster) in the his-
tory. Whereas, Clark and Manning (2016b) first used a feed-forward neural network
to encode each mention-pair of an entity and computed the entity representation
by pooling over all mention-pairs. Later on, Clark and Manning (2016a) extended
their previous work (Clark and Manning, 2015), which built up co-reference chains
with agglomerative clustering. Each mention starts in its own cluster and then pairs
of clusters are merged using imitation learning (a type of reinforcement learning
technique) by assuming merging clusters are actions. Clark and Manning (2016a)
replaced imitation learning with deep reinforcement learning (DRL).
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 195

Liu et al. (2023b) proposed an MTL framework for mention detection and men-
tion linking tasks, because they found that the learning of mention detection task
can enhance the learning of dependent information of input tokens, which is com-
plimentary for mention linking detection. Such an approach achieved comparable
performance to (Kocijan et al., 2019) with only 0.05% WIKICREM training samples.

B. End-to-End Models

A significant benefit of employing deep learning models lies in their capacity to

operate without the requirement of handcrafted features, thus enabling the creation
of end-to-end (End2End) systems. Lee et al. (2017b) proposed the first End2End
anaphora resolution system. It needs no human-craft feature or parser and, more
importantly, it learns to process mention identification and linking tasks jointly. To
this end, the fundamental idea is to first view all spans in the previous discourse as
candidate antecedents and do mention ranking (also known as span ranking as the
spans it sent for rank are not always mentions). The inputs pass through an RNN and
each span is represented by the concatenation of the RNN hidden states of the first
token and the last token as well as the weighted sum of all tokens in the span using
the attention mechanism (Bahdanau et al., 2015). The final decision of each pair
is made using a feed-forward neural network. One limitation of this method is that
since it searches over all possible spans, the search space would be extremely large.
To remedy this, candidate spans are pruned by limiting the maximum span width,
the number of spans per word, the maximum number of antecedents, and the length
of input documents. This End2End model was tested on the OntoNotes dataset and
outperformed all previous works.
Akin to mention-pair anaphora resolution systems, End2End anaphora resolution
is problematic because it ranks every span-anaphor pair separately. In response to this
problem, Lee et al. (2018) introduced a higher-order coarse-to-fine inference strategy
for End2End anaphora resolution models (henceforth, C2F-AR), which, in short,
does cluster ranking. It infers in an iterative manner. The antecedent distributions
are used to update the span representations before doing inference, enabling later
decisions conditioned on previous decisions. C2F-AR uses a coarse factor that can
further prune candidate span during this higher-order inference,
More recent works focused on either improving span representations or selecting
candidate spans. For example, Luo and Glass (2018) used a two-layer bi-directional
RNN and combined the representations of adjacent sentences in order to improve
span representation with cross-sentence dependency information. Zhang et al. (2018)
proposed to enrich the span representations by training a mention identification
model jointly assigning each candidate span an antecedent score. For each pair of
spans, Kirstain et al. (2021) replaced span representations with a combination of
lightweight bilinear functions between pairs of endpoint token representations. Wu
et al. (2020b) formalized the End2End anaphora resolution as a QA task. A query is
produced for each entity and predicts the positions of all spans in the co-reference
chain.
196 3 Semantics Processing

C. Knowledge-based Models

Analog to classical rule-based and statistical-based approaches, works on neural

anaphora resolution models also seek to integrate knowledge. In terms of the use
of open knowledge bases, Aralikatte et al. (2019) used world knowledge to com-
pute rewards for reinforcement learning-based anaphora resolution models. More
specifically, they submitted the predictions to an OpenIE system and compared the
predicted anaphora with the knowledge to compute the reward. Zhang et al. (2019)
extracted knowledge triples related to each entity from knowledge graphs and used
them to enrich span representations using a knowledge attention module.
It has been pointed out that PLMs can be considered as knowledge bases (Petroni
et al., 2019). Many recent anaphora resolution models have incorporated PLMs,
including BERT (Devlin et al., 2018), SpanBERT (Joshi et al., 2020), and Coref-
BERT (Ye et al., 2020). There has been a line of work focusing on addressing mention
linking in WSC-like corpora (see Section 3.5.3). As aforementioned, resolving these
“hard” cases needs reasoning with world knowledge. Works of this line incorporate
either external knowledge bases (Emami et al., 2018) or PLMs (Kocijan et al., 2019;
Attree, 2019).

[Link] Anaphoric Zero Pronoun Resolution

As mentioned in Section [Link], “cool” languages (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Korean,

and Arabic) contain AZPs, and many works have focused on resolving AZPs. As with
other anaphora resolution tasks, early works on AZPR used rule-based approaches
and statistical approaches. Theoretically, these works are built on the fact that speak-
ers process zero pronouns in the same way as pronouns (Yang et al., 1999). Early on,
most of the works are for Japanese because of the NAIST corpus (Iida et al., 2007b),
in which AZPs are annotated. Kameyama (1985); Okumura and Tamura (1996) used
center theory-based approaches for AZPR in Japanese. Statistical-based approaches
were proposed with a focus on exploring useful features, including syntactic pattern
features (Iida et al., 2007a), heuristic rules (Isozaki and Hirao, 2003), and features
that had been considered in anaphora resolution systems (Nakaiwa et al., 1995;
Nakaiwa and Shirai, 1996; Seki et al., 2001, 2002; Sasano et al., 2008; Sasano and
Kurohashi, 2011). Meanwhile, there were also a number of Korean AZPR systems
building on the Korean portion of Penn Treebank (Byron et al., 2006; Han, 2006).
Later on, the development of systems for Chinese (Zhao and Ng, 2007; Kong and
Zhou, 2010; Chen and Ng, 2013) and Arabic AZPs became active after the introduc-
tion of OntoNotes (Aloraini and Poesio, 2020). From Chen and Ng (2016), AZPR
systems also went into the age of deep learning. Most of the works were for Chinese
AZPR, including approaches that use deep feedforward neural networks (Chen and
Ng, 2016), RNNs (Yin et al., 2017a, 2019), attention network (Yin et al., 2018b),
memory network (Yin et al., 2017b), DRL (Yin et al., 2018a) and BERT (Song et al.,
2020a).
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 197

The training of AZPR systems shares the problem of lacking annotated training
data. For example, the AZPR largest corpus, i.e., the Chinese portion of OntoNotes,
contains only 12,111 AZPs. To incorporate more data into training, there have
been three paradigms: (1) Joint modeling: Chen et al. (2021b); Aloraini et al. (2022)
proposed to train a model that resolves either AZPs and non-zero pronouns jointly; (2)
Multi-linguality: Iida and Poesio (2011); Aloraini and Poesio (2020) trained multi-
lingual AZPR systems which were trained on AZPR data in multiple languages; (3)
Data augmentation: Liu et al. (2017b) made use of large-scale reading comprehension
dataset in Chinese to generate pseudo training data for Chinese AZPR. Aloraini and
Poesio (2021) augmented Arabic AZPR data by a number of augmentation strategies,
e.g., back translation, masking candidate mentions, etc.

3.5.8 Downstream Applications

[Link] Machine Translation

Stojanovski and Fraser (2018) provided the following example to illustrate how
oracle anaphora singles can help machine translation systems.
(17) a. Let me summarize the novel for you.
b. It presents a problem.
c. er!@#$XPRONOUN It presents a problem.
d. Er prasentiert ein Problem.
Given the context (a) and the course sentence (b), based on the oracle anaphora
information, Stojanovski and Fraser (2018) pre-pend the input sentence of machine
translation with pronoun translation as shown in (c) and ask the system to translation
with a target (d) in German. In this case, the pronoun “it” which refers to “novel”
(in German “Roman”) is translated to “er” (the German masculine pronoun agreeing
with “Roman”). Without this information, they argued that machine translation will
be hard to produce “er”. The experiment on a number of NMT models suggested
that would improve the BLEU scores by 4-5 points.
This argumentation was strengthened by the experiments conducted by Saunders
et al. (2020), who concluded that NMT does not translate gender co-reference. De-
spite these theoretical studies, Le Nagard and Koehn (2010); Hardmeier and Federico
(2010); Guillou (2012) focused on improving machine translation with anaphora res-
olution outputs. The solution is often using anaphora resolution outcomes to obtain
features of each pronoun (including, gender, number, and animacy) in order to en-
hance the pronoun translation performance. Beyond these works, Miculicich and
Popescu-Belis (2017) proposed to use clustering scores which are used for generat-
ing co-reference chains in anaphora resolution (see Section [Link]) as features for
re-ranking machine translation results.
198 3 Semantics Processing

There has been a long tradition of studying the impact of AZPs on machine
translation systems, especially when translating from a pro-drop language to a non-
pro-drop language. For example, the Japanese-English machine translation in the
1990s had already been deployed an AZPR systems (Nakaiwa and Ikehara, 1992).
Later systems followed a slightly different strategy. Instead of doing a full anaphora
resolution, these systems only detect AZPs in the source language and directly
translate them into the target language without further resolute them (Tan et al.,
2019; Wang et al., 2019b).

[Link] Summarization

There are two major uses of anaphora resolution in text summarization (Steinberger
et al., 2007). One is to help with finding the important terms while the other is
to help with evaluating the coherence of the summarization. Many works have
demonstrated that incorporating the information of co-reference chains contributes
to both the faithfulness and the coverage of summarization systems (Bergler et al.,
2003; Witte and Bergler, 2003; Sonawane and Kulkarni, 2016; Liu et al., 2021d).
Nevertheless, it is also worth noting that there are also some studies that showed that
anaphora resolution had negative effects (Orasan, 2007; Mitkov et al., 2007). One
possible explanation is that the effect highly depends on the task the summarization
system is addressing and the performance of the anaphora resolution systems.

[Link] Textual Entailment

For textual entailment, to understand the impact of anaphora resolution, Mirkin et al.
(2010) manually analyzed 120 samples in the RTE-5 development set (Bentivogli
et al., 2009). They found that for 44% samples anaphora relations are mandatory
for inference and for 28% sample anaphora optionally support the inference. Based
on this fact, many systems that got involved in the RTE challenge made use of
anaphora resolution. Nevertheless, since anaphora resolution systems at that moment
were not strong enough, errors they made would propagate to downstream textual
entailment systems (Adams et al., 2007; Agichtein et al., 2008). As a consequence,
the contribution of anaphora resolution was negative or not significant (Bar-Haim
et al., 2008; Chambers et al., 2007).

[Link] Polarity Detection

Sukthanker et al. (2020) identified two ways anaphora resolution aids polarity detec-
tion: It enhances sentiment analysis of online reviews by linking pronouns to global
entities and improves fine-grained ABSA by clustering entities into distinct aspects
for better sentiment extraction.
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 199

The contribution of anaphora resolution in polarity detection tasks can be sum-

marized as follows: it enables discourse-level sentiment analysis by linking mentions
from different sentences. Many efforts have been carried out to demonstrate such
an ability for anaphora resolution. Nicolov et al. (2008) conducted systematic ex-
periments to understand the impacts of anaphora resolution on sentiment analysis.
Specifically, they tried to incorporate anaphora information into a number of sen-
timent analysis models and assessed them on varieties of datasets. They concluded
that, on average, anaphora resolution can boost sentiment analysis performance by
10%. Based on this finding, sentiment analysis systems that are assembled with
anaphora resolution have been proposed (Jakob and Gurevych, 2010a; Ding and Liu,
2010; Le et al., 2016).

3.5.9 Summary

Anaphora resolution has been explored extensively by theoretical linguists, psy-

cholinguists as well as computational linguistics. It is the manifest of structural
semantics because the meaning of an anaphor elucidates the syntactic relationship
between the anaphor and its antecedent. Early anaphora resolution models were
inspired by theories and findings in linguistics, such as the theory of syntactic and
semantic constraints from theoretical linguistics and the findings about factors that
influence the choice of referential form from psycholinguists. Later on, by marrying
these theories with computational models, linguists also gained insights regarding
the comprehension and production of anaphora from anaphora resolution systems.
For instance, we could understand better how each salience factor contributes to
the use of anaphora through the importance analysis of a computational model that
considers the factor.
Most recently, though most computational works focus on building End2End
anaphora resolution systems based on deep learning techniques, linguistic theories
about anaphora are still proven to play vital roles (Chai and Strube, 2022). Dataset
is core for either practical or theoretical anaphora resolution research. Though many
annotation schemes and datasets have been introduced, we found that they share two
limitations: one is that due to the fact that anaphora is a complex concept, annotations
of anaphora resolution datasets are always imperfect (Deemter and Kibble, 2000).
The other is the lack of wide-coverage datasets that covers all kinds of anaphora.
Finally, we found that anaphora resolution is useful in many downstream tasks,
including major tasks of both NLU and natural language generation. It is always
utilized as a producer of additional features for downstream tasks. Unlike other
tasks in this chapter, we rarely see how anaphora resolution techniques help boost
the explainability of downstream models, apart from the work of Saunders et al.
(2020). We also have not observed that anaphora resolution techniques are used for
constructing datasets for downstream tasks.
200 3 Semantics Processing

[Link] Technical Trends

As shown in Table 3.17, there are two clear technical trends. One is that the research
interest in the realm of anaphora resolution has shifted from machine learning-based
or rule-based anaphora resolution to neural approaches, especially the End2End
neural anaphora resolution, which does mention identification and linking simulta-
neously. Another one is that, as previously elucidated in Section 3.5.7, there exist
distinct shortcomings associated with each of the task formulations such as mention
pair, entity mention, and mention ranking. Consequently, another tendency is to
employ higher-order inferences (Lee et al., 2018) to directly rank clusters or entities,
which allows for the incorporation of benefits from all the formulations.
To sum up, state-of-the-art anaphora resolution models are often End2End cluster
ranking models. Most recent advances tended to further improve this paradigm from
two angles, namely reducing the search space as an End2End anaphora resolution
searches across all possible spans in its inputs for antecedents (Wu et al., 2020b);
and equipping anaphora resolution systems with knowledge (which, recently, often
large-scale PLMs) to boost their ability of reasoning (Joshi et al., 2019, 2020).

Table 3.17: A summary of representative anaphora resolution techniques. Rahman

and Ng (2011) reported that the performance of Denis and Baldridge (2008) was
57.7% CEAF-F and that CoNLL-F is the average of MUC, B3, and CEAF scores.
Stat. denotes statistics. DL denotes deep learning. Cha. Emb. denotes character
embedding.

Task Reference Feature Framework Dataset Score Metric

Carter (1987) Salience Logic rules self-collected dataset 93.00% Acc
Lappin and Leass (1994) Salience Logic rules self-collected dataset 85.00% Acc
Brennan et al. (1987) Semantic constraints Centering theory New York Times 59.40% Acc
Tetreault (2001) Semantic constraints Centering theory New York Times 80.40% Acc
Rule-based
Syntactic, Semantic,
Baldwin (1997) Discourse Logic rules self-collected dataset 77.90% Acc
Liang and Wu (2003) WordNet Logic rules Brown Corpus 77.00% Acc
Haghighi and Klein (2009) Syntactic, Semantic Logic rules ACE 79.60% MUC-F
Syntactic, Semantic,
Soon et al. (2001) WordNet Mention-pair MUC-6 62.60% MUC-F
Lexical, Syntactic,
Cardie and Wagstaff (1999) Semantic Entity-Mention MUC-6 64.90% MUC-F
Stat.-based Denis and Baldridge (2008) Linguistic & Positional Mention-ranking ACE 67.00% CEAF-F
Lexical, Syntactic,
Rahman and Ng (2011) Semantic Mention-ranking ACE 60.80% CEAF-F
Wiseman et al. (2015) Syntactic, Semantic Mention-rank., DNN OntoNotes 82.86% Acc
Syntactic, Semantic,
Wiseman et al. (2016) Global Feature Mention-rank., RNN OntoNotes 64.21% CoNLL-F
Clark and Manning (2016a) Syntactic, Semantic DRL OntoNotes 65.73% CoNLL-F
Syntactic, Semantic,
Clark and Manning (2016b) Global Feature Mention-ranking, DNN OntoNotes 65.52% CoNLL-F
DL-based Lee et al. (2017b) Word & Cha. Emb. End2End, LSTM, DNN OntoNotes 68.80% CoNLL-F
Lee et al. (2018) ELMo End2End, LSTM, DNN OntoNotes 73.00% CoNLL-F
Zhang et al. (2018) Glove & Cha. Emb. BiLSTM, Joint Learning OntoNotes 69.20% CoNLL-F
Joshi et al. (2019) BERT Lee et al. (2018) OntoNotes 76.90% CoNLL-F
Joshi et al. (2020) SpanBERT Lee et al. (2018) OntoNotes 79.60% CoNLL-F
Wu et al. (2020b) SpanBERT QA OntoNotes 83.10% CoNLL-F
Kocijan et al. (2019) BERT_WikiCREM DNN DPR 84.80% Acc
Liu et al. (2023b) BERT Transformer, MTL DPR 84.58% Acc
Okumura and Tamura (1996) Salience Center Theory self-collected dataset 78.30% Acc
Sasano et al. (2008) Salience Probalistic self-collected dataset 39.10% F1
Chen and Ng (2016) Syntactic, Lexical DNN OntoNotes 52.20% F1
AZPR
Yin et al. (2017a) word2vec, Global RNN OntoNotes 53.60% F1
Yin et al. (2018a) Word Embedding DRL OntoNotes 57.20% F1
Song et al. (2020a) BERT DNN, MTL OntoNotes 58.49% F1
3.5 Anaphora Resolution 201

Furthermore, recent investigations on anaphora resolution have also led to ad-

vancements in various deep learning paradigms. DRL and MTL were employed for
obviating the need for language-orientated hyperparameter tuning (Clark and Man-
ning, 2016a), investigating the enduring impact of pronoun-candidate antecedent
pairs (Yin et al., 2018a), and enhancing the dependency learning of mention
pairs (Liu et al., 2023b). Meanwhile, there were also certain efforts that concen-
trated on resolving “hard” cases and multilinguality in anaphora resolution. As for
the former one, people were aware of the models’ capacity to resolve ambiguous
pronouns and biases (especially, gender bias) learned by anaphora resolution mod-
els (Levesque et al., 2012; Rudinger et al., 2018).
State-of-the-art models of this line of work are often assembled with knowledge
bases (Emami et al., 2018) or PLMs (Kocijan et al., 2019). As for the latter one,
multilingual anaphora resolution systems were developed in order to either, theoreti-
cally, unify the theory of reference for different languages (Nedoluzhko et al., 2022),
or, practically, enrich the datasets for low-resource anaphora resolution languages
or tasks, e.g., AZPR (Aloraini and Poesio, 2020). In addition to these two trends
for developing practical anaphora resolution systems, there is also a long tradition
of studying how human beings understand and use anaphors with the algorithms
introduced in this section from the age of rule-based methods (Sidner, 1979; Carter,
1987) to the most recent deep learning based methods (Chai and Strube, 2022; Same
et al., 2022).

[Link] Application Trends

Many demonstrations were carried out approximately 15 years ago to validate the
necessity of anaphora resolution for both language generation and understanding
downstream tasks (Steinberger et al., 2007; Mirkin et al., 2010; Nicolov et al., 2008;
Li et al., 2021d; He et al., 2022a). Nevertheless, practically, at that moment, anaphora
resolution often had negative effects (Bar-Haim et al., 2008; Chambers et al., 2007;
Orasan, 2007; Mitkov et al., 2007). This is mainly because anaphora resolution
systems were not powerful enough and errors they made may propagate to their
downstream tasks.
Recently, with significant advancements in the capabilities of anaphora resolution
systems, more and more anaphora resolution systems have been used for providing
anaphora information for downstream tasks (see Table 3.18). In short, anaphora reso-
lution helps its downstream applications mainly in two ways. It links noun phrases in
different sentences. As a consequence, these applications have better performance in
comprehending discourse-level information. On the other hand, linking noun phrases
helps downstream applications to do higher-level reasoning, e.g., extracting global
entities (Sukthanker et al., 2020) and recovering the ellipses (Aralikatte et al., 2021).
Most downstream task models utilize anaphora resolution as an additional feature
to improve task performance. However, we did not see how anaphora resolution
techniques help to explain how and why anaphora is used in a certain context.
202 3 Semantics Processing

Table 3.18: A summary of the representative applications of anaphora resolution in

downstream tasks. Xdenotes the role of anaphora resolution in a downstream task.

Reference Downstream Task Feature Explainability

Le Nagard and Koehn (2010) Machine Translation X
Hardmeier and Federico (2010) Machine Translation X
Miculicich and Popescu-Belis (2017) Machine Translation X
Saunders et al. (2020) Machine Translation X X
Steinberger et al. (2007) Summarization Evaluation X
Bergler et al. (2003) Summarization X
Liu et al. (2021d) Summarization X
Agichtein et al. (2008) Textual Entailment X
Jakob and Gurevych (2010a) Polarity Detection X
Ding and Liu (2010) Polarity Detection X

[Link] Future Works

Developing Robust Annotation Schemes

Current annotation schemes for anaphora work practically but face theoretical issues
due to the lack of unified rules on what is remarkable and the unclear distinction
between co-reference and anaphora, despite clear boundaries in linguistic theory.
Annotation schemes so far are imperfect to improve the practicality so that large
anaphora/co-reference resolution datasets (that can be used for training and assess-
ing data-driven anaphora resolution systems) could be constructed. In exchange, the
resulting corpora are imperfect in terms of both quality (i.e., some annotated relations
might not be anaphoras) and coverage (i.e., some kinds of anaphora are not covered).
On a different note, anaphora resolution, which can also be seen as a pragmatics
task, disagreement on how an anaphora is interpreted happens across different read-
ers (Uma et al., 2022). Nonetheless, many datasets resolve disagreements through
majority voting, while only a few works explicitly annotated ambiguities, which
are the causes of the disagreements (Poesio and Artstein, 2008). In aggregate, it is
plausible to design a scheme (probably by extending MATE) that not only handles
disagreements but also balances quality, practicality, and coverage. Furthermore, it
is important to empirically investigate how the errors and limitations inherent in the
annotation scheme can impact the performance of anaphora resolution systems.

Anaphora Resolution Evaluation

Analogue to the disagreements in the anaphora annotation, one can expect that,
for a single mismatch between an output and a reference answer, it might be an error
for some readers but not an error for the rest. For different mismatches, they might
have different severity. The impact of severity of errors has been studied for the
production of reference (van Miltenburg et al., 2020).
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 203

For example, saying “a woman is a man” is more serious than saying “a red coat
is pink”), but it has never been explored in the realm of anaphora resolution. This
said, roughly computing the overlaps between model outputs and reference outputs
might be problematic. On the one hand, due to discrepancies and varying degrees
of errors in anaphora resolution, human evaluation (Martschat and Strube, 2014) is
necessary to improve the analysis and evaluation of anaphora resolution models, as
well as to establish benchmarks for developing more accurate evaluation metrics. On
the other hand, when designing new evaluation metrics, disagreements, and error
severity should be considered by data-driven methods.

Model Development

Regarding future advancements in anaphora resolution models, a significant area

of focus should be on computational studies of anaphora resolution tasks that are
firmly grounded in theory but have yet to be extensively explored. Examples of such
tasks include but are not restricted to (1) bridging, deictic, and plural references,
which are crucial aspects of referential language, yet their computational treatment
has been limited, possibly due to a shortage of relevant annotated datasets; and
(2) disagreement resolution, which involves learning from discrepancies in human
interpretations of anaphoric expressions to better capture the pragmatic nuances of
such references, and should be incorporated into future models (Uma et al., 2021);
and (3) cross-document anaphora resolution, which is critical for downstream appli-
cations such as KGC and cross-document information extraction, yet has received
insufficient attention in terms of data, methods, and evaluation metrics, particularly
in relation to event resolution.

3.6 Subjectivity Detection

Conventionally, subjectivity detection is defined as a task to determine whether a text

is subjective or not, where a subjective text expresses personal feelings, evaluations,
and speculations (Wiebe, 1994), whereas an objective one merely delivers factual
information. Generally, subjectivity can manifest in different forms, e.g., opinions,
allegations, desires, beliefs, and suspicions (Liu et al., 2010) to express private states.
It is not an easy task to identify the use of subjective language, as a subjective sentence
does not always contain an opinion (Liu et al., 2010). Therefore, it is important for
the subjectivity detection task to find reliable clues.
Aside from opinion-bearing words, syntax also provides essential clues in re-
porting private states, because grammaticalization involves the recruitment of items
to mark the speaker’s point of view (Traugott, 2010). Early works often equated
the presence of subjectivity to the presence of subjectivity-bearing words in a sen-
tence (Riloff and Wiebe, 2003; Kim and Hovy, 2005; He et al., 2023b; Bao et al.,
2021). However, subjectivity is context- and domain-dependent. Some words are
only subjective in certain contexts or domains.
204 3 Semantics Processing

Therefore, many researchers incorporated syntactic dependencies (Wilson et al.,

2004; Xuan et al., 2012), interactions between neighboring sentences (Wiebe, 1994;
Pang and Lee, 2004) or in discourse (Biyani et al., 2014) to extract different levels
of contextual information. An alternative to this subjective-lexicon-based approach
is the word-frequency-based approach (Rustamov et al., 2013; Kamil et al., 2018),
which is completely domain-independent by learning from document-level infor-
mation. However, this approach has difficulties capturing syntactic dependencies.
By now, subjectivity detection research has been divided into several distinct tasks,
each with its unique objectives. One such task is individual subjectivity detection,
which focuses on detecting subjectivity at the sentence level. In contrast, context-
dependent subjectivity detection aims to incorporate discourse information and a
broader context in detecting subjectivity. Cross-lingual subjectivity detection, on the
other hand, strives to identify subjectivity in various languages. Moreover, multi-
modal subjectivity detection is concerned with identifying subjective expressions
in different modalities such as audio and video. Finally, the bias detection task is
centered on identifying biased statements in ostensibly impartial articles.
Subjectivity detection is commonly considered as a subtask of sentiment analysis
since it serves as a filtering step for polarity detection (Liu et al., 2010). It can also
be helpful for downstream tasks that require a distinction between opinionated and
non-opinionated sentences, such as opinion and information retrieval (Zhang et al.,
2007; Wiebe and Riloff, 2011), analyses in financial and political domains (Wang
et al., 2021; Tang et al., 2014b; Al Hamoud et al., 2022), QA systems (Yu and
Hatzivassiloglou, 2003; Li et al., 2008a), etc.

3.6.1 Theoretical Research

The broad range of subjective expressions, such as personal feelings, evaluations,

and speculations, makes the related theoretical research in this domain extensive.

[Link] Subjective Elements

Early linguistic works studied subjective language extensively in third-person narra-

tive text. Banfield (2014) defined the SELF of a sentence as the speaker in conversa-
tion or the narrating character in third-person fictional text. She identified a variety
of morphological, lexical, and syntactic elements, termed subjective elements, that
always express the private states, i.e., emotions and opinions, of the sentence’s SELF.
However, many linguistic elements are subjective only in certain conditions. Thus,
Wiebe (1990) further defined a category termed potential subjective elements, which
expanded the subjective elements with some linguistic elements that can report the
private state of a character. She applied these findings to identify the subjective
language in the non-fictional text, suggesting that potential subjective elements are
also valid subjectivity clues for texts other than third-person narrative fiction.
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 205

[Link] Speech Acts

Speech acts have a strong connection with subjective expressions because speech
acts perform actions, such as making a promise, giving an order, or expressing
a belief. Austin (1975) argued that language is not just a tool for describing the
world but also a means of accomplishing things in the world. Through speech acts,
individuals can influence the world around them and the actions of others. In this
sense, many seemingly objective expressions with speech acts can become subjective.
For example, if someone says,
(18) I promise to do it.
The utterance is not just conveying information but also performing the act of making
a promise. A more subjective case is
(19) I believe that it will rain tomorrow.
When individuals express belief in such a manner, they are essentially asserting their
mental disposition or perspective towards a specific statement. This entails making
a claim about their inner state or outlook toward a proposition. Austin (1975) argues
that a considerable number of utterances possess illocutionary force, which signifies
that their purpose is not merely to communicate information but also to accomplish
something beyond that.

[Link] Conceptual Metaphor

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argued that metaphors are not solely a linguistic phe-
nomenon, but also mirror human cognition via concept mappings. When an indi-
vidual uses a metaphorical expression, they employ a source concept to represent
a target concept in a particular context, thereby conveying their cognitive attitude
toward the target concept. This process, known as concept mappings, facilitates such
representation. In instances such as the statement
(20) Our love is a journey.
The individual utilizes the concept of a “journey” as the source to represent the
target concept of “love”, expressing their subjective feeling that their love is char-
acterized by both ups (joy) and downs (sadness). “Our love is a journey” cannot be
an objective statement, because the two concepts are from different domains, i.e.,
literally, love is not a journal. Thus, there is a semantic contrast between the literal
and contextual meanings of a metaphor (Mao et al., 2019). The semantic disparities
inherent in metaphors suggest that relying on the literal meanings of a statement
alone is insufficient in substantiating its subjectivity. Even though the statement of
Example (20) does not use any obvious opinionated words, e.g., “happy” and “sad”,
it also expresses a personal feeling. Thus, the pragmatics of statements must also be
taken into account in subjective detection.
206 3 Semantics Processing

3.6.2 Annotation Schemes

For general subjectivity detection, it is sufficient for a dataset to annotate a sentence,

snippet, or document as subjective (positive/negative) or objective (neutral). Never-
theless, Wiebe et al. (2005) proposed the MPQA scheme, which annotates text at the
word and phrase levels. The MPQA scheme is suitable for fine-grained subjectivity
detection that aims to identify the source, target, and properties of each expression
of the private state. Wilson (2008) proposed the AMIDA Scheme for annotating
subjectivity in speech. This scheme marks word spans that are in the following three
main categories: subjective utterances, objective polar utterances, and subjective
questions. A subjective utterance is a word span that expresses a private state. An
objective polar utterance delivers positive or negative factual information without
expressing a private state. A subjective question is a question in which the speaker is
eliciting the private state of someone else. Each category is divided into finer classes
that indicate the polarity and certainty of an utterance.

3.6.3 Datasets

A summary of all the introduced datasets can be found in Table 3.19. Generally,
subjectivity detection data are organized in the following forms. A text is typically
labeled as either subjective or objective, with the former category often further
classified as positive, negative, or neutral. The following examples are from SemEval-
2013 Task 2B: Sentiment Analysis on X (Nakov et al., 2013).
id1: “263732569508552704”
id2: “369152026”
text: “Kick-off your weekend with service! EV!’s Get on the Bus trip to the
Boys & Girls Club is Friday from 3-6! Hope to see you there :)”
label: positive

id1: “213342054351257601”
id2: “189656827”
text: “Desperation Day (February 13th) the most well known day in all mens life.”
label: negative

id1: “263803288074477568”
id2: “396953010”
text: “It seem like Austin Rivers is tryin to had to get a bucket. I feel em tho my
1st game in the league I was trying hard too”
label: neutral
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 207

Table 3.19: Subjectivity detection datasets and statistics. ISD denotes individual sub-
jectivity detection. CDSD denotes context-dependent subjectivity detection. CLSD
denotes cross-lingual subjectivity detection. MMSD denotes multimodal subjectiv-
ity detection. BD denotes bias detection.

Dataset Task Source # Samples Reference

MPQA ISD, CDSD

English news articles 9,700 Wiebe et al. (2005)
MPQA Gold ISD, CLSD
Spanish sentences 504 Mihalcea et al. (2007)
MultimPQA ISD, CLSD
Machine-translated MPQA 9,700 Banea et al. (2010)
Movie ISD, CDSD
Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB 10,000 Pang and Lee (2004)
WebDoc CDSD English web documents 1,076 Chesley et al. (2006)
TREC CDSD WSJ 2,000 Yu and Hatzivassiloglou (2003)
Political and ideological
Debate CDSD dataset 53,453 Al Hamoud et al. (2022)
Twitter1 ISD English tweets 200,000 Barbosa and Feng (2010)
Twitter2 ISD English tweets 498 Serrano-Guerrero et al. (2015)
Forum CDSD online forums 700 Biyani et al. (2014)
SemEval-2013 ISD English tweets 12,002 Nakov et al. (2013)
English nuclear energy
NET ISD tweets 2,308 Khatua et al. (2020)
Multilingual nuclear
MLT ISD, CLSD energy tweets 7,700 Satapathy et al. (2017a)
TASS ISD, CLSD Spanish tweets 10,000 Villena et al. (2015)
Email CDSD BC3 corpus 1,800 Murray and Carenini (2011)
AMIDA MMSD AMI Meeting Corpus 13 Wilson (2008)
ICT-MMMO MMSD YouTube review videos 370 Wöllmer et al. (2013)
MOUD MMSD YouTube review videos 498 Morency et al. (2011)
Conservapedia BD Conservapedia statements 1,000 Hube and Fetahu (2018)
WNC BD Wikipedia sentence pairs 180,000 Pryzant et al. (2020)

For fine-grained subjective annotation, the labels are annotated at the span level.
The following examples are from SemEval-2013 Task 2A: Sentiment Analysis on
X (Nakov et al., 2013).

id1: “255732290246815744”
id2: “315400337”
text: “Billy Cundiff may be leaving Washington. Hopefully he won’t miss the door
on the way out.”
start id: “7”
end id: “7”
label: “positive”

id1: “255732290246815744”
id2: “315400337”
text: “Billy Cundiff may be leaving Washington. Hopefully he won’t miss the door
on the way out.”
start id: “9”
end id: “10”
label: “positive”
208 3 Semantics Processing

MultiParty Question Answering (MPQA) (Wiebe et al., 2005) is derived from

535 English news articles from a wide variety of news sources, manually annotated
for subjectivity. The corpus contains 9,700 sentences, 55% of which are labeled as
subjective and 45% as objective. The MPQA Gold (Mihalcea et al., 2007) contains
504 Spanish sentences manually annotated for subjectivity, where 273 sentences
are subjective and 231 are objective. The MultimPQA (Banea et al., 2010) contains
parallel corpora to the MPQA dataset in five languages other than English, namely,
Arabic, French, German, Romanian, and Spanish.
The Movie Review dataset (Pang and Lee, 2004) contains 5,000 movie review
snippets collected from Rotten Tomatoes29, considered as subjective. Furthermore,
5,000 sentences are collected from plot summaries from the Internet Movie Database
(IMDB)30, considered as objective. All reviews and plot summaries are sourced
from movies released post-2001, preventing overlap with the polarity benchmark
dataset (Pang and Lee, 2004). A data sample, either sentence or snippet, is at least
10 words long. The Debate dataset (Al Hamoud et al., 2022) is derived from the po-
litical and ideological dataset (Somasundaran and Wiebe, 2010), containing 53,453
sentences from political and ideological posts and comments. The instances are auto-
matically labeled for subjectivity by using lexicon-based and syntactic-pattern-based
classifiers (Riloff and Wiebe, 2003).
Numerous microtext corpora exist that can serve as benchmark datasets for sub-
jectivity detection. Barbosa and Feng (2010) presented a dataset containing 200,000
English tweets, where roughly 100,000 are subjective and the rest are objective.
Serrano-Guerrero et al. (2015) manually annotated 498 English tweets as pos-
itive, negative, or neural. SemEval-2013 (Nakov et al., 2013) is a collection of
12,002 English tweets labeled as objective, positive, negative, or neutral. Nuclear
Energy Tweets (NET) (Khatua et al., 2020) contains 2,308 English tweets about
nuclear energy, manually annotated for subjectivity. The Multilingual Tweets (MLT)
dataset (Satapathy et al., 2017a) is a collection of 12,719 tweets about nuclear en-
ergy in English, French, Spanish German, Malay, and Indonesian, 7,700 out of which
are manually labeled for subjectivity. The Taller de Analisis de Sentimientos en la
SEPLN (TASS) corpus (Villena et al., 2015) contains 10,000 tweets in Spanish,
collected from posts by 150 public figures in fields of sports, politics, and commu-
nication during the period from 2011 to 2012. Each tweet is labeled as positive,
neutral, negative, or without opinion.
The Web Document dataset (Chesley et al., 2006) contains 1,076 English web
documents, sourced from traditional news websites and blog posts on diverse topics.
Each document is manually annotated as objective, positive, or negative. The Text
REtrieval Conference (TREC) dataset (Yu and Hatzivassiloglou, 2003) is a collection
of 8,000 WSJ articles evenly distributed in the categories of editorial, letter to editor,
business, and news. The articles and sentences from the former two categories
are mapped as opinions (subjective), while the ones from the latter two are facts
(objective).

29 [Link]
30 [Link]
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 209

The Forum dataset (Biyani et al., 2014) contains 700 threads from online forums
Trip Advisor–New York31 and Ubuntu Forums32, manually annotated for subjec-
tivity. Email (Murray and Carenini, 2011) contains 1,800 sentences derived from
BC3 corpus (Ulrich et al., 2008), 172 out of which are labeled as subjective. For
multimodal subjectivity detection, the AMIDA dataset (Wilson, 2008) consists of
19,071 dialogue act segments from 20 conversations from the AMI Meeting Cor-
pus (McCowan et al., 2005), manually annotated with the AMIDA scheme. 42%
of the dialogue act segments are tagged with at least one subjective annotation.
The Institute for Creative Technologies Multimodal Movie Opinion (ICT-MMMO)
dataset (Wöllmer et al., 2013) contains 370 YouTube review videos labeled as
strongly negative, weakly negative, neutral, weakly positive, and strongly positive.
Multimodal Opinion Utterances Dataset (MOUD) (Morency et al., 2011) is a col-
lection of 80 YouTube review videos annotated as positive, negative, and neutral.
For the bias detection task, which aims to identify subjective bias in Wikipedia,
the following datasets are widely used. Conservapedia (Hube and Fetahu, 2018) is
a collection of 1,000 single-sentence statements from Conservapedia33, manually
annotated as biased or unbiased. Wiki Neutrality Corpus (WNC) (Pryzant et al.,
2020) contains 180,000 aligned Wikipedia sentence pairs. Each pair consists of a
sentence before and after bias neutralization by English Wikipedia editors.

3.6.4 Knowledge Bases

Lexicons of subjectivity clues and patterns are commonly used for subjectivity
detection, as summarized in Table 3.20. The General Inquirer (Stone et al., 1966) is
a lexicon consisting of 10,000 words sorted into 180 categories for content analysis.
The Subjectivity Clues lexicon (Riloff and Wiebe, 2003) is a list of words that are
subjective in most cases (strongly subjective) and words that may have subjective use
in certain contexts (weakly subjective). MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon (Wilson et al.,
2005) expanded the Subjectivity Clues using additional dictionaries and lexicons,
containing over 8,000 subjectivity clues.
Knowledge bases that provide sentiment information are also widely used for
subjectivity detection. WordNet-Affect (Strapparava et al., 2004) is a set of synsets
derived from WordNet that effectively represents affective concepts. SentiWordNet,
as introduced in the previous section, is based on WordNet. Each word in Senti-
WordNet is given three scores indicating its positivity, negativity, and objectivity.
As discussed earlier, SenticNet (Cambria et al., 2024) is also a popular knowledge
base for subjectivity detection.

31 [Link]
32 [Link]
33 [Link]
210 3 Semantics Processing

Table 3.20: Useful knowledge bases for subjectivity detection.

Name Knowledge # Entities Structure

The General Inquirer Sentiment labels 4,000 List
MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon Subjectivity clues 8,000 List
Structured lexical
SentiWordNet 100,000 Graph
knowledge by concept
WordNet-Affect lexical knowledge 4,787 Graph
SenticNet Sentiment scores 400,000 Graph

3.6.5 Evaluation Metrics

The performance of subjectivity detection is commonly evaluated via accuracy and

F-measure.

3.6.6 Annotation Tools

The aforementioned NER annotation tools (see Section [Link]) can be used for
subjectivity detection because these tools can annotate labels for spans (fine-grained
subjectivity detection) and sentences (coarse-grained subjectivity detection).

3.6.7 Methods

[Link] Individual Subjectivity Detection

In individual subjectivity detection, the subjectivity of a sentence is evaluated in

isolation and irrespective of any contextual factors. The primary methods used
for addressing this task include lexicon-based, word frequency, and deep learning
approaches.

A. Lexicon-based

Drawing on the premise that sentences that contain commonly-subjective expres-

sions are more likely to be subjective, lexicon-based methods utilize a manually-
constructed lexicon of subjective words, clues, or patterns to determine the sub-
jectivity of a given sentence. Riloff and Wiebe (2003) introduced an unsupervised
rule-based classifier that leverages the identification of subjective clues and patterns
to detect subjective sentences, while also employing bootstrapping to recognize
objective sentences based on the absence of such indicators. The clues were man-
ually collected and annotated. The patterns were generated by the AutoSlog-TS
algorithm (Riloff, 1996), based on pre-defined syntactic templates.
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 211

Wiebe and Riloff (2005) further improved this bootstrapping system by using
the labeled sentence produced by the rule-based method as initial training data for
a Naïve Bayes classifier. The major weakness of these methods is the unreliable
assumption that the absence of subjective clues and patterns indicates objectivity,
resulting in false-positive errors. Kim and Hovy (2005) first compiled lists of words
that convey opinions and those that do not, which were manually annotated with
corresponding classes and levels of strength. They expanded the lists with a common
English word list by measuring the WordNet distance between a common word and
the compiled seed lists. They further identified additional opinion words and non-
opinion words from editorial and non-editorial WSJ documents by computing their
relative frequencies. By detecting the subjectivity of a given sentence based on the
presence of a single strong valence word, their method achieved 65% accuracy on
MPQA.
Benamara et al. (2011) argued that sentence-level subjectivity detection cannot
fully leverage context, because a sentence may contain several opinion clauses, and
opinion expressions may be discursively related. As such, they proposed a segment-
level annotation based on the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher
and Lascarides, 2003), where segments are labeled as explicitly subjective, implicitly
subjective, subjective non-evaluative, and objective. This fine-grained annotation
can better enhance polarity detection, as segments in the latter two categories do not
covey positive, negative, or opinion. However, the limitation of this method is that the
four label classes are unbalanced in the corpus. Additionally, implicitly subjective
segments are often nuanced and hard to identify. Thus, it would be challenging to
design an appropriate classifier. The paper circumvented this problem by reframing
the task as two parallel binary classification tasks and obtained 82.31% accuracy
with a manually compiled French lexicon and SVMs as classifiers.
Merely detecting the existence of subjective keywords is often an insufficient
indication of a sentence’s subjectivity. Other works attempted to enrich the feature
set by incorporating more sentence-level information. Relying on expert knowledge
of parse tree, Xuan et al. (2012) manually constructed a set of syntax-based patterns
from unigrams and bigrams to extract features. A MaxEnt model was employed
as the classifier, obtaining 92.1% accuracy on the Movie dataset. Remus (2011)
hypothesized that the readability of a sentence was related to its subjectivity. Hence,
readability formulae such as Devereux Readability Index (Smith, 1961) and Easy
Listening (Fang, 1966) were incorporated as features in addition to the MPQA
Subjectivity Lexicon, obtaining 84.5% F-measure on Moive.
Many works proposed subjectivity detection systems that specifically targeted
X (formerly known as Twitter). Given the word constraint imposed by X, a tweet
is generally regarded as a sentence. Barbosa and Feng (2010) believed that using
subjectivity detection as an upstream task would improve the performance of polarity
detection on X text. Aside from conventional features such as subjective clues and
POS tags, they leveraged Tweet-specific syntax features, e.g., links and upper case.
An SVM classifier was employed, which achieved 81.9% accuracy on the X dataset,
and improved the accuracy of polarity detection by 5.6%.
212 3 Semantics Processing

Following their footsteps, Sixto et al. (2016) incorporated more tweet-specific

features that leveraged the structure of X, e.g., the relationship between tweets,
users, hashtags, and links. Using the stacking classifier proposed by Cotelo et al.
(2015), their method obtained 89.8% on TASS. To reduce human effort, Keshavarz
and Saniee Abadeh (2018) created an X subjectivity lexicon automatically through
a meta-heuristic approach, i.e., a genetic algorithm, which produced separate lists
of subjective and objective words. A Bayse network was employed to classify a
given tweet based on its subjective and objective word counts, achieving 60.9%
on SemEval-2013. Alternatively, Khatua et al. (2020) leveraged the concept-level
knowledge base SenticNet as their lexicon, which is able to provide implicit meaning
associated with commonsense concepts. Their method obtained 80.7% accuracy on
the NET dataset.
The methods introduced above have a common limitation, i.e., the lexicons are
lists of keywords, instead of word meanings. Some subjective clues in fact have both
subjective and objective word senses, which are not distinguishable in keyword lexi-
cons, leading to false-positive errors. This problem can be mitigated by incorporating
a Subjectivity WSD (SWSD) system to build a sense-aware lexicon. Akkaya et al.
(2009) trained a supervised targeted SWSD system using SVM. The training data
was compiled using words that are both in the MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon and the
sense-tagged SensEval corpora (Kilgarriff and Palmer, 2000; Preiss and Yarowsky,
2001; Litkowski, 2004). Alternatively, Ortega et al. (2013) applied an unsupervised,
clustering-based SWSD system (Anaya-Sánchez et al., 2006) on SentiWordNet to la-
bel each subjective word with fine-grained sense. Both SWSD systems were applied
to a rule-based classifier similar to the one proposed by Riloff and Wiebe (2003).
The supervised one improved accuracy by 1.3% on MPQA, while the unsupervised
one improved F-measure by 6.5% on the Movie dataset. A prominent limitation
of lexicon-based methods is that they require external resources such as sentiment
lexicon and knowledge base.

B. Word Frequency

Word-frequency-based methods detect subjectivity by modeling word presence or

occurrence within a corpus. Therefore, compared to lexicon-based methods, they are
language-independent and require neither manual annotation nor linguistic knowl-
edge. They are also less computationally expensive due to the reduction of feature
sets. Rustamov et al. (2013); Kamil et al. (2018) proposed a language-independent
feature extraction algorithm with a novel statistical measure of word occurrence
called Pruned ICF (Inverse-Class Frequency), which is proven to be more effective
than the standard IDF (Inverse-Document Frequency). Additionally, they applied two
widely-used methods for pattern recognition to detect subjectivity, namely Fuzzy
Control System (FCS) (Helmi and AlModarresi, 2009) and Adaptive Nero-Fuzzy
Inference System (ANFIS) (Fullér, 1995), achieving the accuracy of 91.3% and
91.66% on the Movie dataset, respectively. The latter obtained better performance
due to the addition of a neural network layer.
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 213

Inspired by empirical evidence that hybrid systems improve the performance of

NLP classifiers, Rustamov (2018) further integrated FCS, ANFIS, and HMM into
a sequential hybrid system, where input sentences that are wrongly labeled by the
prior classifier are passed onto the subsequent one. Using the same feature extraction
method as the previous paper, this system increased the accuracy to 92.24% on the
Movie dataset. Wang and Manning (2013) proposed a novel dropout algorithm
to optimize the feature learning process. Conventional dropout training in neural
network (Hinton et al., 2012) prevents feature co-adaptation by randomly sampling
neurons and input features and setting them to zeros, which leads to slow training.
The authors suggested fast dropout training as a more efficient alternative, using
a Gaussian approximation to draw samples. They applied this dropout method to
Naïve Bayes SVM (NBSVM) (Wang and Manning, 2012), which extracts features
based on word presence. Their method not only achieved the accuracy of 93.6% on
the Movie dataset and 86.3% on MPQA, but also greatly decreased the training time.
Experiments also showed that fast dropout training could be applied to other loss
functions and neural networks.
LDA (Blei et al., 2003) is a weakly-supervised generative model that assumes
every document is a distribution of latent topics, which is determined by word fre-
quencies. He (2010); Maas et al. (2011) suggested that subjectivity detection can
be solved by LDA, based on the intuition that subjective sentences likely contain
opinionated words. Hence, the paper modified conventional LDA so that the latent
topics are word-level sentiment labels. An additional layer is inserted between word
and document levels to model sentence-level subjectivity labels. Sentiment lexicons
are incorporated to establish an informed prior distribution for word-level sentiment
labels, achieving 71.2% accuracy on MPQA. On the other hand, Lin et al. (2011)
argued that LDA likely discovers topics based on semantic similarities, instead of
sentiment. Therefore, they modified LDA, so that it directly models word probabili-
ties conditioned on topic distributions to capture semantic information. To explicitly
extract sentiment information, they incorporated supervised sentiment analysis as an
auxiliary task. Their method achieved 88.58% on the Movie dataset. The drawback
of the word frequency approach is that the order of the words is not considered.
Thus, syntactic information cannot be effectively learned using this approach.

C. Deep Learning

The acquisition of precise sentence representations is crucial for subjectivity de-

tection, and as such, numerous studies have examined neural sentence modeling as a
language-independent alternative to parse trees. Kalchbrenner et al. (2014) presented
a Dynamic CNN (DCNN) that is able to capture short- and long-range relations. The
core component of DCNN is dynamic pooling, which outputs the sub-sequence of k
maximum values in the input sequence, where k can be dynamically chosen. Hence,
DCNN produces a hierarchical feature graph that contains syntactic, semantic, and
structural patterns of the input sentence. However, their sentence representations do
not retain any intermediate information, e.g., word-level and phrase-level features.
214 3 Semantics Processing

To address this, Zhao et al. (2015) described a self-adaptive hierarchical sentence

model named AdaSent. Inspired by gated recursive CNN (Cho et al., 2014), AdaSent
forms a pyramid-shape DAG, where the bottom level is word representations and the
top level is sentence representations. In this process, the gating network receives infor-
mation from each level and selects the most appropriate representations for the given
task. Their method obtained an accuracy of 95.5% on the Movie dataset and 93.3%
MPQA. With similar motivation for higher-order dependencies, Chaturvedi et al.
(2018) proposed a Bayesian Network-based Randomized Network (BNRN) frame-
work for subjectivity detection. Randomized networks excel at inductive learning.
However, the excessive number of their hidden neurons often leads to overfitting and
slow performance. To address these weaknesses, Bayesian networks were introduced
to model connections among the hidden neurons of a randomized network, as they
can prune redundant and irrelevant hidden neurons and capture high-dimensional
features. Furthermore, randomized networks cannot handle non-linear data such as
sequences of sentences. Thus, an RNN layer was used to extract temporal features.
Upon it, a fuzzy classifier was applied to achieve stability in case of noisy data, pro-
ducing the output labels. Additionally, a deep CNN was employed prior to BNRN to
provide low-dimensional features. The framework achieved the accuracy of 75% on
MPQA Gold and 89% on TASS, outperforming previous models.
Likewise, Satapathy et al. (2017a) employed CNN and RNN to extract spatial and
temporal information respectively. To make the model more robust, they incorporated
reinforcement learning, namely Point-wise Probability Reinforcement (PPR) (Frénay
and Verleysen, 2015), to regularize the learning process of CNN and reduce the
influence of outliers. Specifically, convolutional layers in the CNN component were
added iteratively, where the weight of each neuron was fine-tuned by the reinforced
maximum likelihood of PPR. Their method did not perform very well on MPQA,
obtaining 50% F-measure. However, it achieved a good performance of 76% F-
measure on the multilingual X dataset MLT.
In the same vein, PLMs can also provide beneficial universal representations
learned from a plethora of unlabeled text. For instance, Al Hamoud et al. (2022) fed
GloVe embeddings to different types of RNN variants, among which LSTM with
attention mechanism achieved the best accuracy of 89.53% on MPQA and 83.83%
on their proposed political and ideological dataset, whereas BiLSTM with attention
achieved the best accuracy of 92.8% on the Movie dataset. Kim (2014) fine-tuned
pretrained word2vec with a simple CNN, obtaining accuracy of 93.4% on the Movie
dataset and 89.5% on MPQA.
Furthermore, many works observed that it is complementary to combine PLM and
MTL for more effective learning of text representations (Liu et al., 2019b; Sun et al.,
2019; Mao and Li, 2021). Motivated by this, Huo and Iwaihara (2020) fine-tuned
BERT using MTL, where the BERT layers are shared among subjectivity detection
and three other text classification tasks. Similarly, Satapathy et al. (2022) proposed
an MTL framework for subjectivity and polarity detection. The framework leverages
BERT as embedding, which is fed into two separate self-attention BiLSTM layers.
A neural tensor network (NTN) (Socher et al., 2013a) was used as the information-
sharing layer.
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 215

Both methods employed a simple softmax classifier for each task. The former
achieved 95.23% accuracy on the Movie dataset, while the latter obtained 95.1%.
However, a shared limitation is that, despite their overall good performance, some
of the tasks did not exceed single-task learning baselines. This is likely because both
methods adopted hard parameter sharing MTL (Crawshaw, 2020), which emphasizes
more on generalization rather than optimization.
Sagnika et al. (2021) presented an attention-based CNN-LSTM model for sub-
jectivity detection, which served as a preprocessing step for sentiment analysis.
The combination of CNN and LSTM enabled the model to capture both spatial
and temporal information. Additionally, it utilized word embeddings enhanced by
sentiment-related information (Sagnika et al., 2020). Initially, the training of the
model was carried out with the Movie dataset, after which it was utilized to analyze
the sentiment of the IMDB dataset. The objective sentences were eliminated from
the dataset to form a modified set of reviews. Various models were tested as senti-
ment classifiers. The subjectivity detection model not only obtained 97.1% accuracy
on the Movie dataset, but also consistently improved the performance of sentiment
analysis.

[Link] Context-Dependent Subjectivity Detection

The method of individual detection categorizes each sentence without considering its
context. However, subjectivity detection and sentiment classification are contextual
problems since lexical items can affect each other in a discourse setting (Aue and
Gamon, 2005; Polanyi and Zaenen, 2006). Pang and Lee (2004) were the first
to leverage inter-sentence context information to filter out objective sentences, in
order to better serve document-level polarity detection. Based on the hypothesis that
adjacent text spans might have the same subjectivity label (Wiebe, 1994), suggested
an algorithm known as the “minimum cuts algorithm” that aims to optimize the
subjectivity status score for every sentence separately, while also punishing the
assignment of different labels to two closely related sentences. These two sub-
objectives are independent of each other, making the model more flexible for the
addition of features. Context-dependent methods can be divided into two categories,
namely, the feature engineering approach and the statistical approach.

A. Feature Engineering

A common way to incorporate document-level information is by designing relevant

features. Das and Bandyopadhyay (2009) proposed a domain-independent rule-based
algorithm, named theme detection. The model utilized document-level features, e.g.,
positional aspects (document title, first paragraph, last two sentences), the positions
of subjectivity clues, and the distance between any two thematic words. As with
many techniques at the sentence level, this approach also integrated syntactic char-
acteristics and resources such as SentiWordNet and MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon. It
achieved precision and recall of 76.08% and 83.33% on MPQA.
216 3 Semantics Processing

To automatically select an appropriate feature set, Das and Bandyopadhyay (2010)

employed a genetic algorithm (Holland, 1992; Sastry et al., 2005), which is a prob-
abilistic search method, to find the optimal range of values of every feature. To
capture context information, positional aspects, word distribution, and document
theme (Wiebe, 2000) were incorporated as discourse-level features, aside from the
commonly-used lexical and syntactic features. The genetic algorithm then identified
the globally optimal feature set by natural selection and computed the corresponding
accuracy of the classifier through the fitness function. An advantage of the proposed
method over other statistical classifiers is that the entire input sentence is encoded by
the genetic algorithm and used as features, instead of using n-gram. Their method
obtained the F-measure of 93.02% on MPQA and 95.69% on the Movie dataset.
Biyani et al. (2014) noticed a gap in subjectivity detection targeting online forums.
Moreover, they argued that lexical features are highly dimensional, leading to the
risks of overfitting and slow training. Thus, they presented a Forum dataset, and
designed a set of non-lexical thread-specific features. Specifically, they leveraged
thread structure and dialogue acts and utilized lexicons and tools such as MPQA
Subjectivity Lexicon and SentiStrength (Thelwall et al., 2012) to extract sentiment
features. With the addition of conventional lexical features, the logistic regression
classifier obtained 77.01% accuracy on Forum.

B. Statistical Approach

To minimize human effort in designing features, a statistical approach automati-

cally learns features from a given corpus using statistical models. Yu and Hatzi-
vassiloglou (2003) simply implemented a Naïve Bayes classifier for document-level
subjectivity detection, which achieved the F-measure of 97% on the TREC dataset
proposed by them. Motivated by the observation that language models are adept at
representing knowledge of the text they were trained on, Karimi and Shakery (2017)
proposed a language-model-based document-level subjectivity detection method.
During training, a subjective reference language model and an objective were built
using labeled documents. During inference, a language model was constructed for
each input document, which was compared with the reference language models us-
ing KL-divergence (Lafferty and Zhai, 2001), producing two similarity scores. The
difference between these two scores was regarded as the subjectivity score of the
document. The final output of the model was a sorted list of input documents, based
on their subjectivity scores. To achieve language non-specificity, the paper also pro-
posed a semi-supervised method where the reference language models were built
on a lexicon divided into subjective and objective parts, based on polarity scores.
The supervised method obtained 94.63% MAP on the Movie dataset, whereas the
unsupervised obtained 53.61% MAP.
Word embeddings can only provide limited syntactic and semantic informa-
tion (Belinkov et al., 2017). Therefore, to better initialize their model, Chaturvedi
et al. (2016a) employed a Gaussian Bayesian Network (GBN) (Friedman et al., 1998)
layer to capture long-range features among successive sentences, which were used
to pretrain the CNN classifier.
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 217

The GBN layer converted the sentence sequence from the MPQA dataset into
a time series of word frequency, captured second-order word dependencies with a
time lag of 2, and generated a subset of sentences that contained the most significant
words from the MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon. The model adopted a CNN sentence
model with convolution kernels of increasing size, which combined the local word
dependencies within the kernel size to model long-range syntactic relations. It was
pretrained with the sub-set of sentences produced by GBN before being trained on
the full dataset, obtaining the accuracy of 93.2% on MPQA and 96.4% on the Movie
dataset.

[Link] Cross-Lingual Subjectivity Detection

A. Language-Independent Approach

For feature-engineering-based subjectivity detection, lexical resources and tools

are often not readily available for non-English languages. A common approach to
circumvent this problem is to use non-language-specific features that are based on
the presence or occurrence statistics of a corpus, e.g., word frequency (Rustamov
et al., 2013; Wang and Manning, 2013; Kamil et al., 2018; Blei et al., 2003; Lin
et al., 2011; Belinkov et al., 2017) and language modeling (Karimi and Shakery,
2017). Mogadala and Varma (2012) further introduced language-independent fea-
ture weighing, leveraging unigram and bigram frequencies, and unigram word length.
Entropy-based category coverage difference (Largeron et al., 2011) was employed
as the feature selection method.

B. Translation Approach

Another solution is the translation approach, where lexical resources for the target
language are automatically generated by translating the resources and tools available
for English, usually with the help of SMT (Kim and Hovy, 2006; Mihalcea et al.,
2007; Wan, 2009; Amini et al., 2019). Banea et al. (2010) conducted a study on En-
glish and five other highly lexicalized languages, proving that a multilingual feature
space constructed through SMT improved the accuracy of subjectivity detection on
all languages involved. However, the sentence translation process can lead to the loss
of essential lexical information such as inflection and formality, which often served
as an indicator of subjectivity.
Chaturvedi et al. (2016b) mitigated this information loss during translation by
using a neural network to transfer resources from English to Spanish. They first trans-
lated the MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon into Spanish using an SMT system (Lopez,
2008). A MaxEnt-based POS tagger (Toutanvoa and Manning, 2000) and a multilin-
gual WSD system (Moro et al., 2014a) were incorporated in the preprocessing stage
to minimize the loss of lexical information during translation.
218 3 Semantics Processing

Their proposed model, named Lyapunov Deep Neural Network (LDNN), ex-
tracted spatial features from the input Spanish sentence and its translated English
form using CNN, which were then combined with an RNN to capture the bilin-
gual temporal features. To mitigate the vanishing gradient problem with RNN, a
Lyapunov function was used as the error function of RNN for stable convergence.
Utilizing the high-level features produced by Lyapunov-guided RNN, a multiple
kernel learning (Subrahmanya and Shin, 2009; Zhang et al., 2010) classifier yielded
the prediction. Their model obtained 84.0% F-measure on MPQA Gold, and 88.4%
accuracy on TASS.

[Link] Multimodal Subjectivity Detection

While most studies on detecting subjectivity have concentrated on text-based data, the
identification of subjective expressions in other modalities, such as audio and video,
presents an important area for research. For instance, Murray and Carenini (2009,
2011) proposed an automatic pattern extraction method for subjective expression in
spoken conversation, which is able to extract Varying Instantiation N-Grams (VIN)
from labeled and unlabeled data. Unlike convention n-gram, a VIN is a trigram where
each unit can be either a word or a POS label, which is a more robust alternative
to syntactic parsers for fragmented and disfluent text, such as meeting transcripts.
Combined with a large raw feature set, a MaxEnt classifier scored the F-measure of
52% on the AMIDA dataset. This method, however, did not leverage any information
from other modalities.
Raaijmakers et al. (2008), instead, explored the effectiveness of lexical and acous-
tic features in speech subjectivity detection. Specifically, they investigated word, char-
acter, prosody, and phoneme n-grams. Following Wrede and Shriberg (2003); Banse
and Scherer (1996), the prosodic features were extracted based on pitch, energy, and
the distribution of energy in the long-term averaged spectrum. Word-, character-, and
phoneme-level features were extracted from manual speech transcripts. A separate
BoosTexter classifier (Schapire and Singer, 2000) was employed for each feature
set, whose predictions were combined using a simple linear interpolation strategy to
obtain the final output. The combination of the four types of feature sets achieved
75.4% accuracy and 67.1% F-measure on AMIDA. Experiments showed that word-
and character-level features contributed the most.

[Link] Bias Detection

Bias detection refers to the task of identifying biased statements from supposedly
impartial articles. Specifically, in Wikipedia, the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) is
a core principle that ensures neutrality for controversial topics. Thus, the goal of
this task is to detect sentences that violate NPOV policy on a Wikipedia page. Bias
detection is closely related to subjectivity detection. Its development mirrors the
technical trends of the latter.
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 219

However, it is considered to be more complex, because the linguistic cues of biased

language are often nuanced, and depend heavily on the context. For lexicon-based
approaches, Recasens et al. (2013) manually compiled a biased word lexicon and
feature set that covered framing bias (use of subjective words or phrases that links to
a particular point of view), and epistemological bias (linguistic cues that modify the
credibility of a statement). However, their method focused only on detecting a single
bias-inducing word in a known biased statement. Furthering their work, Hube and
Fetahu (2018) constructed a more comprehensive biased word lexicon for sentence-
level bias detection. To minimize human efforts, they leveraged word2vec to expand
a seed word list by measuring the distance between word vectors. Aside from the
lexicon, other syntactic and semantic features were incorporated, e.g., tri-gram, POS
tags, Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) (Pennebaker et al., 2001), framing bias
features, and epistemological bias features. By using a Random Forest classifier,
their method obtained 74% precision on their proposed Conservapedia dataset.
Aleksandrova et al. (2019) proposed a semi-automatic method to construct a
multilingual bias detection corpus, consisting of Bulgarian, French, and English
sentences from Wikipedia. Their method was applicable for building a corpus from
a Wikipedia archive in any language, as it does not rely on language-specific features.
Additionally, they provided the performance of three baseline models, namely BoW,
fastText (Joulin et al., 2017), and logistic regression (Hosmer and Lemeshow, 2000),
among which BoW achieved the best overall average F-measure of 59.57% across
the three languages. For neural network approaches, Hube and Fetahu (2019) em-
ployed RNN to capture the inter-dependency of words and their context. To address
the weakness of RNN in modeling long-range information, a hierarchical attention
mechanism (Yang et al., 2016b) was adopted, which applied word-level attention
on each sentence to compute sentence representations, upon which sentence-level
attention was applied to learn biased cues from different samples. Following previ-
ous feature-based works, they concatenated GloVe embedding, POS tags, and LIWC
features as word representations.
PLMs were also widely used in bias detection. Pryzant et al. (2020) extended
the work of Recasens et al. (2013) by using a pretrained BERT-based detector to
identify bias-inducing words and neutralizing them via an LSTM-based editor. A join
embedding mechanism was employed to allow the detector control over the editor.
They also introduced the WNC dataset for detecting and editing biased language, on
which their model obtained 93.52% BLEU and 45.80% accuracy for the produced
edits. However, a limitation is that they primarily targeted single-biased words. To
mitigate this, Pant et al. (2020) enabled multi-word detection by identifying bias at
the sentence level. They employed the weighted-average ensemble method on several
BERT-based models to detect biased language, which obtained 71.61% accuracy and
70.40% F-measure on WNC.
220 3 Semantics Processing

3.6.8 Downstream Applications

[Link] Polarity Detection

The presence of objective text can decrease the accuracy of polarity detection,
as sentiment classifiers are usually optimized for the binary classification task of
labelling text as either positive or negative. Therefore, having a subjectivity detection
as upstream task can greatly enhance polarity detection (Satapathy et al., 2017a;
Das and Sagnika, 2020). For document-level sentiment analysis, Bonzanini et al.
(2012) showed that subjectivity detection reduced the amount of data to 60% while
still producing the same polarity classification results as full-text classification.
Pang and Lee (2004); Das and Sagnika (2020) applied subjectivity detection to
filter out objective sentences in reviews prior to classifying their polarity. Similarly,
Kamal (2013) first extracted subjective sentences from customer reviews and then
employed a rule-based system to mine feature-opinion pairs from the subjective
sentences. Barbosa and Feng (2010); Soong et al. (2019) used subjectivity detection
in sentiment analysis for X microtext. These works proved that removing objective
content from the dataset indeed makes the learning of sentiment more effective.

[Link] Information Retrieval

Subjectivity detection can serve as a module in information retrieval systems too to

determine whether a document is subjective or objective (Soong et al., 2019), because
such systems normally aim to retrieve either opinionated or factual topic-relevant
text from web sources, e.g., tweets, blog posts, and reviews webpages (Paltoglou
and Giachanou, 2014). For opinion retrieval, it helps to select candidate opinionated
documents. For instance, Zhang et al. (2007) first employed an SVM classifier
that used unigram and bigram features to identify subjective documents. Then,
they separated relevant documents from irrelevant ones. For factual information
retrieval, on the other hand, subjectivity detection helps to filter out opinionated text
such as allegations and speculations to prevent false hits. Wiebe and Riloff (2011)
implemented a Naïve Bayes subjectivity classifier and a domain-relevant indicator
for selective subjective sentence filtering. If a sentence was classified as subjective,
it would be discarded unless it was also labeled as relevant by the indicator.

[Link] Hate Speech Detection

Hate speech detection is a task that identifies abusive speech targeting a person or a
group based on stereotypical group characteristics, e.g., ethnicity, religion, or gender,
on social media (Warner and Hirschberg, 2012). Since hate speech is often marked
by its content, tone, and target (Cohen-Almagor, 2011), its detection is similar to
that of polarity. Additionally, subjectivity clues tend to be surrounding the polarizing
and arguing topics, which aligns well with hate speech detection.
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 221

As such, subjectivity detection can be used as a filtering subsystem in hate

speech detection. For instance, Gitari et al. (2015) employed a rule-based subjec-
tivity classifier that leveraged lexicons including MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon and
SentiWordNet to identify subjective sentences. From the extracted sentences, they
built a hate speech lexicon using bootstrapping and WordNet. Experiments showed
that the addition of subjectivity detection significantly improved the performance of
the hate speech classifier.

[Link] Question Answering System

QA systems generally encounter two types of questions: the ones that expect truth as
answers, and the ones that expect opinions. Therefore, it is crucial for a QA system to
distinguish opinions from facts, and provide the appropriate type depending on the
question (Yu and Hatzivassiloglou, 2003). To achieve this goal, a QA system should
operate in two stages. First, it must determine whether a question calls for a subjective
or objective answer, which is its subjectivity orientation (Li et al., 2008a,b; Aikawa
et al., 2011). Then, the system needs to consider subjectivity as a relevant factor
in the information retrieval process. Subjectivity detection can be incorporated as a
filter or feature set in a QA system. For instance, Stoyanov et al. (2005) modified the
conventional QA system by applying a subjectivity filter and an opinion source filter
on the initial information retrieval results, which improved the system significantly.
On the other hand, Wan and McAuley (2016) leveraged subjective features from
reviews to provide users with a list of relevance-ranked reviews, which improved the
performance of answering binary questions from categories with abundant data.

3.6.9 Summary

Subjectivity detection is a cognitive semantic processing task. It categorizes state-

ments by subjective and objective classes. Theoretical research indicates that subjec-
tivity can be detected by certain subjective elements, e.g., morphological, lexical, and
syntactic elements (Banfield, 2014). Thus, computational subjectivity research has
developed lexical resources, e.g., Subjectivity Clues (Riloff and Wiebe, 2003), and
MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon (Wilson et al., 2005). On the other hand, subjectivity
can be also explained from the perspectives of pragmatics, e.g., speech acts (Austin,
1975) and conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Related subjectivity
detection works defined the task as classification tasks. Although those classification
tasks can be further divided into course-grained and fine-grained classifications, e.g.,
document-level, sentence-level, and span-level subjectivity detection, there have not
been studies aimed at explaining the subjectivity from pragmatic perspectives, e.g.,
speech acts and metaphors. Subjectivity detection is crucial for many downstream
tasks, especially those that mine opinions from text, as it greatly increases their
accuracy by filtering out objective content.
222 3 Semantics Processing

[Link] Technical Trends

Subjectivity detection is a well-studied NLU subtask. There are five technical trends
in this area, namely individual, context-dependent, cross-lingual, multimodal sub-
jectivity detection, and bias detection. A summary of the trends can be found in
Tables 3.21 and 3.22. For individual subjectivity detection (Table 3.21), the sub-
jectivity of each sentence or snippet is determined only by the lexical, syntactic,
and semantic information of the sentence itself. There are mainly three types of
methods for individual subjectivity detection. First, the lexicon-based approaches
rely on external lexicons that contain subjective and sentiment clues to predict the
subjectivity of a sentence. The weakness of such an approach is that subjective
clues are often not extensive and reliable enough to determine the subjectivity of
a sentence. Some works attempted to address this issue by utilizing sentence-level
features to extract syntactic information (Wilson et al., 2004; Xuan et al., 2012; Bar-
bosa and Feng, 2010), or incorporating WSD to identify subjective clues according
to context (Akkaya et al., 2009; Ortega et al., 2013). Nonetheless, these methods
cannot fully extract the underlying sentence structure and contextual information.
Word-frequency-based approaches, on the other hand, predict sentence subjectivity
according to the word presence or occurrence in a given corpus, thus being able
to adapt to new domains and languages. Additionally, this approach requires little
external resources or human effort.

Table 3.21: A summary of representative subjectivity detection techniques (Part 1).

ISD denotes individual subjectivity detection. SCSL denotes self-collected subjec-
tivity lexicon. SWSD denotes subjectivity WSD.

Task Reference Techniques Feature and KB Framework Dataset Score Metric

Riloff and Wiebe (2003) Rule SCSL Logic rules - - -
Kim and Hovy (2005) Statistics MPQA, WN WN distance MPQA 65.00% Acc
Lexical, stylistic,
Benamara et al. (2011) Statistics syntactic, discursive SVM Self-collected 82.31% Acc
features
MPQA, syntax-
Xuan et al. (2012) Statistics based patterns MaxEnt Movie dataset 92.10% Acc
Remus (2011) Statistics MPQA, readability SVM Movie dataset 84.50% F1
MPQA, POS,tweet-
Barbosa and Feng (2010) Statistics specific features SVM Twitter1 81.59% Acc
MPQA, tweet-specific
Sixto et al. (2016) Statistics features Stacking classifier TASS 89.80% Acc
Keshavarz and Saniee Abadeh (2018) Statistics SCSL Genetic algorithm SemEval-2013 60.90% Acc
Khatua et al. (2020) DL SenticNet CNN NET 80.70% Acc
Akkaya et al. (2009) Statistics MPQA, SWSD SVM MPQA 81.30% Acc
ISD Ortega et al. (2013) Rule MPQA, SWSD Clustering, rules Movie dataset 55.68% F1
Kamil et al. (2018) Statistics Pruned ICF ANFIS Movie dataset 91.66% Acc
Rustamov (2018) Statistics Pruned ICF FCS, ANFIS, HMM Movie dataset 92.24% Acc
Wang and Manning (2013) Statistics Word presence NBSVM Movie dataset 93.60% Acc
Semantic and sentiment Probabilistic model,
Maas et al. (2011) Statistics embeddings LDA . MPQA 71.20% Acc
Lin et al. (2011) Statistics Sentiment LDA Movie dataset 88.58% Acc
Zhao et al. (2015) DL word2vec CNN Movie dataset 95.50% Acc
ELM, RNN, CNN,
Chaturvedi et al. (2018) DL MPQA, POS fuzzy classifier MPQA Gold 75.00% Acc
Satapathy et al. (2017a) DL GloVe, MPQA CNN, PPR MPQA 50.00% F1
Al Hamoud et al. (2022) DL GloVe RNN, Att Movie dataset 92.80% Acc
Kim (2014) DL word2vec CNN Movie dataset 93.40% Acc
Huo and Iwaihara (2020) DL BERT MTL Movie dataset 95.23% Acc
Satapathy et al. (2022) DL BERT MTL, RNN,NTN Movie dataset 95.10% Acc
Sentiment-enhanced
Sagnika et al. (2020) DL word embedding CNN, LSTM Movie dataset 97.10% Acc
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 223

Table 3.22: A summary of representative subjectivity detection techniques (Part

2). CDSD denotes concept-dependent subjectivity detection. CLSD denotes cross-
lingual subjectivity detection. MMSD denotes multimodal subjectivity detection.
BD denotes bias detection. SWN denotes SentiWordNet.

Task Reference Techniques Feature and KB Framework Dataset Score Metric

Minimum cuts,
Pang and Lee (2004) Statistics SCSL Naïve Bayes Movie dataset 86.40% Acc
MPQA, doc-level
Das and Bandyopadhyay (2009) Rule features, SWN Logic rules MPQA 79.54% F1
MPQA, POS, doc-
Das and Bandyopadhyay (2010) Statistics level features Genetic algorithm Movie dataset 95.69% F1
CDSD MPQA, SentiStrength,
Biyani et al. (2014) Statistics thread-specific features Logistic regression Forum 77.01% Acc
Yu and Hatzivassiloglou (2003) Statistics MPQA, POS Naïve Bayes TREC 97.00% F1
Karimi and Shakery (2017) Statistics Language model Rank by similarity Movie dataset 94.63% MAP
Chaturvedi et al. (2016a) DL MPQA GBN, CNN Movie dataset 96.40% Acc
Banea et al. (2010) ML MPQA SMT, Naïve Bayes MultimPQA EN 74.72% Acc
Unigram and bigram
CLSD Mogadala and Varma (2012) Statistics Naïve Bayes MultimPQA EN 92.50% F1
freq., word length
Chaturvedi et al. (2016b) DL MPQA, WSD SMT, CNN, RNN MPQA Gold 84.00% F1
Murray and Carenini (2011) Statistics VIN, raw features MaxEnt AMIDA 52.00% F1
MMSD Lexical, prosodic, and
Raaijmakers et al. (2008) Statistics phonemic features BoosTexter AMIDA 75.40% Acc
Biased lexicon,
Recasens et al. (2013) Statistics POS Logistic regression Self-collected 34.35% Acc
word2vec, POS, LIWC,
Hube and Fetahu (2018) Statistics biased lexicon Random Forest Conservapedia 74.00% Prec.
BD Aleksandrova et al. (2019) Statistics Word frequency BoW Self-collected 59.57% F1
Hube and Fetahu (2019) DL GloVe, POS, LIWC RNN Self-collected 77.10% F1
Pryzant et al. (2020) DL BERT LSTM WNC 45.80% Acc
Pant et al. (2020) DL BERT Ensemble, BERT WNC 71.61% Acc

Like lexicon-based approach, however, word frequency methods lack the ability to
capture syntactic information. To address this limitation, deep-learning-based meth-
ods utilize neural networks to learn spatial and temporal dependencies. Specifically,
PLMs are widely used for their ability to provide universal representations (Kim,
2014; Liu et al., 2019b; Sun et al., 2019). For context-dependent subjectivity de-
tection (Table 3.22), the subjectivity of a sentence is determined with regards to its
surrounding context, e.g., inter-sentence-level (Pang and Lee, 2004; Belinkov et al.,
2017), document-level (Yu and Hatzivassiloglou, 2003; Das and Bandyopadhyay,
2009; Karimi and Shakery, 2017), or discourse-level (Biyani et al., 2014) infor-
mation. In existing works, such information is typically captured through feature
engineering or statistical means.
As a large part of subjectivity detection works relies on external subjective clues,
cross-lingual subjectivity detection aims specifically to solve the lack of lexical
resources for non-English languages. There are mainly two branches of thought
to address this problem (Table 3.22). One is to make use of language-independent
methods such as word frequency (Rustamov et al., 2013; Lin et al., 2011; Kamil et al.,
2018; Belinkov et al., 2017) and language modeling (Karimi and Shakery, 2017).
The other is to generate resources for the target language from English lexicons with
the help of SMT systems (Banea et al., 2010; Chaturvedi et al., 2016b).
Multimodal subjectivity detection is a rising field of interest in accordance with
the rising need for sentiment analysis in various media (Table 3.22). Existing works
utilized lexical, prosodic, and phonemic features for subjectivity detection in spoken
conversations (Murray and Carenini, 2011; Raaijmakers et al., 2008). Subjectivity
detection in other modalities such as video remains mostly unexplored.
224 3 Semantics Processing

Bias detection is a task that is closely related to subjectivity detection (Table 3.22).
It aims to identify biased statements from supposedly impartial articles such as
Wikipedia. Despite its greater complexity, the identification of bias exhibits technical
patterns that are akin to those found in subjectivity detection, e.g., lexicon-based (Re-
casens et al., 2013; Hube and Fetahu, 2018), deep learning (Hube and Fetahu, 2019;
Pryzant et al., 2020), and cross-lingual (Aleksandrova et al., 2019) methods.

[Link] Application Trends

Due to its filtering nature, subjectivity detection is widely used as a parser for
many downstream tasks, e.g., sentiment analysis (Pang and Lee, 2004; Barbosa and
Feng, 2010; Kamal, 2013; Soong et al., 2019; Das and Sagnika, 2020), information
retrieval (Zhang et al., 2007; Wiebe and Riloff, 2011), hate speech detection (Gitari
et al., 2015), and QA systems (Stoyanov et al., 2005; Wan and McAuley, 2016). Most
existing works take the pipeline approach, using the filtered results from subjectivity
detection as the input of the target application. On the other hand, we also observe
that subjectivity lexicons can also be useful features to support hate speech detection
and QA systems.
A survey of literature pertaining to subjectivity detection reveals that the progress
made in this research area has not kept pace with the advancements made in its
downstream polarity detection tasks, e.g., sentiment analysis (Gandhi et al., 2023).
This is likely because sentiment analysis may deliver more fine-grained classification
outputs, which helps to gain business insights, e.g., sentiment polarities on product
or service reviews.

Table 3.23: A summary of the representative applications of subjectivity detection

in downstream tasks.

Reference Downstream Tasks Feature Parser

Bonzanini et al. (2012) Polarity Detection X
Pang and Lee (2004) Polarity Detection X
Das and Sagnika (2020) Polarity Detection X
Kamal (2013) Polarity Detection X
Barbosa and Feng (2010) Polarity Detection X
Soong et al. (2019) Polarity Detection X
Zhang et al. (2007) Information Retrieval X
Wiebe and Riloff (2011) Information Retrieval X
Cohen-Almagor (2011) Hate Speech Detection X
Gitari et al. (2015) Hate Speech Detection X X
Li et al. (2008a) Question Answering X X
Li et al. (2008b) Question Answering X X
Aikawa et al. (2011) Question Answering X X
Stoyanov et al. (2005) Question Answering X
Wan and McAuley (2016) Question Answering X
3.6 Subjectivity Detection 225

However, it should be noted that while positive, negative, and neutral sentiment
polarities represent subsets of subjective texts, there exists a substantial portion of
texts that are objective in nature, presenting factual information. Objective texts are
likely to be infrequent in reviews of products or services, as customers often use such
platforms to express their opinions. However, in the context of opinion mining on
social media, it is crucial to differentiate between subjective and objective statements,
given that even statements with neutral sentiment polarities can be indicative of an
individual’s opinion. Thus, it is still necessary to conduct subjectivity detection
before sentiment analysis.

[Link] Future Works

Fine-grained Subjectivity Detection

A sentence may contain several clauses with differing subjectivity. For instance,
a sentence may present two or more opinions, or contain both opinions and factual
information. Therefore, to better assist downstream applications, fine-grained sub-
jectivity detection that identifies the particular opinion-bearing clauses is worthy
of investigation. However, there is limited research on this issue. Benamara et al.
(2011) proposed segment-level subjectivity detection. Wilson et al. (2004) proposed
a method specifically for classifying the subjectivity of deeply nested clauses. There
is scope for additional research to exploit the full potential of the fine-grained sub-
jectivity annotation offered by the MPQA scheme (Wiebe et al., 2005).

Multimodal Subjectivity Detection

Subjectivity detection using information from multiple modalities remains largely

unexplored. There is related multimodal research that might provide inspiration
for future works. Wrede and Shriberg (2003) aimed to identify hot spots, which
are regions in a meeting where participants are highly involved in the discussion,
using solely a set of prosodic features. Hillard et al. (2003); Galley et al. (2004)
both targeted the detection of agreements and disagreements in meetings. The for-
mer explored the combination of lexical and prosodic features, whereas the latter
incorporated pragmatic features that captured the interactions between speakers.
Neiberg et al. (2006) recognized positive, negative, and neutral emotions in meet-
ings using lexical and acoustic-prosodic features. Somasundaran et al. (2007) de-
tected sentences and turns in meetings that express sentiment and arguing opinions
using lexical and discourse features. Morency et al. (2011); Wöllmer et al. (2013);
Tsai et al. (2019) conducted sentiment analysis on review videos using linguistic
features, acoustic features, and visual features (face tracking).
226 3 Semantics Processing

Explainable Subjectivity Detection

While much of the subjectivity detection research has utilized lexical resources
such as subjectivity and affective lexicons to explain the subjective nature of text
based on individual words, these resources do not capture the pragmatic nuances
of words within their contextual environment. This is because the utilized lexical
knowledge is context-independent. Theoretical research has explained subjectivity
from the perspective of pragmatics (Austin, 1975; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).
It would be useful to distinguish between different types of objectivity, e.g., a
piece of text that is completely factual versus one that contains both positive and
negative sentiments towards the same opinion target and, hence, results in overall
neutrality or ambivalence (Valdivia et al., 2018). Explainable subjectivity detection
could push the development of more linguistics-inspired models that can account for
the complexities of subjectivity and its expression in natural language. Additionally,
there is potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration between linguistics, cognitive
science, and computer science to further advance our understanding of subjectivity
and its detection in various domains.

3.7 Conclusion

In this chapter, we reviewed WSD, NER, concept extraction, anaphora resolution,

and subjectivity detection. We summarized useful datasets, annotation tools and
knowledge bases that can facilitate research in these domains. We also explored
their technical trends, related theoretical research, and applications. We found that
the breadth and depth of semantics processing can be greatly extended, both from
the perspective of the needs of theoretical research and downstream applications.
This is because current computational semantic processing techniques are limited
in their reliance on specific task settings and available datasets. Reviewing semantic
processing applications may encourage further research into fusion methodologies
to improve downstream task performance. Semantics processing methods can not
only deliver effective features for these tasks, but also gain insights into analyzing
model behaviors and studying linguistic and cognitive patterns.
As we continue to advance in the field of NLU, using powerful PLMs and knowl-
edge graphs has become increasingly common to tackle more complex reasoning
tasks. However, it is important to note that there is still great academic value in
studying the low-level semantic tasks that these models are built upon. These tasks
help us understand how language is presented and received, how it relates to hu-
man cognition and, hence, get one step closer to NLU. We observe that numerous
contemporary semantic processing tasks have been translated into machine learning
problems, which have somehow diminished linguistic motivations and intuitions
from these computational studies.
3.8 Learning Resources 227

Shaping semantic processing tasks into tasks that are more conducive to machine
learning can indeed improve the accuracy of specific tasks. However, improving
accuracy in a single-task setting is not the only pursuit of semantics processing. We
should pay more attention to how semantic processing techniques can better serve
humans and machines to explain language phenomena. We hope that this chapter can
stimulate more research directions in the field of semantics processing and inspire
researchers to place greater emphasis on the nature and cognition of semantics. With
the development of more powerful tools such as PLMs and LLMs, it is perhaps
valuable for our research to use these tools to address those fundamental linguistic
challenges that were previously considered daunting. Regardless of the sophistication
of tasks that can be performed by LLMs, basic semantic processing tasks remain
crucial for comprehending and utilizing language effectively. These tasks serve as
the foundation upon which our understanding of language is built.

3.8 Learning Resources

A. Reading List
• Xulang Zhang, Rui Mao, Kai He, and Erik Cambria. Neurosymbolic Sentiment
Analysis with Dynamic Word Sense Disambiguation. In: Proceedings of EMNLP,
8772–8783, 2023 (Zhang et al., 2023b)

• Ran Zhou, Xin Li, Ruidan He, Lidong Bing, Erik Cambria, Luo Si, and Chunyan
Miao. MELM: Data Augmentation with Masked Entity Language Modeling for
Low-Resource NER. In: Proceedings of ACL, 2251-2262, 2022 (Zhou et al., 2022)

• R Satapathy, SR Pardeshi, E Cambria. Polarity and Subjectivity Detection with

Multitask Learning and BERT Embedding. Future Internet 14(7), 191, 2022 (Sa-
tapathy et al., 2022)

B. Relevant Videos
• Labcast about Dynamic WSD: [Link]/dRrxVWPBfVo

• Labcast about Low-Resource NER: [Link]/CpHZzn1Ar0Y

• Labcast about Subjectivity Detection: [Link]/PKeciTINEIc

228 3 Semantics Processing

C. Related Code
• Github repository about Dynamic WSD: [Link]/SenticNet/Dynamic-WSD

• Github repository about Low-Resource NER: [Link]/SenticNet/MELM

• Github repo about Subjectivity Detection: [Link]/SenticNet/Subjectivity

D. Exercises
• Exercise 1. Implement the Lesk algorithm on the following sentences to deter-
mine the correct sense of each target word in the given context (use WordNet or
any other lexical database for word definitions and examples): “He went to the
bank to deposit his paycheck”; “She played the bass in the school orchestra”; “The
bark of the tree was rough to the touch”.

• Exercise 2. Design a simple NER algorithm that detects named entities and
their corresponding types in the following sentences: “Apple is looking at buying
U.K. startup for $1 billion”; “San Francisco considers banning sidewalk delivery
robots”; “London is a big city in the United Kingdom”; “Elon Musk founded
SpaceX in 2002”; “Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu”.

• Exercise 3. Identify and list polar concepts (lemmatized key words and MWEs
that capture the essence of content polarity) from the following text and then
compare them with the concepts extracted using the concept parsing API
([Link]/api/#concept): “I love affogato because I am a coffee addict and I
like cold desserts: hot espresso on ice cream is such a delightful contrast in tem-
peratures and flavors that I find irresistible”.

• Exercise 4. Write a simple program to detect and resolve anaphoras in the fol-
lowing paragraph: “Roberto decided to bake a cake. He found a recipe online and
gathered all the ingredients. It took him an hour to mix everything and put it in
the oven. While it was baking, he cleaned up the kitchen and prepared some tea.
When the cake was ready, Roberto let it cool before decorating it with frosting.
He was proud of his creation and couldn’t wait to share it with his friends”.

• Exercise 5. Develop a simple algorithm that detects subjectivity based on Sentic-

Net. Clean the text data by removing special characters, converting to lowercase,
etc. Implement a function to score the subjectivity of a sentence based on the
presence of words from SenticNet. Define a threshold to classify a sentence as
subjective or objective based on its subjectivity score. Test your program with
various sentences to evaluate its performance.
Chapter 4
Pragmatics Processing

Abstract Pragmatics, situated in the domains of linguistics and computational lin-

guistics, explores the influence of context on language interpretation, extending
beyond the literal meaning of expressions. It constitutes a fundamental element for
NLU in machine intelligence. In the current era dominated by LLMs, the research
focus in NLU has predominantly shifted towards high-level task processing, inad-
vertently downplaying the importance of foundational pragmatic processing tasks.
Nevertheless, pragmatics serves as a crucial medium for unraveling human language
cognition. The exploration of Pragmatics Processing stands as a pivotal facet in
realizing linguistic intelligence. This chapter encompasses important pragmatic pro-
cessing techniques, namely: metaphor understanding, sarcasm detection, personality
recognition, aspect extraction, and polarity detection. It spans theoretical research,
the forefront of pragmatic processing techniques, and downstream applications, aim-
ing to underscore the significance of these low-level tasks in advancing NLU and
linguistic intelligence.

Key words: Metaphor Understanding, Sarcasm Detection, Personality Recognition,

Aspect Extraction, Polarity Detection

4.1 Introduction

Pragmatics, situated in the domains of linguistics and computational linguistics,

explores the influence of context on language interpretation, extending beyond the
literal meaning of expressions. While both semantics and pragmatics study meanings,
according to Kroeger (2023), semantics studies the intrinsic meaning of words and
sentences as linguistic constructs, isolated from their context. In contrast, pragmatics
focuses on the dimensions of meaning contingent upon, or arising from, the actual
usage of words and sentences.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 229
E. Cambria, Understanding Natural Language Understanding,
[Link]
230 4 Pragmatics Processing

Within the field of computational linguistics, the investigation of Pragmatics Pro-

cessing has expanded its purview to employ NLU techniques for the contextual
comprehension of implicit intentions and meanings within linguistic expressions.
Examples of applications include metaphor understanding, sarcasm detection, per-
sonality recognition, aspect extraction, and polarity detection. The research signif-
icance of Pragmatics Processing lies in its close connection to uncovering human
cognition. This is due to the fact that the comprehension of meanings within the
pragmatic context extends beyond the interpretation of literal word meanings, en-
compassing the discernment of underlying purposes and intentions in the use of
specific expressions.
Despite the remarkable success of LLMs in NLP complex reasoning tasks and
multiple domains (He et al., 2023c), the question arises: why is fundamental re-
search in Pragmatics Processing still of value in the era of LLMs? LLMs appear
to have rapidly bypassed foundational research in computational linguistics, swiftly
executing diverse NLP tasks and intricate reasoning in dialogical contexts. This can
be predominantly ascribed to the success achieved in language modeling, which
involves employing large neural networks and pretraining corpora to predict miss-
ing or subsequent words based on contextual cues. While the pretraining paradigm
undeniably yields fluent and ostensibly coherent language based on probabilities,
it does not align with the way humans comprehend languages. Relying on word
association probability for understanding and generating language introduces a con-
straint wherein current LLMs do not explicitly learn to interpret the intention and
implicit meaning conveyed in spoken language. Consequently, the comprehension of
language by LLMs remains confined to modeling the relationships between tokens
within a vector space. The relevant evaluation also shows that current LLMs fall
behind expert systems in processing conventional NLP tasks (Mao et al., 2024a).
In contrast, humans comprehend language through various pragmatic con-
texts (Kasper and Schmidt, 1996). This involves understanding the contextual mean-
ing of an expression and inferring the aim of the expression, e.g., expressing a specific
sentiment. Furthermore, the pursuit of AI extends beyond the mere attainment of
human-level accuracy in computational tasks. It encompasses the aspiration to cul-
tivate a form of intelligence akin to human cognition, wherein AI systems emulate
human thought processes and behavior. Pragmatics Processing constitutes crucial
facets that contribute to progress aligned with these seven pillars. Thus, we contend
that Pragmatics Processing research remains valuable in the era of LLMs. Such a re-
search domain not only illuminates the state of human language usage and perception
but also showcases mechanisms that offer potentially more scientific methodologies
than the language modeling paradigms for pragmatic understanding. On the other
hand, pragmatic processing techniques are beneficial for various downstream tasks
(see Table 4.1), yet this area of study remains relatively overlooked. Challenges stem-
ming from the scarcity of annotated data and the complexity of pragmatic modeling
have led previous research to simplify pragmatic processing tasks using elementary
learning paradigms. This approach enables the examination of machine learning
algorithms in performing such tasks. However, the simplified task formulation also
restricts the functional scope of pragmatic processing techniques.
4.1 Introduction 231

Table 4.1: The surveyed pragmatic processing tasks and their downstream applica-
tions. F denotes that the technique yielded features for a downstream task model; P
denotes that the technique was used as a parser; E denotes that the technique improved
the explainability for a downstream task. MU denotes metaphor understanding. SD
denotes sarcasm detection. PR denotes personality recognition. AE denotes aspect
extraction. PD denotes polarity detection.

Downstream tasks MU SD PR AE PD
Sentiment Analysis P F, P F, P
Knowledge Graph Construction F, E P P
Psychology Analysis F, E P
Machine Translation P
Cognition Analysis P, E
Political Analysis E
Advertising E
Dialogue Systems F
Recommendation Systems F, P E
Social Network Analysis F, P, E
Human-robot Interaction F, P
Financial Prediction F, E

For instance, in the domain of computational metaphor processing, where a

shortage of extensive annotated datasets for metaphor interpretation exists, substan-
tial focus has been placed on the foundational task of metaphor identification (Ge
et al., 2023). However, considering the support for downstream NLP tasks and the
exploration of human cognition, a more beneficial avenue may involve the research
of linguistic and conceptual metaphor understanding rather than confining the in-
vestigation to metaphor identification. Thus, the formulation of tasks in a simplified
manner and the limited availability of benchmark datasets consequently impose con-
straints on the research scope within Pragmatics Processing, resulting in the fact that
the value of Pragmatics Processing has been seriously underestimated in the era of
LLMs.
The motivation of this chapter (and textbook) is to draw scholars’ attention to
Pragmatics Processing and inspire broader and deeper pragmatic research works. Our
objective is to provide a comprehensive overview of recent research developments
in key pragmatic processing tasks, namely: metaphor understanding, sarcasm de-
tection, personality recognition, aspect extraction, and polarity detection. By doing
so, we aim to showcase the current task forms, and the cutting-edge advancements
within this research domain. Furthermore, we undertake a review of relevant the-
oretical research in pragmatic processing tasks, approaching them from linguistic
and cognitive perspectives, with the intention of encouraging researchers to broaden
the scope of pragmatic processing tasks. Emphasizing the practical implications,
we introduce downstream applications to underscore the importance of pragmatic
processing techniques within the NLP community. Finally, we deliver insights into
current technical trends and challenges, providing a foundation for future research
endeavors to bridge existing gaps in the field.
232 4 Pragmatics Processing

Fig. 4.1: Outline of this chapter. Each subtask is explained in terms of different
technical trends and downstream applications.

The contribution of this chapter is threefold:

• It comprehensively examines contemporary Pragmatics Processing methodolo-
gies, datasets, and knowledge bases relevant to five specific pragmatic processing
tasks.
• Emphasizing the significance of theoretical research and downstream applica-
tions, we aim to stimulate more extensive and profound investigations within the
Pragmatics Processing domain, building upon the existing task setups.
• Through a comparative analysis of various pragmatic processing techniques, we
elucidate their technical trajectories and applications, presenting insights into
current trends. Additionally, we propose potential directions for future research
in this domain.
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 233

In the following sections, we introduce five different pragmatic processing tech-

niques, namely: metaphor understanding (Section 4.2), sarcasm detection (Sec-
tion 4.3), personality recognition (Section 4.4), aspect extraction (Section 4.5), and
polarity detection (Section 4.6). Fig. 4.1 presents an outline of the chapter: each task
is organized in terms of theoretical research, annotation schemes, datasets, knowl-
edge bases, evaluation metrics, methods, downstream applications, and a summary.
Finally, Section 4.7 wraps up the chapter by proposing concluding remarks, a reading
list, three relevant videos, some related code, and five exercises.

4.2 Metaphor Understanding

Metaphors constitute a form of figurative language wherein one or more words are
employed to convey a meaning distinct from their literal interpretation. In pragmatics,
metaphors are instrumental in conveying abstract concepts, expressing attitudes,
and shaping the communicative intent of utterances. They serve as powerful tools
for conveying meaning by drawing upon familiar, concrete imagery to illuminate
more complex or abstract ideas. The interpretation of metaphors often involves
an understanding of the contextual cues, shared knowledge between speakers, and
the social and cultural background (Ritchie, 2004), making them a rich area of
investigation in pragmatic analysis.
Additionally, metaphors are integral to various aspects of human communication,
including humor, persuasion, and the conveyance of emotions (Charteris-Black,
2009), making their examination essential for a comprehensive understanding of
pragmatic language use. On the other hand, metaphors pose a challenge for nu-
merous NLP applications, such as machine translation and sentiment analysis (Mao
et al., 2023b). The intricacy lies in the complexity faced by machine intelligence in
deducing the real meanings embedded within metaphors (see errors in Fig. 4.2). All
the aforementioned aspects highlight the significance of metaphor understanding in
NLP and pragmatics.
Metaphor identification, positioned as an antecedent task for metaphor under-
standing, has garnered substantial attention within the research community (Mao
and Li, 2021; Tian et al., 2023). This heightened interest is largely attributed to the
creation of an extensive metaphor identification dataset, namely the VU Amsterdam
(VUA) Metaphor Corpus (Steen et al., 2010). Conversely, the landscape of compu-
tational metaphor understanding research is comparatively less developed, primarily
stemming from the scarcity of comprehensive annotated data encompassing diverse
metaphor understanding tasks. In this endeavor, we survey important computational
works in metaphor understanding with the aim of fostering increased engagement and
contributions from researchers in this specialized research domain. This is because
metaphor understanding is a direct gateway to pragmatic understanding, compared
to metaphor identification.
234 4 Pragmatics Processing

Fig. 4.2: Examples of errors caused by a metaphoric expression in ChatGPT (left),

AllenNLP (top-right corner), and Google Translate (bottom-right corner).

Two distinct facets of metaphor understanding have been studied, namely lin-
guistic metaphor understanding and conceptual metaphor processing. The former
involves the generation of literal texts for the rephrasing or explanation of given
metaphorical expressions from a linguistic standpoint. This category can be further
delineated into three groups, namely property extraction, word-level paraphrasing,
and explanation pairing. Conversely, conceptual metaphor processing endeavors
to establish concept mappings that elucidate the target and source domains of a
metaphorical expression from a conceptual standpoint. The source domain serves as
the origin of metaphorical qualities, providing imagery, attributes, or characteristics
that are subsequently applied to another domain. On the other hand, the target domain
represents the subject of the metaphor, interpreting and incorporating the metaphor-
ical qualities derived from the source domain. This dual framework illuminates the
linguistic and conceptual dimensions integral to a comprehensive understanding of
metaphorical expressions.

4.2.1 Theoretical Research

[Link] Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argued that metaphorical expressions reflect the human
cognitive process in their CMT. They articulated the interpretation of metaphors
by devising concept mappings, elucidating the cognitive mechanisms underlying
metaphors.
(1) I spent three days reading a book.
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 235

Given Example (1), the target concept is metaphorically associated with the
source concept through the verb “spent”. Within the concept mapping of
, the attribute of , specifically its value and limited availability, is
metaphorically transferred to the notion of . This metaphor serves to underscore
the conceptualization that is regarded as a valuable and finite resource, akin to
the attributes associated with .
(2) She attacked his argument.
Metaphors also impact human behaviors. In Example (2), is metaphori-
cally projected into a domain. When we view an “argument” through the lens
of “war”, it is easy to associate it with strategies, attacks, and defensive behaviors
common in a war. This perception can lead people to forget the importance of collab-
oration and mutual benefit during an argument, resulting in an aggressive approach
with raised voices to win the argument.
(3) Encountering her miraculously restored my faith in love.
(4) Our relationship has reached a crossroads.
As metaphors serve as reflections of cognitive mechanisms guiding human concep-
tualizations, variations in metaphoric expressions can signify distinct perceptions
of a concept among individuals. For instance, a young couple may conceptualize
as akin to , influenced by the enchantment of their initial encounter and
falling in love, e.g., Example (3). In contrast, an older couple might adopt the concept
mapping of , embodying the cumulative experiences amassed over
the years, e.g., Example (4). Thus, considering the frequent occurrence of metaphors
in everyday communication (Shutova, 2015), metaphors can serve as an important
entrance for studying human cognition.

[Link] Metaphor-Enriched Social Cognition

Landau et al. (2010) investigated the impact of metaphors on shaping social thought
and attitudes, utilizing empirical evidence to illustrate that metaphors play a distinc-
tive role in social information processing. They introduced the metaphoric transfer
strategy and the alternate source strategy as empirical approaches to assess the in-
fluence of conceptual metaphor and embodied simulation on social information pro-
cessing. Their findings reveal that manipulating psychological states associated with
one concept induces metaphor-consistent alterations in how individuals process in-
formation related to seemingly dissimilar concepts. Furthermore, they observed that
metaphors have bidirectional effects on social information processing. Manipulating
abstract social concepts led to changes in perceptions of more concrete concepts. For
example, changes in divinity-related images affected spatial memory biases, and dif-
ferent moods influenced attention shifts. Social exclusion also impacted perceptions,
such as temperature sensations.
236 4 Pragmatics Processing

The study also discussed the differentiation between conceptual metaphor and
embodied simulation. Landau et al. (2010) posit that while both are cognitive mech-
anisms involving bodily states in processing abstract concepts, they differ in their uti-
lization of these bodily states. Conceptual metaphor operates as an inter-conceptual
mechanism, mapping content and structure between apparently dissimilar concepts.
It draws on representations of bodily states related to a concept in a manner dis-
tinct from how embodied simulations employ such representations. Conceptual
metaphors can incorporate concepts representing common knowledge about bod-
ily states, whereas embodied simulations exclusively involve specific bodily states
occurring during experiences with abstract concepts. In contrast, embodied simu-
lation functions as intra-conceptual mechanism, utilizing representations of bodily
states associated with a given concept. It employs bodily states to simulate the
experience of the concept, enabling individuals to understand it better.

[Link] Neural Theory of Language

Feldman (2008) undertook a neuroscientific exploration of language by delving into

the neural mechanisms underpinning language processing and production. Within
this context, he probed the intricate relationship between metaphor and meaning,
asserting that the meanings of our cultural, abstract, and theoretical concepts are
fundamentally rooted in metaphor. This assertion gains support from empirical evi-
dence highlighting the robust connection between cultural knowledge and embodied
experience. Exemplifying this linkage, the primary metaphor of affection, conceptu-
alized as , draws on the physical sensation of being held affectionately. This
metaphorical correlation is evident in language, wherein affection is commonly artic-
ulated in terms of , illustrating the formative role of embodied experiences
in shaping our conceptual understanding of abstract concepts.
Moreover, Feldman investigated the metaphorical foundation of causation, specif-
ically the metaphor positing causes as forces, grounded in our embodied encounters
with in everyday life. This exploration showed the interplay between physical
experiences and abstract notions such as causation. Expanding his inquiry, Feldman
explored how simulation theory enables individuals to grasp discourse and infer
meaning by leveraging their extensive experiences of the world and social systems.
This exploration demonstrated the integral connection between embodied experi-
ences and the comprehension of abstract and cultural concepts.
Feldman discussed complex systems of structural mappings connecting all knowl-
edge domains to basic schemas. He argued that reasoning about complex and abstract
topics stems from our embodied knowledge of actions, goals, and forces. The study
examined how primary metaphors help children understand and express language
about subjective experiences, providing a way to conceptualize cultural and abstract
concepts. Embodied semantics plays a key role in interpreting narratives with new
ideas and language, allowing people to use their experiential understanding of the
world and social systems for inference.
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 237

4.2.2 Annotation Schemes

[Link] Metaphor Interpretation Annotation

Pragglejaz (2007) presented metaphor identification procedure (MIP) to annotate

metaphors at the token level and eliminate the subjectivity issue during the annotation
process. Steen et al. (2010) proposed an extension called MIP Vrije Universiteit
(MIPVU) based on MIP and published currently the largest annotated token-level
metaphor identification dataset, VUA. The main idea of MIP is to annotate metaphors
by the semantic contrast between the contextual (dynamic) meaning and the basic
(static) meaning of a target word. If there is a semantic contrast between the contextual
and basic meanings, the target word is metaphoric, otherwise, it is literal. MIP
provides a practical method for understanding the contextual and basic meanings of
metaphors and annotating metaphoricity.
Inspired by MIP, Shutova (2010) asked annotators to provide meaningful para-
phrases of metaphors or rate the produced paraphrases by the proposed model and
the baseline system based on the context meanings. Nevertheless, achieving consen-
sus on the basic meanings among annotators can prove challenging, even with the
aid of dictionaries. The inherent subjectivity of annotators may introduce variabil-
ity into the annotation process. Additionally, certain conventional metaphors are so
pervasive that their meanings are incorporated into dictionaries. In such instances,
the MIP faces limitations in accurately identifying or comprehending metaphors.

[Link] Concept Mapping Annotation

Shutova and Teufel (2010) presented a practical procedure for concept mapping an-
notations based on MIP. They built source and target concept domain lists containing
a subset of domains from a master metaphor list (MML) (Lakoff, 1994) and novel
domains annotated by themselves. They asked annotators to choose concept domains
for the basic and contextual meanings of single-word verb metaphors.
(5) If he asked her to post a letter or buy some razor blades from the chemist,
she was transported with pleasure.
In Example (5). the basic meaning of the verb transported is “goods being trans-
ported/carried somewhere by a vehicle”, while the context meaning of this sentence
is “a person being transported by a feeling” (Shutova and Teufel, 2010). According
to the different agents of the transported action, the source-target concept mapping
is “ is ”. However, this annotation scheme must provide the whole
concept lists before the annotation, which is labor-costing and makes it difficult to
update any novel metaphors. Mohler et al. (2016) used a similar annotation scheme
to (Shutova and Teufel, 2010). In particular, they provided annotators with two
source domains produced by their conceptual metaphor mapping system (Mohler
et al., 2014).
238 4 Pragmatics Processing

4.2.3 Datasets

This section introduces existing datasets for metaphor understanding. Table 4.2
summarizes the basic information and statistics of the relevant datasets. Bizzoni and
Lappin (2018) proposed a metaphor understanding dataset1 in a paraphrasing task
format. This dataset contains 200 sentence sets. Each set contains one metaphorical
sentence and four literal sentences with different semantic similarities: one strong
paraphrase, one loose paraphrase, and two non-paraphrases. The strict semantic
similarity rule made this dataset manually constructed and a relatively small volume.

Table 4.2: Metaphor understanding datasets. EP denotes explanation pairing. CMP

is conceptual metaphor processing. TP denotes token-level metaphor paraphrasing.

Reference Task Source # Samples

Bizzoni and Lappin (2018) EP Manually created 200
Zayed et al. (2020) EP Dictionaries, X 1,500
Liu et al. (2022a) EP Manually created 10,256
Published books, papers,
Lakoff (1994) CMP and research seminars 791
Shutova and Teufel (2010) CMP British National Corpus 761
ClueWeb09 corpus,
Mohler et al. (2016) CMP Debate Politics Online Forum 80,100
Mao et al. (2024b) TP VUA 10,716

Metaphorical sentence: “The crowd was a river in the street”

Literal sentence 1: “The crowd was large and impetuous in the street.”, #4
Literal sentence 2: “There were a lot of people in the street.”, #3,
Literal sentence 3: “There were few people in the street.”, #2,
Literal sentence 4: “We reached a river at the end of the street.”, #1.

Zayed et al. (2020) developed a dataset for metaphor understanding through the
generation of definitions, providing comprehensive interpretations of metaphorical
expressions. The metaphorical expressions are in a verb-direct object form. The
definitions are collected from multiple English dictionaries.
Metaphorical expressions: “release old emotional pain”,
Definition: “to express feelings such as anger or worry in order to get rid of them”,
Source: Oxford.

Liu et al. (2022a) created Fig-QA2 metaphor interpretation dataset and proposed
an exploration based on the Winograd schema (Levesque et al., 2012) to investigate
the effectiveness of language models in metaphor interpretation. The aim is to prompt
language models to select or generate implications for two metaphorical phrases with
divergent meanings.
1 [Link]
2 [Link]
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 239

Fig-QA displays 10,256 distinct and creative metaphors, along with interpre-
tations crafted by workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). The dataset is
structured as pairs of phrases embodying contrasting meanings, along with their
potential interpretations.
Metaphorical sentence 1: “Her word had the strength of titanium.”,
Interpretation 1: “Her promises can be believed.”,
Metaphorical sentence 2: “Her word had the strength of a wine glass.”,
Interpretation 2: “Her promises cannot be trusted.”

Lakoff (1994) first attempted to compile an MML for source and target con-
cept mappings. MML contains 791 nested concept mappings with corresponding
metaphorical expressions. The data were sourced from published books and papers,
student papers, and research seminars. However, MML has stayed unfinished up to
now. The varying abstractness levels of concept mappings remain an issue (Shutova
and Teufel, 2010).
Concept mappings: “change is motion (Location)”,
sub concept mappings: “stopping being in a state is leaving a location”,
Metaphor expressions: “He came out of the coma with little long-term damage.”

Shutova and Teufel (2010) extracted a subset of British National Corpus

(BNC) (Consortium, 2007) and made annotators choose source and target con-
cepts from provided lists. The three annotators are native English speakers with
linguistic backgrounds. Mohler et al. (2016) made available a sizable collection
of word pair metaphors in four languages (English, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi),
termed Language Computer Corporation (LCC) metaphor datasets3. The annotation
labels include metaphoricity rates on a 4-point scale (clear, conventionalized, weak
metaphor, and literal), source and target concept domains, affect polarity, and inten-
sity rates. The English data is collected from ClueWeb09 corpus4 and Debate Politics
Online Forum5. The annotators were asked to choose the most appropriate concepts
for the given metaphorical expressions in a concept list generated by Mohler et al.
(2014).
Mao et al. (2024b) proposed a human-annotated metaphor paraphrasing dataset
( - ) upon VUA. The dataset consists of 10,716 sentences, 11,880 metaphor-
ical lexical units and the associated paraphrases. The lexical units include both
metaphoric single- and MWEs. The dataset was developed for the purpose of end-
to-end metaphor processing. To achieve this goal, the authors have made the fol-
lowing efforts: data were sourced from real-world text, metaphor identification and
paraphrase labels were annotated on the token level, and annotations were delivered
by a linguistic expert to improve the paraphrase consistency.

3 [Link]
4 [Link]
5 [Link]
240 4 Pragmatics Processing

‘ID’: ‘trn_1179’,
‘doc_ID’: ‘ahc-fragment60’,
‘sent_ID’: ‘1221’,
‘sent’: ‘Relief was at hand .’,
‘metaphor_index_list’: [[0], [2, 3]],
‘pos_list’: [‘Assistance’, ‘nearby’],
‘neg_list’: [‘Easement’, ‘Sculptural relief’, ‘Decrease’, ‘Ministration’, ...],
‘lemma’: ‘relief be at hand .’,
‘pos_tags’: [‘NN’, ‘VBD’, ‘IN’, ‘NN’, ‘.’],
‘open_class’: [‘NOUN’, ‘VERB’, ‘O’, ‘NOUN’, ‘O’],
‘genre’: ‘news’

4.2.4 Knowledge Bases

Useful knowledge bases that can be used in metaphor understanding are WordNet
and ConceptNet (introduced earlier in Section 3.4). Strzalkowski et al. (2013); Li
et al. (2013); Dodge et al. (2015); Gagliano et al. (2016); Mao et al. (2018); Ge
et al. (2022) utilized lexical relations in WordNet, such as synonyms, hyponyms,
and hypernyms to obtain or expand candidate concept words. Mason (2004); Gandy
et al. (2013); Strzalkowski et al. (2013) clustered concepts by WordNet functions,
such as semantic categories and hypernyms. Shutova (2010) utilized WordNet to
disambiguate the sense of concepts. Su et al. (2020) calculated relatedness between
concepts by synonymous extension in WordNet.
FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al., 2016) is another useful knowledge base for
metaphor understanding, It serves as an English lexical repository designed for
both human and machine readability. It was established through the annotation of
real-life textual examples illustrating word usage and is grounded in the framework of
frame semantics. The repository encompasses 1,224 frames, where each frame rep-
resents a diagrammatic depiction of a scenario, incorporating diverse elements such
as participants, props, and other conceptual roles. Additionally, FrameNet comprises
13,687 lexical units, encompassing lemmas and their POSs that evoke frames.

Table 4.3: Useful knowledge bases for metaphor understanding. MWD denotes
Merriam Webster’s dictionary.

Name Knowledge # Entities Domain Structure

WordNet Structured lexicon 155,327 Open Graph
FrameNet Structured lexicon 13,687 Open Graph
ConceptNet Structured lexicon & multilingual 8M Open Graph
SenticNet Structured lexicon & multilingual 400,000 Sentiment Graph & Dictionary
Wiktionary Word senses 7,317,715 Open Dictionary
MWD Word senses 470,000 Open Dictionary
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 241

Finally, dictionary resources are intuitive choices for metaphor understanding

because language learners will open a dictionary when confused with unfamiliar
materials (Zayed et al., 2020). Some studies utilized dictionaries for word senses or
explanations. Gandy et al. (2013) extracted dictionary senses from Wiktionary6 to
find linguistic metaphors in the proposed model. Dodge et al. (2015) utilized Wik-
tionary to build the frame network pattern of metaphorical and literal words. Mao
et al. (2022a) manually annotated an idiom dictionary to assist in metaphoric MWE
interpretation. Other studies extracted lexical information, such as syntactic depen-
dency relations from dictionaries. Li et al. (2013) collected syntactic information
of word associations from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary7. Table 4.3 shows relevant
information and statistics of the above-mentioned knowledge bases.

4.2.5 Evaluation Metrics

Since multiple data structures in annotated datasets (see Section 4.2.3) and task
forms (see Section 4.2.6) exist in the metaphor understanding domain, researchers
developed a variety of evaluation metrics.

[Link] Automatic Evaluation

Accuracy (Shutova, 2010; Mao et al., 2018; Bizzoni and Lappin, 2018) and F1
score (Gandy et al., 2013; Dodge et al., 2015; Ge et al., 2022) are frequently used
automatic evaluation metrics for datasets with golden labels. When the proposed
models can generate a list of possible interpretations, the higher ranks of correct
interpretations show better performance of models. Mean reciprocal rank (MRR) is
a metric traditionally used in QA systems and is appropriate for this task. Shutova
(2010); Song et al. (2020b) applied MRR to evaluate the ranking quality of their
models. Li et al. (2013); Song et al. (2020b) utilized the proportion of the correct
interpretations among the top N predictions (Hits@N) to evaluate the performance
comprehensively.
Each possible mapping in the work of Mason (2004) was evaluated regarding
polarity, the number of word collocations instantiating the mapping, and the sys-
tematic co-occurrence. Gagliano et al. (2016) demonstrated the blending effect of
generated concepts by cosine similarity. Bizzoni and Lappin (2018) used correlation
to show the performance of the paraphrase ordering task. Other automatic evaluation
methods involve grounding the evaluation tasks in downstream applications, such
as metaphor identification (Ge et al., 2022), machine translation (Mao et al., 2018),
and sentiment analysis (Mao et al., 2022a), to assess the efficacy of a metaphor
understanding system.

6 [Link]
7 [Link]
242 4 Pragmatics Processing

[Link] Human Evaluation

Researchers used human evaluation metrics for metaphor understanding tasks with-
out golden labels to measure the performance of outputs from multiple perspectives.
Li et al. (2013) defined “correct Top 3” to denote concepts within the top three po-
sitions of lists that, while not considered golden labels, are recognized as metaphors
by human judges. Gandy et al. (2013) measured the meaningfulness of the gener-
ated concept mappings. Su et al. (2015, 2017, 2020) evaluated the acceptability of
produced interpretations. Rai et al. (2019) chose appropriateness to show the per-
formance of the proposed model. Sometimes the evaluation metrics could be too
abstract to understand. Some researchers proposed detailed questions to help peo-
ple for evaluation more understand the criteria. Strzalkowski et al. (2013) evaluated
metaphoricity, affect, and force (inverse of commonness) by asking, “Q1: To what
degree does the above passage use metaphor to describe the highlighted concept?
Q2: To what degree does this passage convey an idea that is either positive or nega-
tive? Q3: To what degree is it a common way to express this idea?”. Ge et al. (2022)
evaluated the quality of the source and target domains with two questions: “Q1.
Whether the noun is conceptually mapped to the source concept? Q2. Whether the
basic meaning of the noun belong to the target concept?” Mao et al. (2022a) eval-
uated coherence, semantic completeness, and literality of generated interpretations
with three questions: “Q1. Does the paraphrased word semantically and grammat-
ically fit the context? Q2. To what extent does the paraphrased word represent the
contextual meaning of the original target word? Q3. Is the paraphrased word a literal
counterpart of the original target word?”.

4.2.6 Methods

[Link] Property Extraction

Metaphor understanding systems based on property extraction seek to extract prop-

erties potentially connecting the source and target domains. For example, extracting
an adjective attribute for two nouns from source and target domains represents the
shared qualities of two words from source and target domains. Early works used
semantic role labeling (SRL) for identifying the predicate-argument structures in
a sentence and, hence, for extracting properties and roles of words in a metaphor-
ical context. Su et al. (2015) proposed a Chinese metaphor understanding model
by extracting an appropriate property of a source concept to connect with a target
concept. The properties of source concepts were collected from Attribute Database8
and Sardonicus9.

8 A database by NLP Lab of Xiamen University.

9 An adjective taxonomy database from [Link]
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 243

They extended properties with synonyms from a Chinese Thesaurus named

Tongyi Cilin10 and designed a relatedness score with cosine similarity between
properties and target concepts, and between properties and contextual words. The
property with the highest relatedness score was outputted as “target be property”.
This method deeply relied on external knowledge bases and ignored the direct in-
teraction between contextual and target words. They evaluated the proposed method
with the help of five Chinese volunteer native speakers on a self-collected Chinese
dataset containing 80 instances of nominal metaphors from the web, blogs, and
books. The annotators were asked to score the acceptability of predicted results,
which reached the highest acceptability as the correct outputs. The proposed model
achieved the highest accuracy, 0.84. Su et al. (2017) followed this idea but revised
the relatedness score into cosine similarities between synonyms of properties and
target words. Following the same evaluation guideline as Su et al. (2015), the test
dataset extended to 100 Chinese nominal and 100 English nominal metaphors.
Rai et al. (2019) hypothesized that metaphors could be better understood with
emotions and presented a metaphor understanding model regarding emotions as
connections between source and target concepts. It started with searching properties
of source concepts on the web. Then, it vectorized each property in six emotion
dimensions by word2vec (Mikolov et al., 2013b), namely anger, fear, happiness,
disgust, sadness, and surprise. Finally, it selected the most related properties in the
most related emotion dimensions. The output was formulated as “target be <emotion:
property>”. The test data included 75 nominal metaphorical instances from Rai and
Chakraverty (2017). The authors invited seven non-native English speakers to rate
the appropriateness of the generated senses on a Likert scale (Likert, 1932) of 1 to
5 where 1 denoted highly inappropriate and 5 denoted highly appropriate. Ratings
below an average of 3 were designated as incorrect.
Su et al. (2020) presented a hierarchical semantic model with the hypothesis that
some metaphors are created with cultural implications. To broaden the property’s
coverage, they manually annotated a conceptual mapping knowledge base related
to culture. The proposed method embedded word-level, perception-level, attribute-
level, and context-level information. The perception layer utilized sentiment infor-
mation from WordNet and Stanford CoreNLP (Manning et al., 2014). The attribute
layer processed cultural information with three types: shared non-cultural attributes,
non-shared non-cultural attributes, and cultural attributes. The global feature layer
integrated three features to describe contextual semantics: cultural semantics, the
theme of words, and the theme of discourse, which are from word2vec and LDA (Jo
and Oh, 2011) models. They employed a random walk algorithm to find the prop-
erties with the highest relevance to target concepts. This paradigm concentrated on
nominal metaphors in Chinese. The self-collected test dataset included 280 nominal
metaphors, 190 of which are cultural metaphors and 90 of which are non-cultural
metaphors.

10 [Link]
244 4 Pragmatics Processing

Song et al. (2020b) completed metaphor understanding in a knowledge graph

completion pattern. The knowledge graph contains triples in the form of (source, at-
tribute, target). The attribute is a shared property between source and target concepts.
The metaphor understanding task is transferred to select an appropriate attribute
based on the given source and target concepts. The final attributes were selected by
knowledge graph embedding methods. The evaluation was conducted on a manually
built metaphor dataset, compared with model variants based on different embed-
ding methods and score functions. To demonstrate a complete model performance,
the evaluation includes exact-match-based and synonymy-based metrics. Due to the
uniqueness of the task form, no external baselines were included in the evaluation.

[Link] Word-level Paraphrasing

The objective of systems for word-level metaphor paraphrasing is to perform a word-

by-word transformation of metaphors into their literal equivalents within the given
context. These systems were initially designed to address primarily single-word
metaphors. Shutova (2010) first defined metaphor understanding as a paraphrasing
task, making outputs available for downstream applications. The proposed algorithm
targeted word pairs: verb-subject and verb-direct object. The authors selected pos-
sible candidates from a large corpus by the co-occurrence of targets and syntactic
dependency relations. Then, they filtered and ranked them by hyponyms in WordNet
and selectional preference. The evaluation was on a subset of BNC with a brief
version of the proposed model as a baseline. The evaluation settings are twofold.
The first was to ask seven volunteer annotators to determine whether the generated
paraphrases are literally used and deliver the same meanings as the metaphorical
concepts. The second evaluation setting was to ask another five volunteers to write
appropriate paraphrases as golden standards according to the given metaphorical
expressions.
Mao et al. (2018) built an unsupervised metaphor identification and understanding
method at the sentence level. Based on the hypothesis that the literal senses of
words can occur more frequently than their metaphorical senses, they utilized the
synonyms and hypernyms from WordNet as the candidate literal senses of the target
words. They employed word2vec methods to capture the co-occurrences between
contextual words and target words. This model was evaluated as a preprocessing step
of the machine translation task, which largely enhanced the performance of Google
and Bing Translator. Mao et al. (2022a) developed this model with PLMs, such
as RoBERTa, ALBERT, and BERT. The human evaluation was managed on 100
sentences, randomly sampled from the VUA open-class testing set by three native
English speakers from the UK and the US. The annotators were asked to measure
the coherence, semantic completeness, and literality of produced paraphrases. The
RoBERTa-based model achieved the highest scores in three dimensions.
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 245

To improve the learning of the end-to-end metaphor paraphrasing task, Mao et al.
(2024b) proposed a new dataset ( - ) and a metaphor-tailored PLM. Compared to
conventional language modeling methods, e.g., masked word prediction-based and
next word prediction-based methods, Mao et al. (2024b) pretrained a model with an
ALM paradigm. The authors randomly replaced some words, forming anomalous
sentences, to simulate the selectional preference violation of metaphors. Then, they
developed an MTL and contrastive learning framework to learn the anomalous detec-
tion and original word retrieval tasks, simultaneously, at the pretraining stage. Thus,
the learned linguistic patterns can be inherited by the following metaphor identifi-
cation and paraphrasing tasks. The authors found that such a pretraining paradigm
exceeds parameter-size-comparable PLM baselines in the end-to-end metaphor in-
terpretation task.

[Link] Explanation Pairing

Metaphor understanding systems based on explanation pairing seek to connect a

metaphor with an explanation in the given context. Typically, dictionary definitions
serve as the basis for explanations.
Martin (1990) introduced a framework known as Metaphor Interpretation, De-
notation, and Acquisition System (MIDAS). In the initial stage, the interpretation
system analyzed the input text to extract syntactic information. This syntactic data
was then employed to identify potential candidates, which underwent scrutiny for
coherence and abstractness through constraint testing. The interpretation process
followed a recursive pattern, addressing metaphors based on language grammar
principles and leveraging rich specialized information. KODIAK (Wilensky, 1986)
was used by MIDAS, which is a knowledge representation language wherein facts are
depicted as nodes interconnected by primitive links. The three categories of nodes
encompass “absolutes”, “relations”, and “aspectuals”. The associations of metaphors
can be linked to other concepts and organized within abstraction hierarchies through
the inheritance mechanisms facilitated by KODIAK.
Bizzoni and Lappin (2018) discussed the limitations of current metaphor under-
standing task forms and introduced two new task forms, namely binary classification
and paraphrase ordering tasks. They argued that the sentiment might not be reserved
after single-word replacement, so the new task forms with less constraint could
be closer to human cognition of metaphors. The authors suggested a CNN-LSTM
framework to capture the semantic representations of metaphorical and literal ex-
pressions at different levels. The inputs of the model were one metaphor sentence and
one literal candidate. The outputs were binary labels as well as the sigmoid value.
The binary labels (metaphorical or literal) were for the binary classification task.
The sigmoid value could be used in the paraphrase ordering task. Experiments were
conducted on a self-produced dataset containing 200 sets of sentences. However,
these task forms needed rich language resources and considerable annotation labor,
making them less liable for further research and application.
246 4 Pragmatics Processing

Mao et al. (2022a) presented a dictionary and rule-based method to identify and
understand metaphorical MWEs. The method set up three rules with dependency
pairing and lemma information to identify MWEs. The interpretation was completed
with the help of semantic similarity and a manually annotated idioms dictionary.
The selected explanation achieved the highest semantic similarity with the source
sentence. The output added an explanation as a clause of the source sentence, which
downstream tasks can directly use. They tested the MWE detection model on Formal
Idioms Corpus11. The proposed method outperformed machine learning baselines
on an unseen case evaluation task.

[Link] Conceptual Metaphor Processing

Current conceptual metaphor processing methods aim at generating source-target

concept mappings of metaphorical expressions. Generally, concept mappings are
formulated as “a target concept is a source concept”, such as “ is .

A. Feature-based Methods

Mason (2004) proposed a system termed CorMet to generate concept mappings

for conventional metaphors. It searched documents related to two specific domains,
extracted representative verbs, and clustered selectional preferences by WordNet
nodes. The step of searching documents online might introduce unnecessary noise
for representative verbs. Those verbs could be unrelated to the specific domains.
Due to the unavailability of a large corpus containing golden labels, the system was
assessed on a subset of MML. Gandy et al. (2013) developed a rule-based heuristic
algorithm to identify linguistic metaphors, discovered nominal analogies, and clus-
tered them to find meaningful conceptual metaphors. The candidate concepts were
extracted from WordNet and selected by linguistic features, e.g., point-wise mutual
information and abstraction scores. They clustered candidates and self-defined a
linguistic score to select a meaningful concept from WordNet hypernyms. The eval-
uation was delivered by 21 volunteers to validate whether each conceptual metaphor
reflected a valid and meaningful interpretation of metaphorical expressions about
, , , , and domains.
Strzalkowski et al. (2013) generated concept mappings from a passage in a specific
domain – with topical structure, imageability scores, and a clustering
framework. They hypothesized that metaphorical words are typically employed with
strong imageability and beyond the topical framework of a sentence. They asked an-
notators from AMT to evaluate the concept mappings in the aspects of metaphoricity,
affect, and commonness scores. The evaluation was conducted on English, Spanish,
Russian, and Farsi datasets without baselines.

11 [Link]
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 247

Li et al. (2013) proposed the first unsupervised data-driven model for metaphor
identification and concept generation. They prepared a word pair dataset by searching
“like-a” and “is-a” syntactic patterns in a web corpus. They designed a context-
related formula with selectional preference to obtain the implicit source or target
concepts among the candidates from the metaphorical corpus. The testing dataset
contained 83 sentences expressing metaphors by subject-verb or verb-object relations
from Lakoff and Johnson (1980). The baseline was a variant of the proposed model
with a replacement of a metaphor database. They applied two labeling criteria.
The generated concept mappings are marked as “match” if they are the same as or
subsumed by gold labels. If the generated concept mappings are not “match” but are
considered metaphors by at least two annotators, they are marked as “correct”.
Dodge et al. (2015) put up a framework termed MetaNet for bridging theory-
and corpus-driven approaches to metaphor processing. Together with linguists, they
created a hand-crafted repository. The repository of metaphor expressions and frame-
works included several relations like “subcase of” and “incorporates as a role” as
well as concept domains. Then, they looked for phrases using a list of grammatical
constructs. Through the relational network of the repository and with the aid of
WordNet, FrameNet, and Wiktionary12, the source and target terms were matched
with concept domains in the repository. By using pre-defined syntactic patterns
from language characteristics and knowledge sources, this approach is restricted in
its ability to identify metaphors.
Rosen (2018) proposed a source domain mapping model expressing the inter-
action between a target word and its construction-based context. It extracted mul-
tiple self-defined features related to dependency relationships and fed the features
into a deep neural network classifier. The features were interactions derived from
dependency-parsed inputs, such as target domain x subject and target domain x
object. The evaluation was conducted on LCC (Mohler et al., 2016). However, the
source domains were represented as one-hot vectors in outputs, leading to data spar-
sity somewhat. The model could only output one of 77 known and limited source
domains.

B. Embedding-based Methods

Gagliano et al. (2016) applied word2vec to identify the connection between two
words in the semantic space to generate a figurative relationship. Based on word2vec
vectors of a target concept and an attribute, the addition and intersection models
independently derived candidates of a source concept. They designed quantitative
and qualitative analyses to evaluate the generated terms. In the quantitative analysis,
they used the cosine similarity of word2vec vectors to measure the semantic repre-
sentations. In the qualitative analysis, AMT employees were asked to select the final
source concepts in the provided list and generate a metaphorical expression. The
result showed that candidate concepts with balanced cosine similarity between two
words could boost the effect of integrating two semantic spaces.

12 [Link]
248 4 Pragmatics Processing

Fu et al. (2020a) designed an image metaphor understanding task containing

three parts: literal concept detection, literal-implied concept mapping, and metaphor
captioning. This study aimed to establish literal-implied concept mapping, wherein
the identification of suitable target concepts was performed by analyzing source and
contextual concepts present in the images. They constructed an undirected refer-
ence graph, in which the nodes represented candidates found by rule-based query
searching, and edges reflected the compatibility between candidates and contex-
tual concepts. The final implied concepts had the highest compatibility among all
the concepts. The evaluation was conducted on a manually-built image metaphor
dataset13 with 54 images collected from stock image websites. They utilized Hit@N
which denoted the proportion of correct concepts in the top N predicted concepts.
Experiments compared multiple model variants, such as different ways for refer-
ence graph construction or external knowledge, with a baseline barely calculating
the cosine similarity of word2vec representations between metaphorical terms and
predicted concepts. The approach that yielded the most favorable outcomes involved
the integration of word2vec-based co-occurrence and DeepWalk-based knowledge
base.
Ge et al. (2022) proposed an MTL model for metaphor identification and con-
cept mapping generation. They extracted hypernyms from WordNet and frequent
associations of target words from Wikipedia and applied a knee algorithm (Satopaa
et al., 2011) to select candidate concepts. Due to the absence of large annotated
concept mapping datasets, they proposed novel a dynamic reward mechanism to
push the learned concepts toward more accurate metaphor identification. The model
could learn concept mappings with a broad conceptual spectrum from metaphor
identification. Compared with previous works, this model can automatically iden-
tify metaphoricity and generate concept mappings in natural language instead of
clustering concepts. The automatic evaluation was managed on an out-of-domain
dataset14, GUT, to examine whether the model can deliver accurate concept map-
pings for metaphor identification. The proposed model obtained higher scores in
source, target, and mapping accuracy in human evaluation.
MetaPro (Mao et al., 2023b) integrated the works of Mao and Li (2021); Mao
et al. (2022a) and Ge et al. (2022) to process concept mapping from end to end. The
system first identified metaphors from a full sentence. Next, the identified metaphors
are paraphrased into their literal counterparts. The original metaphors and their
literal counterparts served as the basis for the source and target concepts. Finally,
output is organized in the form of “the target concept is the source concept”. To
the best of our knowledge, MetaPro is the only system that can generate metaphor
paraphrases and concept mappings from end to end.

13 [Link]
14 [Link]
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 249

4.2.7 Downstream Applications

Researchers have discovered that metaphorical expressions are difficult for the learn-
ing of downstream NLP tasks. Since the semantics of metaphorical expressions differ
from those of literal ones, NLP systems likely make mistakes while comprehending
them. This is why metaphor understanding is a key subtask of the NLU suitcase
model (Fig. 1.12). In sentiment analysis, the literal meaning of the phrase “she de-
voured his novels” is not positive, while its metaphorical connotation is positive.
A sentiment classifier may deliver an inaccurate answer for expressions without
metaphor understanding (Mao et al., 2022a). Due to cultural variations, it might
be difficult for language learners to understand metaphors. The literal translation
of the expression “she devoured his novels” in the same case does not make sense
in Chinese (Mao et al., 2018). Therefore, transforming metaphors into their literal
counterparts can enhance the comprehension of metaphors for both humans and
machines.
On the other hand, metaphors also provide an entry point for investigating hu-
man cognition. These psycho-linguistic expressions offer a distinctive window into
the subconscious minds of humans (Goatly, 2007). By their very nature, metaphors
extend beyond literal language, tapping into the rich reservoir of symbolism and im-
agery ingrained in our thoughts and emotions. When individuals employ metaphors,
they tap into a collective repository of shared cultural, social, and personal experi-
ences, unveiling deeper cognitive processes that might not be immediately apparent
in explicit language. One structured way of representing metaphorical cognition
processes is through concept mappings, where the projection from a target to vari-
ous source domains highlights distinctions between different cognitive frameworks.
Concept mappings have been utilized in various traditional diagnostic psychological
assessments, such as the Word-association Test, Thematic Apperception Test, and
Rorschach Test, each employing distinct forms of concept mappings (Rapaport et al.,
1946). Consequently, the understanding of conceptual metaphors holds potential for
downstream research in psychology and cognitive science.

[Link] Machine Translation

Mao et al. (2018) evaluated the proposed metaphor understanding model on a ma-
chine translation task. The testing dataset contained 50 metaphorical sentences and
50 literal sentences randomly sampled from Mohammad et al. (2016)15. The text
identified as metaphors was paraphrased by the metaphor understanding model be-
fore going into the machine translation system. The results showed that paraphrasing
metaphors into their literal equivalents boosted 26% accuracy in Google translation
and 24% in Bing translation for an English-Chinese metaphor translation task.

15 [Link]
250 4 Pragmatics Processing

[Link] Sentiment Analysis

Mao et al. (2022a) assessed MetaPro on a news headline sentiment analysis dataset
(NHSA) from SemEval-2017 Task 5 (Cortis et al., 2017). The findings demonstrated
that MetaPro could boost the performance of state-of-the-art sentiment analysis
classifiers by an average of 4.0% F1 scores. They also demonstrated that the sentiment
classifier gained additional benefits in the non-metaphorical (paraphrased) dataset if
the train and test sets were paraphrased first before training and evaluating.

[Link] Psychology and Cognition Analysis

Han et al. (2022a) believed that metaphorical concept mapping features could en-
hance the performance and the explainability of a depression detection task. They
presented an explainable hierarchical attention network (HAN) that could extract
depression-featured tweets and their corresponding concept mappings. Since the in-
dividual had implicitly delivered these concept mapping patterns in everyday social
media contact, the generated concept mappings could provide insight into the inner
reality of a depressed person. MetaPro was employed to generate the concept map-
ping features. The evaluation was conducted on a publicly available X dataset called
MDL (Shen et al., 2017). Their experiments showed that introducing the concept
mapping features could increase the accuracy of the depression detection task. The
authors also demonstrated common concept mapping patterns among the depressed
group.
Mao et al. (2023a) leveraged MetaPro to uncover the cognitive patterns of finan-
cial analysts under different market conditions. They examined MetaPro-generated
concepts from 1.4 million financial reports spanning a decade, encompassing 1,000
analysts and 6,000 stocks in the US market. Analyzing these mappings revealed
distinct patterns corresponding to various market conditions. In rising markets, re-
ports often emphasized target concepts like , , , ,
and through metaphorical expressions. However, these concepts were less
prominent in turbulent markets. Conversely, during turbulent conditions, metaphors
were frequently used to elucidate new target concepts such as , , -
_ , , , , and . Furthermore, there
was a higher frequency of both optimistic and cautious concept mappings in com-
parison to down days. Conversely, on down days, report concept mappings tended
to be more encouraging and persuasive.
With MetaPro, Mao et al. (2024d) also analyzed the public perception towards four
types of weather disasters, e.g., floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires. They
parsed concept mappings from tweets. By statistical analysis, they found that disaster
management is often likened to a strategic battle, focusing on mental preparedness,
resource assessment, and adaptive planning. Disasters are viewed as dynamic and
transformative, requiring urgent and intense responses. The public emphasizes proac-
tive disaster response, including early warning systems and community resilience.
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 251

[Link] Political Analysis

Metaphor use in the text can reveal fine-grained sentiment and underlying cultural
tendencies. Researchers in political analysis provided a perspective to deconstruct
text by metaphors. Hu and Wang (2021) analyzed the differences and similarities in
using conceptual metaphors in two government reports from China and the United
States. The similarity between the two nations reflected their political systems’
acceptance of commonsense. For instance, metaphors from the source
domain conveyed that achieving the goals would take time. Diverse rooting cultures
were mostly responsible for the variances. The USA political report, for instance, used
metaphors from the source domain to connect to American entertainment.
Mao et al. (2024e) also used MetaPro to analyze the relationship between
metaphor cognition and voting behaviors at the United Nations. They first parsed
metaphorical concept mappings from the debates at the United Nations Security
Council from January 1995 to December 2020. The concept mappings were embed-
ded by GloVe. The annual representations of the metaphorical cognitive pattern of a
country were derived by averaging the concept mapping embeddings from the same
country for a given year. Next, the pairwise consistency of voting between two coun-
tries at the United Nations General Assembly in a given year was measured using
Cohen’s Kappa (Cohen, 1960). The tests conducted on the United States, China, and
Russia revealed moderate correlation coefficients between their metaphorical cogni-
tion and voting consistency. The authors concluded that metaphorical cognition can
impact voting behaviors at the United Nations. They also provided a summary of the
evolution of cognitive patterns over the 15-year analysis period.

4.2.8 Summary

Relevant theoretical research highlights the connection between metaphor under-

standing and human cognitive processes. CMT (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) provided
a practical framework for representing the concept mapping from a target domain to
a source domain; Landau et al. (2010) further affirmed that metaphors play a role
in shaping social cognition; Feldman (2008) suggested that embodied experiences
influence the comprehension of abstract and cultural concepts, leading to varied
usage of metaphorical language. Given the above theoretical findings, we argue that
human perception of concepts is mutually affected by metaphors. External expres-
sions of metaphor can influence how individuals structure the mapping of concepts
and shape their social cognition. Concurrently, personal experiences are reflected in
diverse metaphorical language usage. Thus, metaphors emerge as a crucial medium
for studying both the personal cognition of individuals and the social cognition of
broader populations.
252 4 Pragmatics Processing

[Link] Technical Trends

Table 4.4 summarizes the major technical trends by task setups that were introduced
in Section 4.2.6. The property exaction systems normally use unsupervised and
graph learning methods with linguistic features, such as POS tags, knowledge bases,
and word embeddings. However, methods for property exaction are only effective
when interpreting nominal metaphors. Generated properties can succinctly describe
the link between source and target nouns, while property-based approaches barely
stretch to other POS of metaphors, such as verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Given the
complexity of syntax in real-world text, the interpretation outputs defined as “target
be property” are not valuable for assisting downstream operations.
Word-level paraphrasing-based approaches can be utilized as a text preprocessing
tool to enhance the capacity to grasp semantic concepts for various downstream NLP
activities such as machine translation and sentiment analysis. Given the absence
of large annotated datasets, previous paraphrasing-based metaphor understanding
systems commonly learn the task by word co-occurrence modeling. To improve
the accuracy, they also leverage linguistic features, such as POS tags and WordNet
knowledge base.

Table 4.4: Technical trends in metaphor understanding. PE denotes property extrac-

tion. WP denotes word-level paraphrasing. “Unsup.” is for unsupervised learning.
DL denotes deep learning. KB denotes knowledge base. GE denotes graph embed-
ding. “co-occ” is for co-occurrence. MI denotes mutual information. Cos denotes
cosine similarity. SPV denotes select preference violation (Wilks, 1975). KGE de-
notes knowledge graph embedding. MR denotes mean rank. LM denotes language
modeling. TSG denotes the dataset is a collection of Tsvetkov et al. (2014); Shutova
et al. (2016); Gutierrez et al. (2016). MT denotes the task was evaluated on English-
Chinese machine translation, based on Bing Translator. “Acc.” is for accuracy. PC
denotes Pearson correlation. “A” is for acceptability. “P” denotes appropriateness.
“C” is for coherence.

Task Reference Tech Feature Framework Dataset Score Metric

Su et al. (2015) Unsup. POS, KB, word2vec Cos Self-collected 0.84 Acc.-A
Su et al. (2017) Unsup. POS, KB, word2vec Cos Su et al. (2015) 0.86 Acc.-A
PE Rai et al. (2019) Unsup. POS, KB Cos Rai and Chakraverty (2017) 0.97 Acc.-P
Su et al. (2020) Graph POS,WordNet,word2vec,concept mapping Random walk Self-collected 0.77 Acc.-A
Song et al. (2020b) Graph POS, KB, GE KGE Self-collected 11.6 Hit@1
Shutova (2010) Unsup. POS, Co-occ,WordNet SPV Sub-BNC 0.81 Acc.
WP Mao et al. (2018) Unsup. POS, WordNet, word2vec LM Mohammad et al. (2016) 0.65 MT-A
Mao et al. (2022a) DL POS, WordNet, RoBERTa LM Sub-VUA 4.48 Acc.-C
Mao et al. (2024b) DL POS, WordNet, ALM LM Mao et al. (2024b) 0.40 F1
Martin (1990) Rule KODIAK Logic rules Self-collected - -
EP Bizzoni and Lappin (2018) DL word2vec CNN-LSTM Bizzoni and Lappin (2018) 0.67 Acc.
Mao et al. (2022a) Rule POS, Dict. Depd. Rules Saxena and Paul (2020) 0.99 Acc.
Mason (2004) Unsup. POS,WordNet SPV, Cluster Lakoff (1994) - -
Gandy et al. (2013) Rule POS, Abst., Dict., MI, WordNet Logic rules Self-collected 0.65 Acc.-A
Strzalkowski et al. (2013) Rule POS, MI, Imag., Affect, Co-occ,WordNet Cluster Self-collected 0.71 Acc.
Li et al. (2013) Unsup.,Rule POS, Lemma, Co-occ, WordNet, Dict. SPV Self-collected 0.43 MatchTop1
CMP Dodge et al. (2015) Rule POS, WordNet, FrameNet, Lemma, Dict. Logic rules Self-collected - -
Rosen (2018) DL POS DNN LCC 0.8 Acc.
Gagliano et al. (2016) Unsup. POS, Lemma, WordNet, word2vec Cos Self-collected - -
Fu et al. (2020a) Graph POS, CN, Co-occ, word2vec, GE Cos,deep walk Self-collected 0.7 Hit@1
Ge et al. (2022) DL POS, Lemma, Co-occ, WordNet, RoBERTa MTL TSG 0.64 Acc.-A
4.2 Metaphor Understanding 253

Table 4.5: Metaphor understanding downstream task applications.

Reference Downstream Task Feature Parser Explainability Employed technique

Mao et al. (2018) Machine Translation X Mao et al. (2018)
Mao et al. (2022a) Sentiment Analysis X Mao et al. (2022a)
Han et al. (2022a) Psychology Analysis X X Mao et al. (2023b)
Mao et al. (2023a) Cognition Analysis X X Mao et al. (2023b)
Mao et al. (2024d) Cognition Analysis X X Mao et al. (2023b)
Mao et al. (2024e) Cognition Analysis X X Mao et al. (2023b)
Hu and Wang (2021) Political Analysis X Statistics

Word-level paraphrasing techniques cannot capture the nuanced distinctions be-

tween metaphors and their literal counterparts. This deficiency leads to the loss of
sentimental and emotional information after paraphrasing. With a newly developed
metaphor paraphrasing dataset ( - ) and a metaphor-tailored ALM (Mao et al.,
2024b), the limitations, e.g., end-to-end training and MWE paraphrasing have been
largely improved. Explanation pairing generates a clause or full sentence to un-
derstand metaphors. Current methodologies exhibit fewer constraints compared to
other task formats, rendering them effective for various types of metaphors, e.g.,
MWEs. For example, Mao et al. (2022a) developed a dictionary and rule-based
methods for processing MWEs in diverse syntactic contexts. However, such an ex-
planation pairing method needs a very large knowledge base, leading to difficulty in
generalization.
Conceptual metaphor processing aims to generate concept mappings to compre-
hend metaphorical expressions from a cognitive perspective. Multiple metaphorical
expressions with similar source and target domains can be connected with concept
mappings. Concept mappings reveal how metaphors are created and what metaphors
are compared to. Feature-based methods utilized hand-crafted linguistic features,
such as syntactic information and WordNet hypernyms, to capture semantic rep-
resentations in unsupervised patterns. Embeddings-based methods applied word
embedding techniques including PLMs to generate concept mappings with the as-
sistance of deep learning models. Concept mappings can be expressed as clauses
or additional features and utilized for understanding human cognition for metaphors
and other psycho-linguistic research. However, current approaches cannot process
the concept mapping tasks for MWEs.

[Link] Application Trends

Since metaphors are frequently shown in human communications, metaphor un-

derstanding has close associations with downstream applications and other psycho-
linguistic research. The application trends are summarized in Table 4.5. Metaphor
understanding can be a key upstream subtask for many NLU tasks. For example,
Mao et al. (2018, 2022a) demonstrate the effectiveness of metaphor understanding
for sentiment analysis and machine translation.
254 4 Pragmatics Processing

Metaphor understanding models can also be used as parsers for several NLU ap-
plications, including mental health (Han et al., 2022a), finance (Mao et al., 2023a),
international relationship (Mao et al., 2024e), and weather disasters (Mao et al.,
2024d). These studies not only highlight the relevance of metaphor research but
also offer practical methodologies, empirically substantiating the utility of concept
mapping in supporting research within psychology and cognition. Finally, Hu and
Wang (2021) examined concept mappings of metaphorical expressions in govern-
ment reports, revealing similarities and differences in political attitudes. This analysis
underscores the critical role of metaphor comprehension in effective communication.
In conclusion, examining cognition through metaphors provides a means to conduct
extensive research with large samples, as this method does not require interviews to
uncover cognitive patterns. This noninvasive approach, such as studying cognition
using data mining techniques, can yield more reliable results by mitigating the risk
of subjects not sharing their genuine thoughts during psychological tests.

[Link] Future Works

Metaphor understanding faces several challenges in becoming a more developed

and standard NLU task. The main challenge is creating large annotated datasets for
various metaphor understanding tasks, such as property extraction, paraphrasing,
explanation pairing, and concept mapping. Besides the time and effort required for
annotation, achieving consensus on consistent and comparable labels across different
tasks is equally important. Current metaphor understanding studies exhibit a variety
of task descriptions and dataset formats, yet the community has not yet established a
unanimous agreement on task and dataset forms. This lack of consensus hinders the
comparison of proposed methods across different contexts. It is envisioned that in
the future, one or more standard task definitions will be established, incorporating
theoretical insights to address these challenges.
Another challenge is how to appropriately measure the performance of proposed
methods in different metaphor understanding setups. Whether the generated in-
terpretations or concept mappings deliver the original meanings of metaphorical
expressions is highly subjective. Researchers utilized multiple linguistic features,
such as coherence and metaphoricity in human evaluation, to measure the outputs
from different perspectives. However, these linguistic features have yet to be widely
agreed upon in the community. Meanwhile, comparing with external baselines by
human evaluation is not fair enough considering subjectivity.
Finally, the current integration of linguistic knowledge lags behind machine learn-
ing techniques. Since metaphors involve linguistic rules, finding a way to seamlessly
combine linguistic knowledge with machine learning could be a future direction
for the community. Furthermore, metaphor understanding can enhance downstream
NLU tasks. While there has been thoughtful use of metaphors in academia, practical
applications, like plug-in modules for preprocessing or feature extraction, are still
lacking. We believe that this sort of solution has the potential to significantly impact
the NLU community.
4.3 Sarcasm Detection 255

4.3 Sarcasm Detection

In psycholinguistics, sarcasm is defined as “a form of verbal irony used in a hurtful or

critical way” (McDonald and Pearce, 1996; Colston, 2000). The affiliation of sarcas-
tic language with pragmatics is evident as sarcasm inherently hinges on contextual
factors, speaker intention, and mutual understanding between communicators. Func-
tioning as a type of verbal irony, sarcasm entails expressing words with an intended
meaning opposite to the literal interpretation, frequently leveraging contextual cues,
intonation, and the collective background knowledge shared among communicators.
In our daily lives, understanding sarcasm helps to avoid miscommunication. Sarcasm
detection is crucial to the understanding of humans’ sentiments and emotions (Eke
et al., 2020; Maynard and Greenwood, 2014).
Sarcasm detection in computer science refers to the task of automatically de-
termining whether or not text is bearing sarcasm using computational methods. It
is typically formulated as a binary classification problem. Input can be uni- and
multimodal. For uni-modal sarcasm detection, textual data is usually employed. For
the multimodal task, existing works leveraged combinations of textual, visual and
acoustic modalities. Given input data and its representations, a computational model
discerns the label associated with each input, such as determining whether it is
sarcastic or non-sarcastic.

4.3.1 Theoretical Research

[Link] Mental Clue

McDonald and Pearce (1996) explore psycholinguistics theories of sarcasm via

experiments conducted with brain-damaged subjects. This empirical study reports
that successful detection and interpretation of sarcasm is a multifactorial, interac-
tive process. To understand sarcasm, the comprehension of the literal meaning of
counterfactual remarks and rejecting it are necessary. However, such processes are
not sufficient to fully understand sarcasm. Rather, other inferential reasoning pro-
cesses, such as contextual inference of a speaker’s attitude and the understanding of
emotional information implied in the speaker’s tone, are required to understand the
conceptual relevance of counterfactual remarks in sarcastic utterances.
A more recent study (Gibbs Jr, 2002) lends a new perspective on the role of literal
meanings in understanding indirect, figurative language such as sarcasm. This study
argues that a complete comprehension of literal meanings and the rejection such
meaning may not necessarily be performed either before or in parallel to the inter-
pretation of figurative, implicit meanings of sarcasm given that there exist sufficient,
appropriate pragmatic factors such as background knowledge and context. Various
contextual factors, which may be useful for understanding a speaker’s actual inten-
tion, include mutual beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge shared between the speaker
and the listener.
256 4 Pragmatics Processing

[Link] Communicative Clue

Kreuz and Glucksberg (1989) focus on the communicative function of sarcasm. In

particular, the study proposes the “echoic reminder theory” of sarcastic irony in
which a speaker says counterfactual (i.e., not literally true) remarks (i.e., reminders)
to convey disapproving attitude towards a target. In this theory, a listener recognizes
positive remarks conveying sarcasm by perceiving implicit or explicit norms or
expectations that are shared with a speaker. For example, a listener can interpret
the sarcastic intention of a remark, “you’re a nice friend”, said when they failed
to be helpful to the speaker. On the other hand, negative remarks require explicit
context to be correctly interpreted as sarcasm. For example, a sentence, “you’re an
awful friend”, cannot be used sarcastically when the listener was being helpful to the
speaker. The same sentence can be interpreted as sarcasm or gentle mockery when
the listener was being very helpful to the speaker in contrast to the speaker’s low or
negative expectation for the listener. In this case, the remark reminds the listener of
the speaker’s expectation.
Katz and Lee (1993) support the findings of Kreuz and Glucksberg (1989) in that
sarcasm is perceived when an echoic reminder is used to ascertain a speaker’s inten-
tion to reject the figurative truth-value of an utterance. Specifically, when the literal
meaning of a remark is incompatible with the perceived context, the listener would
infer that the speaker is rejecting a figurative resemblance between the utterance and
the actual state of the ongoing event, and hence is speaking sarcastically. Moreover,
the authors argue that contextual information (e.g., mutual knowledge) is required to
interpret sarcasm.
The empirical findings of such psycholinguistics studies suggest that there are
different types of sarcasm. In general, it is challenging to interpret sarcastic state-
ments that convey a reminder of antecedent affairs or the speaker’s expectations
in comparison to those explicitly expressing an ironic situation. Those studies also
argue that contextual information and the identification of incongruity between the
meaning of a statement and observational evidence are crucial to the understanding
and interpretation of sarcasm.

[Link] Neural Clue

Matsui et al. (2016) utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to

explore the neural mechanisms associated with sarcasm comprehension. Examining
21 participants, the researchers observed brain activity while subjects listened to both
sarcastic and sincere comments within varied contexts. Analysis of the fMRI data
focused on identifying regions exhibiting increased activity during the processing
of sarcastic remarks compared to sincere ones. Specifically, attention was directed
towards the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), a region recognized for its involvement
in processing linguistic input incongruent with accompanying affective prosody. The
hypothesis posited that the left IFG would exhibit heightened activity when affective
prosody conflicted with a discourse context conducive to sarcasm perception.
4.3 Sarcasm Detection 257

The investigation pinpointed the left rostro-ventral portion of the IFG, specif-
ically Brodmann’s Area 47, as crucial in integrating discourse context, utterance,
and affective prosody for sarcasm comprehension. This area demonstrated a signifi-
cant interaction effect, underscoring its role in context-dependent perception of the
utterance. Then, the researchers observed functional asymmetry in incongruity pro-
cessing, with the left IFG implicated in integrating statement, context, and prosody,
while the right IFG responded to negative prosody, indicating incongruity detection
between the statement and prosody. Aligning with behavioral findings, the fMRI data
affirmed that incongruity between discourse context and overall utterance meaning
influenced sarcasm perception. Positive prosody with positive semantic content el-
evated the overall positive valence of utterance meaning, while negative prosody
combined with positive semantic content diminished the positive valence, intensify-
ing incongruity and enhancing sarcasm perception. These results elucidate the neural
substrates involved in integrating affective prosody, semantic content, and discourse
context during sarcasm comprehension, with a particular emphasis on the left IFG
as a pivotal region in this cognitive process.

4.3.2 Annotation Schemes

There are two main approaches for annotating datasets for sarcasm detection: man-
ual and weakly supervised annotation. In both approaches, the task is framed as a
binary classification task, specifically, discerning whether a given target is sarcastic
or not. However, sarcastic statements can be further annotated via subtypes, e.g.,
sarcasm, irony, satire, understatement, overstatement, and rhetorical question. Sar-
casm is often hard to discern even by humans and is subjective. Due to such inherent
characteristics, leveraging human supervision is a natural choice for high-quality
sarcasm labeling. Normally, human annotators are not authors of utterances, which
means that manually annotated datasets contain sarcasm perceived by annotators
which are not necessarily the same as that intended by authors (Oprea and Magdy,
2020). Inter-annotator agreement (Artstein and Poesio, 2008) is often measured to
ensure the consistency of data labeling.
Despite the higher quality of manually curated datasets, the manual labeling
of large-scale, noisy data for sarcasm detection is highly labor-intensive and time-
consuming in comparison to some annotation tasks which can be done without
human supervision such as image annotation (Wallace et al., 2014). Furthermore,
annotating sarcasm is challenging because it requires a thorough understanding of
context and cultural background as discussed in Section 4.3.1. To overcome such
limitations of manual annotation, weakly supervised annotation is used to increase
efficiency and improve the usability of massive amounts of unlabelled data. Most
corpora for sarcasm detection are generated using social media data based on the
hypothesis that texts containing certain indicators express sarcasm.
258 4 Pragmatics Processing

X16 and Reddit17 are common social media platforms for studying sarcasm. For
X, several hashtags, such as #sarcasm, #irony, #sarcastic, #cynicism and #not, are
leveraged as markers of sarcasm (Kunneman et al., 2015). For Reddit, the marker
“/s” at the end of posts is used to collect sarcastic statements (Khodak et al., 2018).
However, gathering data by hashtags can inevitably introduce biases, such as those
more subtle, sarcastic expressions without obvious hints will not be annotated due
to the absence of hashtags.

4.3.3 Datasets

Commonly used sarcasm detection benchmarking datasets are shown in Table 4.6.
Oprea and Magdy (2020) proposed a sarcasm detection dataset, iSarcasm18, which
consists of 777 sarcastic and 3,707 non-sarcastic English tweets. To collect intended
sarcasm rather than perceived sarcasm, a subset of X users was asked to provide
one sarcastic and three non-sarcastic tweets. For each sarcastic tweet, an explanation
of why it is sarcastic and a non-sarcastic paraphrase were also collected. Moreover,
a linguist was employed to further categorize each sarcastic tweet into one of the
following seven categories: 1) sarcasm, 2) irony, 3) satire, 4) understatement, 5)
overstatement, 6) rhetorical question, and 7) invalid/unclear.

Table 4.6: Sarcasm detection datasets and statistics.

Reference Task Source # Samples

Oprea and Magdy (2020) Multi-class X 4,484
Khodak et al. (2018) Binary Reddit 533M
Van Hee et al. (2018) Binary/Multi-class X 3,000
Castro et al. (2019) Binary/Multimodal TV shows 690
Joshi et al. (2016) Binary TV show 17,338
Oraby et al. (2016) Binary Online forums 17,338
Cai et al. (2019) Binary/Multimodal X 24,635

Category: sarcasm
Text: Thank @user for being so entertaining at the Edinburgh signings! You did not
disappoint! I made my flight so will have plenty time to read @user
Explanation: I went to a book signing and the author berated me for saying I was
lying about heading to Singapore straight after the signing
Rephrased: I would have said ’here is the proof of my travel, I am mad you
embarrassed me in front of a large audience’!

16 [Link]
17 [Link]
18 [Link]
4.3 Sarcasm Detection 259

Category: irony
Text: Staring at the contents of your fridge but never deciding what to eat is a
cool way to diet
Explanation: I wasn’t actually talking about a real diet. I was making fun of how you
never eat anything just staring at the contents of your fridge full of indecision.
Rephrased: I’m always staring at the contents of my fridge and then walking away
with nothing cause I can never decide.

The Self-Annotated Reddit Corpus19 (SARC) (Khodak et al., 2018) is a large-

scale, self-annotated Reddit corpus comprising 533 million comments, 1.3 million
of which are sarcastic. Initially, comments with the marker “/s” at the end are col-
lected and several noise filtering approaches are applied to the initial collection.
Despite the attempts to remove noise in the dataset, this corpus contains several false
positive (i.e., non-sarcastic statements labeled as sarcastic due to the presence of the
/s marker) and false negatives (i.e., sarcastic statements labeled as non-sarcastic due
to the absence of the /s marker).

Label: non-sarcasm
Text: You do know west teams play against west teams more than east teams right?
Author: Shbshb906
Subreddit: nba
Comment score: -4

Label: sarcasm
Text: gotta love the teachers who give exams on the day after halloween
Author: DEP61
Subreddit: CFBOffTopic
Comment score: 3

SemEval-2018 Task 3 dataset (Van Hee et al., 2018) was constructed using both
weakly supervised and manual annotation schemes. After collecting English tweets
using several hashtags related to irony (i.e., #irony, #sarcasm, and #not), the corpus
was further manually labeled by three human annotators. As a result, the dataset
consists of 1,728 verbal irony with polarity contrast, 267 other types of verbal irony,
401 situational irony, and 604 non-ironic tweets.

Label: non-sarcasm
Text: Had no sleep and have got school now

Label: sarcasm
Text: I just love when you test my patience!!

19 [Link]
260 4 Pragmatics Processing

MUStARD20 (Castro et al., 2019) was manually annotated, including three modal
data (i.e., textual, audio, and visual features) extracted from TV shows. This dataset
consists of 345 sarcastic and 345 non-sarcastic utterances. Each utterance consists
of one or more sentences and its conversational context is also provided.

Fig. 4.3: A data example from the MUStARD multimodal sarcasm detection dataset,
developed by Castro et al. (2019).

Friends dataset (Joshi et al., 2016) consists of transcripts of a TV show, Friends,

manually annotated by two experienced linguists. Specifically, it consists of 913 sets
multi-turn conversations. The average number of utterances per set is 18.6. 1,888
out of 17,338 utterances were labeled as sarcastic.
Sarcasm Corpus V221 (Oraby et al., 2016) was built on online debate forum
conversations and consists of three types of sarcasm: 1) general sarcasm (GEN);
2) hyperbole (HYP); 3) rhetorical questions (RQ). Each type contains sarcastic and
non-sarcastic posts. The GEN, HYP, RQ sets consist of 3,260, 582, and 851 posts
per class. This dataset was annotated via AMT.
Label: non-sarcasm
Id: 11
Text: So will they be in front of or behind a leaf?

Label: sarcasm
Id: 2662
Text: That would be one hell of a kiss...you would probably drown first though :)

Multimodal sarcasm detection dataset22 (Cai et al., 2019) includes sarcastic tweets
that were collected using a set of hashtags. Non-sarcastic tweets in the dataset do not
contain such hashtags. Each tweet has its associated image. After applying filtering
rules, 10,560 sarcastic and 14,075 non-sarcastic tweets remain in the final dataset.

20 [Link]
21 [Link]
22 [Link]
4.3 Sarcasm Detection 261

Image:

Text: What a beautiful couple What wonderful weather!

#goldenglobes

Label: non-sarcasm sarcasm

Fig. 4.4: A data example from the multimodal sarcasm detection dataset, developed
by Cai et al. (2019).

4.3.4 Evaluation Metrics

As the task of sarcasm detection is normally formulated as a binary or multi-

class classification problem, the most common evaluation metrics are accuracy,
precision, recall, and F1 score. Ghosh et al. (2017); Khodak et al. (2018) also exploit
crowdsourcing to evaluate sarcasm detection results. Human evaluators are given a
subset of prediction results along with context and evaluate them. Then, a majority
vote is applied to obtain the final evaluation results. AMT is one of the most popular
crowdsourcing methods used for the task.

4.3.5 Methods

Based on a thorough search of the literature on sarcasm detection, we introduce

four strands of methods for the task: 1) feature-based methods use hand-crafted fea-
tures; 2) embedding-based methods utilize (contextualized) embeddings; 3) semantic
incongruity-based methods leverage contrast between the meaning of an utterance
and contextual evidence or sentimental incongruity; 4) context-based methods em-
ploy conversational context.

[Link] Feature-based Methods

Conventional methods for sarcasm detection aim to distinguish sarcastic utterances

from non-sarcastic ones based on manually curated features. Several studies em-
phasize the importance of extracting and utilizing linguistic features to accurately
interpret sarcasm, recognizing that comprehending the meaning of remarks, whether
literal or figurative, is pivotal for this purpose.
262 4 Pragmatics Processing

Potamias et al. (2019) proposed an ensemble model, termed Deep Ensemble

Soft Classifier (DESC), which combined BiLSTM, LSTM with attention, and dense
neural networks for tweet-level irony and sarcasm detection and sentiment analy-
sis of figurative languages (i.e., irony, sarcasm, and metaphor). The authors argued
that understanding syntactic, semantic, and emotional differences between figurative
and literal languages can be helpful for identifying individuals’ intentions. Hence,
44 hand-crafted features categorized into five major groups (i.e., syntactic, demon-
strative, sentiment, mood, and readability) were integrated into DESC. Specifically,
given an input tweet, these features were extracted and fed into dense neural net-
works. BiLSTM and LSTM, incorporating attention mechanisms, are employed in
this study with the tweet’s GloVe (Pennington et al., 2014) embedding serving
as input. However, this work lacks an ablation study that specifically assesses the
individual contributions of hand-crafted features and the attention mechanism. Con-
sequently, the precise impact of each component on the classification performance
remains unclear.
Pandey et al. (2021) proposed a hybrid attention-based LSTM (HA-LSTM) net-
work. The model learned 16 hand-crafted linguistic features extracted from textual
contents for sentence-level sarcasm detection, namely entropy, lex diversity, number
of nouns, number of adjectives, number of verbs, sum of verbs available in the given
sentence, the Flesch Reading Ease formula, Dale Chall readability, difficult words,
length, set length, stopword count, wrong word, one-letter word, two-letter word,
longer letter word, < li > tags (hyperlinks in the text). The authors argued that
combining the advantages of manually curated features with those of deep learn-
ing techniques will improve sentence-level sarcasm detection performance. Such an
approach has been employed by several works in different social media research
areas (Gao et al., 2020; Mou and Lee, 2020; Liu et al., 2022b). The model consists of
two parts. One module processes a single sentence by utilizing GloVe embeddings
as input for its analysis. These word vectors were fed into two LSTM layers followed
by an attention layer. The output of the attention layer was concatenated with a hand-
crafted feature matrix. The join representation of the input sentence was fed into
a softmax layer which outputs a binary label (i.e., sarcastic or non-sarcastic). The
authors reported that integrating hand-crafted features into a deep learning model
improves the performance of the model in sarcasm detection. Similarly to (Potamias
et al., 2019), this work also did not computationally evaluate how much the integra-
tion of hand-crafted features into a deep learning architecture can contribute to its
performance.
Hand-crafted features have been widely used in various tasks in NLP and social
media research. However, the effectiveness of solely relying on hand-crafted features
is limited. Some studies in different computer science research areas (Gao et al., 2020;
Wu et al., 2018; Bogacsovics et al., 2022) reported that integrating such features can
make complementary contributions to the effectiveness of machine learning models
when they are used with features automatically learned via deep learning techniques.
There have been few attempts to apply such a finding to sarcasm detection, but most
of them failed to conduct appropriate experiments to prove the hypothesis.
4.3 Sarcasm Detection 263

[Link] Embedding-based Methods

Approaches reliant on hand-crafted features often necessitate domain-specific knowl-

edge, which may not always be accessible, and involve labor-intensive and time-
consuming efforts in feature engineering. To overcome these limitations, several
works leveraged recent advances in deep learning techniques such as embeddings
obtained using PLMs. With advances in deep learning (e.g., Transformers) and lan-
guage models, embedding-based methods have been widely used in recent research
on sarcasm detection. Shrivastava and Kumar (2021) presented a brief overview of
methods and datasets for sarcasm detection and proposed a BERT-based model for
the task. A preprocessed input sentence was further processed by a BERT tokenizer.
The tokenized vector was fed into a pretrained BERT followed by a feed-forward
layer. The proposed model achieved an F1 score of 0.705 on the SemEval-2018
Task 3 (Van Hee et al., 2018) dataset. However, the comparative assessment was
conducted with a single benchmark dataset.
Potamias et al. (2020) discussed the limitations of previous studies on sarcasm
detection. The authors emphasized the importance of using multiple benchmark
datasets for fair comparative evaluation. To address such limitations, this work pro-
posed a sentence-level, binary sarcasm detection model, based on BiLSTM and
RoBERTa pretrained embeddings. Given an input sentence, RoBERTa learned its
contextualized embedding and its last hidden state was fed into a BiLSTM layer.
The output of LSTM and the learned embedding were concatenated. The final rep-
resentation of the input was fed into a feed-forward network followed by a softmax
layer, which output a binary label. The proposed model achieved F1 scores of 0.80,
0.78, and 0.90 for the SARC (Khodak et al., 2018), SemEval-2018 Task 3 (Van Hee
et al., 2018), and Riloff (Riloff et al., 2013) datasets, respectively, outperforming the
state-of-the-art models for sentence-level sarcasm detection.
Like Potamias et al. (2020), Babanejad et al. (2020) argued that the use of
hand-crafted features and traditional, non-contextualized word embeddings (e.g.,
word2vec) are sub-optimal. The authors hypothesized that understanding context and
sentiments are useful for sarcasm detection. This work proposes two BERT-based
models (i.e., ACE1 and ACE2), utilizing affective and contextual embeddings for
sentence-level, binary sarcasm detection. A BiLSTM with multi-head attention and a
BERT were used to obtain affective and contextual embeddings of an input sentence,
respectively. In ACE1, another BERT took input as the concatenation of two features
and output a task-specific, join representation of the input. In ACE2, two embeddings
were simply concatenated. In both models, the final representation of the input was
fed into a fully connected layer and a softmax layer. For evaluation, five benchmark
datasets were used and several state-of-the-art models were compared with the
proposed models. Experimental results showed that ACE1 outperforms and ACE2
and the baselines by achieving F1 scores of 0.89 and 0.85 on the SARC (Khodak
et al., 2018) and SemEval-2018 Task 3 (Van Hee et al., 2018) datasets, respectively.
Such results indicate that fusing affective features with sentence embeddings is more
effective that a simple concatenation for sarcasm detection.
264 4 Pragmatics Processing

Yao et al. (2021) aimed to simulate how humans process and interpret sarcasm
given multimodal information. To this end, they proposed a multimodal, binary sar-
casm detection model for X data. It incorporated multiple stacks of gate mechanisms,
guide attention, attention pooling, and multi-hop processing of guide attention and
attention pooling, in the hope that these components could effectively learn interac-
tions among tweet text, an embedded image, text in the image, and image caption.
Multimodal sarcasm detection dataset (Cai et al., 2019) was used for evaluation. The
proposed model is compared with single- and multimodal models for tweet-level
sarcasm detection. This work hypothesized that image captions help a sarcasm de-
tection model learn context and incongruity. The image caption model (Xu et al.,
2015c) utilized in the study was not deemed state of the art, and the rationale behind
not opting for a more contemporary model was not substantiated in the research. In
fact, the ablation study results showed that the effect of the image caption modality
is marginal.
Liang et al. (2022a) argued that not every part of an image equally contributes
to the performance of a multimodal, binary sarcasm detection model. The authors
also believed that learning affective relationship between key visual and textual
information is useful. Based on such hypotheses, a model based on GCNs and
attention mechanism was proposed for multimodal sentence-level sarcasm detection.
Given a sentence and an image paired with it, the textual and visual representations
of the inputs were obtained using a pretrained BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) and
Vision Transformer (ViT) (Dosovitskiy et al., 2021). A cross-modal graph in which
nodes were the obtained multimodal representation. Edges were affective similarity
weights calculated using SenticNet. Then, the adjacency matrix of the cross-modal
graph was fed into multi-layer GCNs. To capture attention information, the simple
concatenation of the input representations was passed through an attention layer.
Computed attention weights were combined with the output of the final layer of the
GCNs to form the final representation of the multimodal input, which was fed into a
softmax layer.
Kamal and Abulaish (2022) focused on the binary classification of sarcasm asso-
ciated with self-deprecation, based on a hypothesis that comprehending such sarcasm
can be useful for improving marketing strategies. This work assumed that sarcastic
tweets in which authors refer to themselves express self-deprecation. In addition
to 6 benchmark datasets for tweet-level sarcasm detection, this work constructed
its own corpus using hashtags. Specifically, sarcastic tweets were collected using
“#sarcasm” and non-sarcastic tweets were collected using “#not”, “#education”,
“#politics”, “#love”, and “#hate”. To select tweets containing self-reference, filter-
ing methods based on a pre-defined set of regular expressions and clustering were
applied to the 7 datasets. In the proposed model, the GloVe embedding of an input
tweet passed through a convolution layer, BiGRU and a sigmoid layer. Experimental
results showed that their model outperforms several deep learning models and two
models developed by existing works on sarcasm detection in terms of accuracy,
precision, recall and F1 score.
4.3 Sarcasm Detection 265

Cai et al. (2019) introduced a multimodal sarcasm detection model encompassing

text, images, and image attributes, represented by 5 keywords. Raw and guidance
embeddings were generated for each modality, and guided weights were computed
using guidance embeddings. Modality-specific feature vectors were obtained through
a weighted sum of raw vectors, and attention mechanisms facilitated the fusion of dif-
ferent modality representations. Textual information was processed using BiLSTM,
while image attributes were predicted with ResNet-50 V2 (He et al., 2016), and a
fine-tuned ResNet was employed for attributes. The proposed model demonstrated
an F1 score of 0.8018 on their proprietary dataset.
Finally, Liang et al. (2024) investigated multimodal sarcasm detection from a
novel perspective, where a multimodal graph contrastive learning strategy is pro-
posed to fuse and distinguish the sarcastic clues for textual modality and visual
modality. Specifically, they first utilized object detection to derive the crucial visual
regions accompanied by their captions of the images, which allows better learning
of the key visual regions of visual modality. In addition, to make full use of the se-
mantic information of the visual modality, they employed OCR to extract the textual
content in the images. Then, based on image regions, the textual content of visual
modality, and the context of the textual modality, they built a multimodal graph for
each sample to model the intricate sarcastic relations between modalities.

[Link] Semantic Incongruity-based Methods

As discussed in Section 4.3.1, several theoretical studies have demonstrated that

identifying contradictions between the meaning of a statement and observational
evidence plays an important role in understanding and interpreting sarcasm. Some
works have been motivated by such a finding and developed methods that identify
sarcasm by modeling (semantic) incongruity. Ren et al. (2020) argued that sarcastic
statements involve the incongruity of sentiment polarity within a sentence and con-
trast between the conveyed sentiment and the situation (context) of the statement.
To integrate such observations, this work proposed a two-level memory network
in which the first-level network obtained sentiment semantics of an input sentence
using SenticNet and the second-level one learned incongruity between the sentiment
semantics and the constituent words of the input by computing their intra-attention.
The ablation study on the X corpus proved their hypothesis that sentiment semantics
and memory networks are useful for sarcasm detection. Specifically, removing the
first-level network and both memory networks reduced the model’s performance by
1.05% and 1.84%, respectively.
Pan et al. (2020) argued that modeling incongruity between or within modali-
ties helps sarcasm detection. The proposed multimodal architecture learned images,
tweet textual content, and hashtags in tweets. Self-attention mechanism was em-
ployed to learn incongruity between images and tweet text. Incongruity between
tweet text and hashtags was learned using affinity matrices which learn similarities
between data points. The two incongruity representations were concatenated and fed
into a softmax layer.
266 4 Pragmatics Processing

A multimodal sarcasm detection dataset (Cai et al., 2019) was used in the exper-
iments and the proposed model achieves an F1 score of 0.8292. An ablation study
showed that incorporating inter- and intra-modality incongruity learning modules is
useful for sarcasm detection. However, tweets expressing sarcasm may lack hashtags
altogether, or the presence of hashtags does not guarantee a direct association with
sarcasm. A more thorough analysis of the dataset is required to argue that the model
can actually capture ‘incongruity’ between tweet textual content and hashtag.
Wu et al. (2021c) were motivated by a hypothesis that sarcasm involves incon-
gruity between a positive word in text and either a negative facial expression or tone.
The authors proposed a multimodal architecture that jointly learns such incongruities
at word level and utterance-level features. It achieved F1 scores of 0.745 and 0.7 on
speaker-dependent and speaker-independent sets in the MuStARD (Castro et al.,
2019) dataset, respectively. An ablation study showed the effectiveness of word-
level incongruity learning in sarcasm detection. The authors believed that sarcasm
does not involve incongruity between visual and acoustic modalities and that be-
tween a negative word and positive context by definition. Different researchers have
given different definitions of sarcasm and its true meaning is in dispute. Additionally,
sarcasm exists in a wide range of forms and structures (Eke et al., 2020).
Chen et al. (2022) argued that sarcasm involves exaggeration and incongruity.
They propose a model consisting of two modules for learning these characteristics
of sarcasm. For learning exaggeration, LSTM with a self-attention mechanism was
applied to an input statement and output a sentiment-aware embedding. For incon-
gruity, an input sentence was segmented into sequential context chunks, and then,
the average of the pretrained embeddings of such chunks was fed into BiLSTM.
Finally, the concatenation of forward and backward hidden states was obtained. The
output vectors of the two modules were concatenated into a single vector, which was
fed into a softmax layer predicting the label of the input. The ablation study shows
that removing exaggeration and incongruity modules decreases F1 scores by 2.31%
and 2.71%, respectively. Although the authors hypothesized that their modules learn
exaggeration and incongruity in sarcastic statements, it is not clear how each module
is suitable for capturing a specific linguistic characteristic of sarcasm, and thus, their
method and experimental results do not fully support their hypothesis.
Yue et al. (2023) proposed a cognition-inspired model, KnowleNet. They argued
that achieving effective multimodal sarcasm detection relies on prior knowledge and
recognizing the semantic contrast between modalities. The identification of seman-
tic disconnection among modalities necessitates the incorporation of commonsense
information, particularly given that implicit expressions of emotion often demand
a nuanced conceptual understanding of words within diverse contexts. Leveraging
conceptual knowledge from ConceptNet, the authors introduced a novel method
for cross-modal semantic similarity detection, aiming to assess the interrelatedness
between visual and textual information. To enhance feature differentiation between
positive and negative samples, contrastive learning was employed, and the visualiza-
tion results provided supporting evidence for the efficacy of this contrastive learning
approach.
4.3 Sarcasm Detection 267

[Link] Context-based Methods

In the case of online sarcasm detection, contextual information typically refers to

information obtained from conversations involving at least two interlocutors. Social
media messages, particularly tweets, are short in length and contain limited context.
Conversational threads can provide a computational model with contextual factors,
such as a speaker’s attitude and intention; emotional information implied in the
speaker’s tone; knowledge and beliefs shared between the speaker and a listener (Li
et al., 2023b), which is also useful for identifying sarcasm. Consequently, exploiting
conversational context can help sarcasm detection models better understand charac-
teristics of sarcasm.
Kumar et al. (2021) argued that comprehending situational context and contextual
incongruity in conversations is useful for identifying sarcasm in real-world scenar-
ios. This work proposed an explainable model for conversational sarcasm detection,
based on eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) (Chen and Guestrin, 2016) and
TF-IDF. For post-hoc explainability analysis, the architecture incorporated Model-
agnostic Explanations (LIME) (Ribeiro et al., 2016) and Shapley Additive exPlana-
tions (SHAP) (Messalas et al., 2019). Chauhan et al. (2022) argued that the presence
and learning of emojis in text can facilitate the understanding of intended sarcasm.
Their model combined textual, visual, acoustic, and emotional modalities. Textual
input included a target utterance and its context (i.e., its preceding utterances in a
dialogue). For each utterance, embeddings of its constituent words were obtained
by using fastText (Bojanowski et al., 2016). Each utterance also had an emoji la-
bel, whose associated emoji’s embedding was obtained via emoji2vec (Eisner et al.,
2016). The four modalities were concatenated and fed into Gated Multimodal Units
(GMUs) with attention. The authors extended MuStARD (Castro et al., 2019) dataset
by adding emoji; sentiment (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral); and fine-grained
emotion labels (e.g., happy, anger, etc.). The proposed model outperformed two
state-of-the-art models with similar experimental set-ups by achieving a maximum
F1 score of 69.8. The ablation study results proved that leveraging emojis improves
the performance of their model.
While most existing multimodal, context-based methods were proposed for En-
glish corpora, Bedi et al. (2021) proposed a code-mixed dataset, including Hindi and
English dialogues, for multimodal sarcasm and humor detection tasks and a contex-
tualized model for such tasks. The dataset consists of over 15K utterances from an
Indian comedy TV show and was manually annotated. The proposed model employed
two LSTMs and hierarchical attention mechanisms to learn textual and acoustic fea-
tures of conversational utterances. Librosa (McFee et al., 2015) and fastText (Joulin
et al., 2016) were used to extract textual and acoustic features, respectively. This work
conducted extensive experiments with several variations of the proposed model and
ablation studies. The proposed model outperformed existing models for utterance-
level sarcasm detection and emotion recognition in conversations tasks by achieving
F1 score of 0.711 and 0.820 for sarcasm and humor classification tasks, respec-
tively. This work is a good attempt to shed light on multi-lingual, multimodal, and
multi-tasking sarcasm detection.
268 4 Pragmatics Processing

4.3.6 Downstream Applications

Sarcasm detection is an integral component of human communication. Despite its

importance, practical applications of the task have not been widely explored. This
section outlines a few attempts at applying sarcasm detection in downstream tasks
in different domains.

[Link] Sentiment Analysis

Sarcasm detection plays a key role in sentiment analysis. Lunando and Purwarianti
(2013) are one of the early works which considered sarcasm in the task of sentiment
analysis. The proposed architecture first identified the sentiment label (i.e., positive,
negative, and neutral) for an input text and then performed sarcasm detection for
the texts labeled with the “positive” label. For the sarcasm detection component, the
model employed two features (i.e., manually computed topic negativity score and
the number of interjection words) on top of the three linguistic features, used for the
first component.
Bouazizi and Ohtsuki (2015) attempted to examine whether sarcasm can improve
sentiment classification on X corpora. To this end, they used hand-crafted features
such as the number of laughters, that of interjections, and the existence of common
sarcastic expressions. Experimental results showed that adding such features could
improve the classification performance of machine learning models. Yunitasari et al.
(2019) exploited the output of binary sarcasm detection to improve the performance
of sentiment classification for Indonesian tweets. This work assumed that sarcasm
is associated with negative sentiment. Therefore, when a sarcastic statement was
classified as “positive”, the model changed its label to “negative”. For sarcasm de-
tection, the architecture employed hand-crafted features associated with sentiment
and punctuation as well as lexical and syntactic features. Experimental results failed
to prove their hypothesis, which indicates that sarcasm is not necessarily associ-
ated with negative sentiment. More advanced contextual information is required to
comprehend sarcasm.
El Mahdaouy et al. (2021) proposed an MTL model that performs sarcasm and
sentiment classification for the Arabic language. The model was capable of learning
the relationship between the two tasks by incorporating attention layers, while most
existing MTL models for sentiment analysis performed different tasks independently.
The ArSarcasm Shared Task dataset consisting of 15,548 tweets was used in the ex-
periments. The results showed that their model outperformed single-tasking models
in sarcasm detection in terms of macro-average F1 score, while a single-tasking
model without attention achieved the best performance for sentiment classification.
As for class-specific F1 score, the proposed MTL model performed best. Their find-
ings indicated that utilizing relational information between sarcasm detection and
sentiment classification could boost the classification performance of each task.
4.3 Sarcasm Detection 269

[Link] Mental Health

Larsen et al. (2016) investigated how Huntington’s disease gene expansion carriers
perform in sarcasm detection, emotion recognition, and theory of mind compared
with healthy controls. This study used sarcasm detection as a measure to assess social-
cognitive impairment. It was assessed using the Social Inference Minimal (SI-M)
test of The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) (McDonald et al., 2003).
The SI-M test evaluated the understanding of sincere and sarcastic interactions.
The results indicated that the higher the severity of patient’s illness is, the poorer
their performance on sarcasm detection is. Their findings offered insights into how
sarcasm detection could aid the early detection of mental health diseases and the
tracking of their progression as well as support patients and clinical and health
professionals.
Several studies and research articles have reported that exposure to cyberbully-
ing is associated with several mental disorders such as depression, self-harm, and
anxiety (Schodt et al., 2021; Skilbred-Fjeld et al., 2020; Maurya et al., 2022). Chia
et al. (2021) applied a machine learning model trained on a sarcasm detection dataset
to a cyberbullying detection dataset to examine the extent to which sarcasm detec-
tion could be useful for cyberbullying detection. Experimental results showed that
a sarcasm detection model surpassed the performance of a model trained on a cy-
berbullying detection dataset, as evidenced by a higher F1 score. This indicates that
sarcastic expressions are commonly used in instances of cyberbullying. It highlights
the importance of developing better tools for detecting sarcasm, as this could signif-
icantly improve the identification and understanding of online cyberbullying cases.
Enhanced sarcasm detection could help in accurately identifying harmful content
and protecting individuals from online abuse.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people’s mental health globally. Rother-
mich et al. (2021) studied changes in the usage of humor and sarcasm among 661
adults (164 with mental disorders and 497 asymptomatic individuals) during the pan-
demic via self-report questionnaires. Experimental subjects were asked how their
usage of sarcasm and humor has changed in the past month. Chi-square tests were
used to evaluate relationships between the frequency of change in the usage of humor
and sarcasm and the anxiety/depression severity of the subjects. The results indicated
that the individuals with depression tend to use it more frequently while those with
anxiety showed no significant change in the usage of humor.
As for sarcasm, individuals with mental disorders used more sarcasm than the
asymptomatic ones did. The authors reported that it should be further investigated
whether the motivation behind the increase in the usage of sarcasm is associated with
self-enhancement or self-deprecation. The findings and future research directions
described in this study offered useful insights into a better understanding of coping
strategies of individuals with mental disorders during crises, which can potentially
benefit patients and health professionals.
270 4 Pragmatics Processing

[Link] Other Applications

Some studies attempted to apply sarcasm detection in other domains apart from
sentiment analysis and mental health. Although these areas have yet to be explored
extensively, they have the potential to benefit businesses and human well-being.
Danielyan (2022) studied the usage and impact of sarcasm in advertising campaigns
from a pragmalinguistic perspective. This work reported that sarcastic expressions in
advertisements drew people’s attention and enhanced user engagement, thereby help-
ing companies gain a positive brand reputation. The paper acknowledges potential
drawbacks and adverse effects associated with the use of sarcasm in advertising. One
concern is the risk of misinterpretation or misunderstanding by the target audience,
potentially resulting in confusion or negative reactions. Furthermore, the caustic or
bitter tone of sarcasm can be perceived negatively by the audience. The paper also
highlights ongoing debates among scholars and linguists regarding the appropriate-
ness of employing sarcastic language in social contexts, with some asserting that it
may have toxic or detrimental effects on relationships.
Zhou et al. (2021b) proposed a dialogue system that generates sarcasm-aware
responses. The authors argued that sarcasm-aware dialogue systems are essential
to avoid misunderstanding and more human interactions. The proposed model first
detected sarcasm from text and speech signals, using existing sentiment analysis
tools. Next, the output of the sarcasm detection module was encoded as a two-
dimension one-hot vector, in which the first and the second respectively represented
whether an input utterance is sarcastic and whether each of the expected responses
is sarcastic. The sarcasm-aware representation was concatenated with other types of
input embeddings and the joint representation was fed into a deep learning model
that generated a response for the input. For evaluation, the SARC (Khodak et al.,
2018) dataset and BLEU (Papineni et al., 2002) which is originally designed to
measure how well a machine-translated text correlates with human judgment, were
used. BLEU was also used as an indicator of the adequacy and fluency of a natural
language generation model. Some examples of sarcasm-aware responses generated
by the proposed model were given in this work and the authors claimed that their
model is capable of generating more interesting dialogues.

4.3.7 Summary

Sarcasm detection is an active research area and has great potential to improve the
performance of computational methods for a wide range of NLU tasks. Findings
of the theoretical research into sarcasm provide useful clues into the computational
learning and modeling of sarcasm from the perspectives of cognition, communicative
behavior, and neural mechanisms. For example, several studies emphasized that
the understanding of contextual information and the identification of contradiction
between the literal/figurative meaning of a statement and observational evidence are
the keys to the successful interpretation of sarcasm.
4.3 Sarcasm Detection 271

The latest computational research actively takes such signals into the learning
process of sarcasm, leading to the development of models equipped with diverse
modality learning capabilities. We also reviewed two main approaches for annotating
datasets for sarcasm detection. Manual annotation is a natural choice for constructing
high-quality corpora, although it is difficult to generate large-scale datasets for labor-
and time-costs. Some researchers have advocated for novel data labeling approaches
that demand minimal human supervision, advocating for the adoption of weakly
supervised annotation methods. These methods typically involve the generation of
annotations through sets of pre-defined keywords, such as hashtags on X, deemed
relevant to sarcasm.

[Link] Technical Trends

Feature-based methods usually identify sarcastic utterances by inputting hand-crafted

features into machine learning classifiers and paved the way for more advanced com-
putational learning of sarcasm. The works under this technical trend believe that
manually developed linguistic features can complement conventional embeddings,
e.g., GloVe. Potamias et al. (2019) proposed 44 hand-crafted features encompassing
syntactic, demonstrative, sentiment, mood, and readability attributes. Pandey et al.
(2021) proposed 16 hand-crafted linguistic features, e.g., entropy, lex diversity, num-
ber of nouns, number of adjectives, number of verbs, sum of verbs available in the
given sentence, the Flesch Reading Ease formula, Dale Chall readability, difficult
words, length, set length, stopword count, wrong word, one-letter word, two-letter
word, longer letter word, <li> tags. In the prevailing focus on deep learning within
the academic landscape, the study highlights the enduring value of research dedicated
to feature engineering. Despite the transformative impact of deep learning across
multiple domains, the acknowledgment of traditional methods, particularly feature
engineering, remains imperative. This recognition underscores the enduring signifi-
cance of feature engineering in providing valuable insights and contributions. By fos-
tering a nuanced understanding of language intricacies, feature engineering emerges
as a fundamental tool for deciphering complex linguistic expressions. Moreover, its
role extends to the broader domain of human-centric computing, emphasizing its
continued relevance in shaping our comprehension of language phenomena.
Embedding-based methods exploit (contextualized) word embeddings, which are
usually generated using PLMs, to represent input data. They have produced state-
of-the-art results across a wide range of NLP tasks. Contextualized embeddings are
advantageous to NLP tasks in that they can automatically encode word semantics
in different contexts and discern polysemy and homonymy. Methods based on em-
beddings have demonstrated exceptional performance with the advancement of deep
learning techniques, exemplified by models like BiLSTM, GCN, CNN, and Atten-
tion mechanisms. Leveraging pretrained embeddings, while proficient in capturing
semantic information, falls short in directly acquiring pertinent knowledge beyond
semantics for effective sarcasm detection.
272 4 Pragmatics Processing

Table 4.7: Technical trends in sarcasm detection. Feat., emb., SI, and cont. denote
feature-, embedding-, semantic incongruity- and context-based trends, respectively.

Trend Reference Tech Feature Framework Dataset Score Metric

Potamias et al. (2019) Hybrid hand-crafted features + GloVe BiLSTM+Attention Riloff et al. (2013) 0.87 F1
Feat.
Pandey et al. (2021) Hybrid hand-crafted features + GloVe LSTM+Attention Misra and Arora (2019) 0.88 F1
Shrivastava and Kumar (2021) DL BERT BiLSTM+Attention Van Hee et al. (2018) 0.85 F1
Yao et al. (2021) DL Multimodal embeddings Gating+Attention Cai et al. (2019) 0.80 F1
Emb. Liang et al. (2022a) DL BERT+ViT GCNs Cai et al. (2019) 0.87 F1
Kamal and Abulaish (2022) DL GloVe CNN+BiGRU Ptá ek et al. (2014) 0.89 F1
Cai et al. (2019) DL RestNet-50 V2+GloVe BiLSTM+Modality Fusion Cai et al. (2019) 0.80 F1
Ren et al. (2020) DL SenticNet Memory Network Ptá ek et al. (2014) 0.87 F1
Pan et al. (2020) DL RestNet+BERT Attention networks Cai et al. (2019) 0.83 F1
SI Wu et al. (2021c) DL RestNet+BERT+OpenSmile Attention networks Castro et al. (2019) 0.75 F1
Chen et al. (2022) DL RestNet+BERT+OpenSmile MTL Khodak et al. (2018) 0.74 F1
Yue et al. (2023) DL RestNet+BERT+ConceptNet Matrix transf.+Similarity Cai et al. (2019) 0.74 F1
Kumar et al. (2021) ML TF-IDF XGBoost+LIME+SHAP Castro et al. (2019) 0.92 F1
Cont. Chauhan et al. (2022) DL fastText+emoji2vec GMUs+Attention Castro et al. (2019) 0.70 F1
Bedi et al. (2021) DL fastText+Librosa LSTM+Attention Bedi et al. (2021) 0.71 F1

Semantic incongruity-based methods are cognition-inspired. They leverage the

contrast between the meaning of an utterance and contextual evidence or sentimental
incongruity to detect sarcasm. Capturing incongruity is challenging. (Yue et al.,
2023) tried to detect the clash between the factual and stated information from text
and images. Interpreting facts from images However, since there exist different types
of incongruities in sarcasm, and hence, effectively modeling the incongruity between
facts and statements still remains several open research directions.
Finally, context-based methods learn contextual information obtained from con-
versations. The advantage of detecting sarcasm from conversions is that the multi-
turn conversational interactions between a speaker and a listener provide more clues
for detecting the clash between facts and statements. Using conversational threads
can enhance the performance of machine learning models in diverse NLP tasks by
providing additional context such as propagation patterns of a target event (Han
et al., 2019; Gao et al., 2020; Sawhney et al., 2022; Vuong et al., 2021). While most
sarcasm detection models in the other categories are trained and evaluated on social
media datasets, these context-based methods usually employ transcripts of TV shows
and movies, which are written by professional screenwriters.

[Link] Application Trends

Sarcasm is prevalent in human communication and correctly interpreting sarcas-

tic utterances can unlock the potential of machine learning techniques for a wide
range of NLU tasks. This chapter introduced a few attempts at sentiment analysis,
mental health, advertising, and dialogue systems. Detecting sarcasm plays a crucial
role in sentiment analysis, with existing studies often employing sarcasm detection
techniques to enhance model performance through the integration of supportive fea-
tures. Additionally, there have been works to utilize sarcasm detection as a parsing
mechanism for sentiment analysis. These parsing-oriented sentiment analysis sys-
tems typically adhere to a simplistic rule, such as assigning the opposite sentiment
polarity when confronted with a sarcastic input.
4.3 Sarcasm Detection 273

Table 4.8: Sarcasm detection downstream task applications.

Reference Downstream Task Feature Parser Explainability

Lunando and Purwarianti (2013) Sentiment analysis X
Bouazizi and Ohtsuki (2015) Sentiment analysis X
Yunitasari et al. (2019) Sentiment analysis X
El Mahdaouy et al. (2021) Sentiment analysis X
Larsen et al. (2016) Mental health X
Chia et al. (2021) Mental health X
Rothermich et al. (2021) Mental health X
Danielyan (2022) Advertising campaigns X
Zhou et al. (2021b) Dialogue system X

Bouazizi and Ohtsuki (2015) claimed that some hand-crafted features are as-
sociated with sarcasm and adding such features improved the performance of the
proposed model for sentiment analysis. Yunitasari et al. (2019) studied sentiment
classification based on an assumption that sarcasm carries negative sentiment. How-
ever, their experimental results did not support such an assumption. El Mahdaouy
et al. (2021) investigated how MTL on both sentiment and sarcasm could improve
the performance of each task. They did not assume certain aspects of sarcasm and,
hence, their method was more generalizable than the two studies introduced earlier.
Some studies explored the correlation between sarcasm and mental health condi-
tions. In this context, the identification of sarcasm serves as a parsing mechanism,
enabling subsequent mental analysis based on the recognition of patterns in sarcastic
expressions, particularly concerning mental health issues. Larsen et al. (2016) inves-
tigated the cognitive functioning of patients with Huntington’s disease via sarcasm
detection and observed that patients lost their ability to understand and interpret sar-
casm as their disease developed. This study did not exploit automatic, computational
sarcasm detection. Chia et al. (2021) studied the usage of sarcasm in cyberbullying
and reported that sarcastic expressions were commonly used in cyberharassment.
Rothermich et al. (2021) researched the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic
on people’s mental health by statistically analyzing changes in the usage of humor and
sarcasm. This study reported that people with different mental disorders exhibited
different patterns in the usage of humor and sarcasm.
Furthermore, the identification of sarcasm holds promise for enhancing explain-
ability in advertising and improving efficacy in dialogue systems. Danielyan (2022)
reported that sarcasm could be an effective tool in advertising campaigns as it helped
to draw people’s attention and increase customer engagement. In this context, the
use of sarcastic language serves as a tool for explaining customer behaviors. Zhou
et al. (2021b) proposed a sarcasm-aware, generative dialogue system. The dialogue
system aims to employ the identified sarcastic label as a signal, prompting the dia-
logue system to generate appropriate responses to sarcastic expressions. Although
this study shed light on the importance of sarcasm understanding in dialogue sys-
tems, the results generated using the proposed model showed that there was great
room for improvement.
274 4 Pragmatics Processing

[Link] Future Works

Research into automatic sarcasm detection has gained popularity due to its impor-
tance in our daily communication. Despite several efforts to comprehend sarcasm
and make computers understand and use sarcasm in different disciplines, several
challenges have yet to be tackled. Firstly, understanding sarcasm requires diverse
contextual factors. Several studies in psycholinguistics, pragmatics, and neuroscience
have delved into how context could help humans perceive, process, and comprehend
sarcasm. Ensuring the context awareness and generalizability of sarcasm detection
methods is crucial. Computational research in automatic sarcasm detection usu-
ally employs sarcastic utterances obtained from social media (e.g., X), which have
limited context in nature due to short lengths. To overcome this limitation, it is
recommended to investigate sarcasm detection using multiple modalities, broader
contexts, and external knowledge. Employing multimodal data enables the detec-
tion of incongruities beyond text, while a broader context, such as shared long-term
experiences and cultural background, offers clues for identifying inconsistent in-
formation in sarcastic expressions. Additionally, incorporating external knowledge,
such as commonsense, provides information not directly obtainable from sarcasm
datasets. Moreover, future research should further investigate how to generate and
leverage effective representations of a wide range of contextual factors.
Secondly, there is a need to create multimodal sarcasm detection datasets with
separate sarcasm annotations for distinct modalities. Current studies in multimodal
sarcasm detection commonly utilize the dataset from the work of Cai et al. (2019),
where a unified sarcasm label is assigned to a text-image pair for multimodal com-
puting. While this label is reasonable for multimodal analysis, it poses challenges in
ablation studies when text-only or image-only inputs share the same label derived
from the multimodal context. This is problematic because some sarcastic expres-
sions have labels annotated based on the combination of text and image, whereas the
independent text or images may not be sarcastic. As illustrated in the example on the
right in Fig. 4.4, a combination of a raining image and the statement “what wonderful
weather” might be defined as sarcasm, but the sarcasm may not be evident in each
modality. Therefore, it is unreliable to assert that a multimodal model outperforms
a unimodal model if sarcasm labels annotated for multimodal data are employed for
unimodal evaluation. To address this issue, a multimodal dataset with independent
annotations for different modalities is essential in the sarcasm detection research
community.
Thirdly, existing studies on sarcasm detection (Liu et al., 2014; Meriem et al.,
2021; Mishra et al., 2016) mentioned that sarcasm identification could benefit several
real-world applications such as marketing, advertising, opinion mining, dialogue sys-
tems, and review summarization. Although several researchers have acknowledged
the importance of sarcasm detection in downstream tasks, practical applications of
the task have not been widely studied. The complexity inherent in detecting sarcasm
across diverse domains contributes to the challenges associated with this task. This
heightened difficulty in sarcasm recognition poses additional obstacles to its effective
application in downstream tasks.
4.4 Personality Recognition 275

Existing research in applications often incorporates sarcastic features as input or

employs a dedicated sarcasm classifier to parse text with sarcastic elements. How-
ever, there remains a notable gap between comprehensive sarcastic analysis and
research in psycholinguistics. Subsequent investigations could focus on refining the
formulation of practical and impactful sarcasm detection tasks. For instance, incor-
porating explainability features could elucidate the cognitive mechanisms behind
sarcastic expressions, thereby augmenting the practical utility of sarcasm detection
techniques. An alternative avenue of exploration involves broadening the task formu-
lation of sarcasm detection beyond a simplistic binary classification, encompassing
a nuanced analysis across multiple dimensions of sarcastic language.

4.4 Personality Recognition

Personality encompasses an individual’s distinctive patterns of thought, emotion,

and behavior, inclusive of the underlying psychological mechanisms, whether overt
or concealed, that give rise to these patterns (Funder, 1997). According to Ozer and
Benet-Martinez (2006), personality is personality is linked to individual happiness,
both physical and psychological well-being, spiritual beliefs, and self-perception.
On an interpersonal level, it influences the nature of relationships with peers, family,
and romantic partners. At a social institutional level, personality is tied to occupa-
tional decisions, satisfaction, and performance, along with community engagement,
criminal behavior, and political ideology.
Automatic personality recognition, also known as personality recognition (Ma-
jumder et al., 2017) or personality identification (Kaushal and Patwardhan, 2018),
has been one of the three emerging research topics of personality computing (Vin-
ciarelli and Mohammadi, 2014). It aims to identify personality traits from machine-
detectable distal cues, including textual, audio, and video sources (Mushtaq and
Kumar, 2023) for individuals. It adopts approaches, based on social signal pro-
cessing, affective computing, AI and methodologies in other domains. Personality
recognition has been applied in many real-life scenarios (Mushtaq and Kumar, 2023;
Remaida et al., 2020), such as recruitment, education, social network analysis, rec-
ommendation systems, and sentiment analysis, which attracts wide attention from
academia and industry. Currently, there are two main personality recognition models,
namely: Big Five (also known as OCEAN because the five factors or dimensions are
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) and
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality recognition.
276 4 Pragmatics Processing

4.4.1 Theoretical Research

[Link] The Big Five and Its Instruments

One of the most famous personality factor models, the Big Five, is an inter-individual
personality structure which originated from the five factor model (FFM) (Norman,
1963). Goldberg (1981) designated the FFM as the Big Five, based on the research
of Wiggins (1968) who dubbed “Extraversion (E)” and “Neuroticism (N)” the Big
Two. Costa Jr (1980) added a dimension “Openness to Experience (O)” and later
in 1985 and 1989, they proposed measure scales of “Agreeableness (A)” and “Con-
scientiousness (C)”. Finally, the Big Five dimensions, shown in Table 4.9, were
compiled, showing the putative assignment of standard personality factors or scales.
The descriptions of the binary values (Yes / No) utilize the Big Five trait definition
from the works of McCrae and John (1992). Most personality traits are measured
from two fundamental sources: self-reports and observer ratings. Using both in-
struments, i.e., questionnaires and trait adjectives (lexical approach), in self-reports
or observer ratings originates in the 1980s, of which has been justified the feasi-
bility by a series of research papers (Norman, 1969). Remarkably, all five factors
were shown to have discriminant and convergent validity across personality instru-
ments and observers (McCrae and Costa, 1985; Goldberg, 1989), enduring across
decades in adults (McCrae and Costa, 1990). These studies justified empirically the
correspondences between the named factors in the two traditional sources.
Personality assessment research has extensively utilized questionnaire instru-
ments based on the five factors. These questionnaires involve individuals providing
self-ratings or observers rating the target person on a Likert-type scale, ranging, for
example, from -2 to 2 or from 1 to 5, to gauge the degree of agreement from disagree
strongly to agree strongly. The top popular questionnaires include the Ten-Item Per-
sonality Inventory (TIPI, 10 items) (Gosling et al., 2003), the Big-Five Inventory
(BFI, 44 items) (John et al., 1991), the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI, 60
items) (McCrae and Costa Jr, 2004), and the NEO-Personality-Inventory Revised
(NEO-PI-R, 240 items) (Costa Jr and McCrae, 1995). The first-person questionnaires
(e.g., “I tend to find fault with others”) lead to self-report, i.e., people’s identities,
while the third-person questionnaires (e.g., “this person tends to find fault with oth-
ers”) come from observer ratings, i.e., people’s reputation. The quantitative measures
of personality traits set the stage for representing personality in a numerical model.

Table 4.9: Big Five personality traits model (also known as OCEAN).

Description
Factor Yes No
Openness (O) innovative and curious dogmatic and cautious
Conscientiousness (C) organized and professional careless and sloppy
Extraversion (E) active and sociable reserved and solitary
Agreeableness (A) trustworthy and modest unreliable and boastful
Neuroticism (N) sensitive and anxious secure and confident
4.4 Personality Recognition 277

[Link] Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Another popular personality typology was developed by Myers et al. (1998), termed
MBTI. MBTI is rooted in personality typology (Jung and Beebe, 2016) and
was formulated to assess individuals’ psychological preferences in cognition and
decision-making. It classifies people into 16 distinct personality types, determined
by their preferences across four dichotomous dimensions: Extraversion-Introversion
(E-I), Sensing-Intuition (S-N), Thinking-Feeling (T-F), and Judging-Perceiving (J-
P) (see 4.10 for details). The primary objective of developing MBTI during World
War II was to create a pragmatic tool facilitating self-awareness and interpersonal
understanding, particularly in realms such as career planning, team dynamics, and
personal development. Over time, MBTI gained prominence in organizational and
industrial psychology (Cohen et al., 2013), as well as career counseling (Savickas,
2019).
However, MBTI also encountered skepticism from scholars and psychometric
experts who question its theoretical underpinnings and measurement robustness.
Pittenger (1993) argued that MBTI displayed correlations with other personality
measures, suggesting challenges in maintaining its distinct assessment qualities.
Advocates of MBTI’s validity typically cited findings linking one of its four scales to
specific behaviors. Nevertheless, the available data did not substantiate the assertion
that MBTI effectively measures distinct personality types or that the delineation of
the 16 types is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of personality.

Table 4.10: The four dichotomies of the MBTI model (Myers et al., 1998).

Extraversion-Introversion Dichotomy
(attitudes or orientations of energy)

Extraversion (E) Introversion (I)

Directing energy mainly toward the outer Directing energy mainly toward the inner
world of people and objects world of experiences and ideas
Sensing-Intuition Dichotomy
(functions or processes of perception)

Sensing (S) Intuition (N)

Focusing mainly on what can be perceived by Focusing mainly on perceiving patterns and
the five senses interrelationships
Thinking-Feeling Dichotomy
(functions or processes of judging)

Thinking (T) Feeling (F)

Basing conclusions on logical analysis with a Basing conclusions on social values with a
focus on objectivity and detachment focus on understanding and harmony
Judging-Perceiving Dichotomy
(attitudes or orientations toward dealing with the outside world)

Judging (J) Perceiving (P)

Preferring the decisiveness and closure that Preferring the flexibility and spontaneity that
result from dealing with the outer world results from dealing with the outer world
through Judging (Thinking or Feeling) through Perceiving (Sensing or Intuition)
278 4 Pragmatics Processing

[Link] Personality Psychology

In the area of personality psychology, the research on personality includes personality

structure, process (Cervone, 2005), stability and change (Ozer and Benet-Martinez,
2006; Caspi et al., 2005). Cervone (2005) argued that personality structure consists
of two aspects: 1) within-person content and organization of personality systems;
2) between-person variation in the population; it is also called intra-individual and
inter-individual personality structures, respectively. The intra-individual analysis
accounts for the actions and experiences of a person with scientific models (Mag-
nusson and Torestad, 1993; Mischel, 2004; Freud, 1989) for intra-individual men-
tal systems, while inter-individual analysis explains differences between individu-
als (Borsboom et al., 2003) by classifying inter-individual categories of popula-
tion variation (Asendorpf, 2003; Ashton et al., 2004; Saucier, 2003). Furthermore,
inter-individual personality structure does not capture psychological tendencies or
personality changes at the level of the individual case (Cervone, 2005).
Guadagno et al. (2008); Qiu et al. (2012); Johnson and Gardner (2010) believed
that personality traits can be externalized through people’s behavior, which explores
the interaction between personality and the way people use technology. Furthermore,
it is demonstrated that the choice of words can be driven by, besides its meaning,
psychological phenomena such as relational attitudes, emotions, and personality
traits (Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010). Therefore, it is possible to predict person-
ality traits from texts by employing socioliguistics in techniques for automatic text
analysis, which has been proved by several research works (Gill et al., 2009; Luyckx
and Daelemans, 2008; Oberlander and Nowson, 2006).

4.4.2 Annotation Schemes

To get the personality trait annotation, the composers or speakers of the corpus (e.g.,
essays, conversations, etc.) will be scored by themselves or other observers according
to given personality questionnaire instruments. As mentioned in section [Link], there
are a large number of questionnaires, such as TIPI, BFI, NEO-FFI, NEO-PI-R, etc.
Since TIPI and BFI contain relatively less items and all the questionnaires share the
similar question format, the detailed questionnaires of TIPI (Table 4.13) and BFI
(Table 4.11) are token as the examples and shown in this section. For each question
in BFI, the participant needs to select a number ranging from 1 to 5 to show the
agreement (from disagree strongly to agree strongly) with that statement. Then, the
result/ category of each dimension of Big Five is obtained through the scoring of
each dimension of the personality traits in Table 4.12. While in TIPI, the participant
are required to write a number ranging from 1 to 7 to indicate the extent to which he
or she agrees with the statement. The continuous decimal value of each dimension
of Big Five is obtained according the scoring rule in Table 4.14.
4.4 Personality Recognition 279

Table 4.11: BFI. Participants are required to write a number next to each statement to
show the degree (1 disagree strongly, 2 disagree a little, 3 neither agree nor disagree,
4 agree a little, 5 agree strongly) to which they agree or disagree with that statement.

I see Myself as Someone Who...

1. Is talkative 2. Tends to find fault with others 3. Does a thorough job
4. Is depressed, blue 5. Is original, has new ideas 6. Is reserved
7. Is helpful and unselfish with others 8. Can be somewhat careless 9. Is relaxed, handles stress well
10. Is curious about different things 11. Is full of energy 12. Starts quarrels with others
13. Is a reliable worker 14. Can be tense 15. Is ingenious, a deep thinker
16. Generates a lot of enthusiasm 17. Has a forgiving nature 18. Tends to be disorganized
19. Worries a lot 20. Has an active imagination 21. Tends to be quiet
22. Is generally trusting 23. Tends to be lazy 24. Not easily upset
25. Is inventive 26. Has an assertive personality 27. Can be cold and aloof
28. Perseveres until the task is over 29. Can be moody 30. Values aesthetic experiences
31. Is sometimes shy, inhibited 32. Is kind to almost everyone 33. Does things efficiently
34. Remains calm in tense situations 35. Prefers work that is routine 36. Is outgoing, sociable
37. Is sometimes rude to others 38. Makes plans and follows them 39. Gets nervous easily
40. Likes to reflect, play with ideas 41. Has few artistic interests 42. Likes to cooperate with others
43. Is easily distracted 44. Is sophisticated in art or literature

Table 4.12: BFI scoring. “R” refers to reverse-scored items.

Factor Corresponding Characteristic Index

Extraversion 1 6R 11 16 21R 26 31R 36
Neuroticism 4 9R 14 19 24R 29 34R 39
Agreeableness 2R 7 12R 17 22 27R 32 37R 42
Conscientiousness 3 8R 13 18R 23R 28 33 38 43R
Openness 5 10 15 20 25 30 35R 40 41R 44

Table 4.13: TIPI. Participants are required to write a number next to each statement
to show the degree (from 1 to 7) to which they agree or disagree with that statement.

I see myself as:

1. Extraverted, enthusiastic. 2. Critical, quarrelsome. 3. Dependable, self-disciplined.
4. Anxious, easily upset. 5. Open to experiences, complex. 6. Reserved, quiet.
7. Sympathetic, warm. 8. Disorganized, careless. 9. Calm, emotionally stable.
10. Conventional, uncreative.

Table 4.14: TIPI scoring. “R” refers to reverse-scored items.

Factor Corresponding Characteristic Index

Extraversion 1 6R
Agreeableness 2R 7
Conscientiousness 3 8R
Emotional Stability 4R 9
Openness 5 10R

4.4.3 Datasets

Many datasets were constructed for personality recognition based on OCEAN and
MBTI (Table 4.15). Essay dataset (Pennebaker and King, 1999) contains 2,479
stream-of-consciousness essays written by psychology students who were asked to
write down whatever they think off within 20 minutes. The binary personality labels
of each essay writer were obtained by asking students to fill in the BFI questionnaire.
The following snippet shows an annotated essay sample.
280 4 Pragmatics Processing

Table 4.15: Personality recognition datasets and statistics.

Reference Task Source # Sample

Pennebaker and King (1999) Big Five Essays 2,479 essays
Biel et al. (2013) Big Five Vlogs related to diverse domains 408 vlogs
Kerz et al. (2022) Big Five Climate change, vaccination, AI 20h speech
Kaggle MBTI MBTI Social media posts 8600 instances

text: “I haven’t chatted on MIRC for a long while. Maybe I’ll do that at work, it should be fun. Hmmm, I’m just thinking

like random thoughts, about nothing specific. My gyming is going fine, hope I get a good looking chest/body over the next

month or so, not that I need to show it off or something, just because this way the clothes i wear will I guess look

better on me... I think I’m going to go to my job kind of early and print out some slides for the CS class quiz it should

be easy. and about this whole Coop thing I think I should go check out the companies but not really apply apply I don’t

want to as yet I think I can make my GPA higher and then apply what do you say well I can’t there’s no one really who

might be able to help me out I just have to think about myself.”

personality: Yes No Yes No No

YouTube dataset (Biel et al., 2013) is built from 408 randomly selected YouTube
vlogs with a set of personality traits for each vlogger. The content of the vlogs are
relevant to books, movies, politics, personal issues, etc. The personality traits are
the Big Five scores annotated by crowdsource workers. the dataset is balanced in
gender, with 211 female (52%) and 197 male (48%) vloggers. There are 243k word
tokens and 10k unique tokens with an audio of 30h in total in the YouTube dataset.

text: “- And here is. I don’t know if you can hear me or not, probably or hopefully because this music is really loud.

But uh, I wanted to apologize YouTube, because I’ve tried

countless time to upload the same videos and for some reason it’s just not being

cooperative. I don’t know, but um, I’ve been trying for a week to upload the ones for local bloggers that I did. Sorry

guys, um, my promotion video might be up, might not. I don’t know, well well I mean, like, it might be up eventually.

Um, yeah, ah, right now I’m in North Carolina. Ah, where are we? What town are we in?

- Oh, um, Fairfield?

- No, we’re at the Fairfield Marriot but we’re in a

- North Carolina?

- We were just at some first basketball game, uh, where we played a song and stuff. But um, I just wanted to apologize.

We are going to do another blog with all of my

friends that are in this room. The other ones are downstairs getting our pizza. So,

when they come back ”

personality: 6 4.9 5.1 5.4 5.8

SPADE dataset (Kerz et al., 2022) consists of 20h of speech from 220 individuals
among which 129 are male, 88 are female and 3 are diverse. The transcribed speech
was obtained via the AMT crowdsourcing platform, with 848,827 words in total.
The personality traits were collected through the BFI questionnaire.
4.4 Personality Recognition 281

Kaggle MBTI dataset23 was gathered from the PersonalityCafe forum, containing
over 8600 instances. Each instance includes the last 50 posts of a user and associates
an MBTI type of the user.

Personality: ENFJ
Post: That sounds like a beautiful relationship already. But don’t push too fast as it
seems she needs to be appreciated as a friend. But at the end of the day you can ...

4.4.4 Evaluation Metrics

Automatic personality recognition is usually formalized as two tasks: classification

and linear regression. Precision, Recall, F1 , and Accuracy are the most commonly
used evaluation metrics for personality classification tasks. For the regression tasks,
Pearson’s r, Adjusted R2 , Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and MSE are the commonly
used evaluation metrics. Here, Pearson’s r is a linear rank measure of predicted and
target values. Adjusted R2 shows the proportion of variance in the target values that
is explained by predicted values. MAE reflects the average of all absolute errors.
MSE depicts the average of the squares of errors.

4.4.5 Methods

[Link] Big Five Personality Recognition

A. Computational Psychology Approaches

There has been a shift from questionnaire approach to computational psychology

approaches since the last century, which combines the psychology theories and
linguistics models. The early implementation of Pennebaker and King (1999) re-
vealed that the linguistic style was an indicator for the differences of individuals
across different contexts and time through leveraging a computational program, i.e.,
LIWC (Francis and Booth, 1993). LIWC provides a “gold standard” of categories for
studying the textual data from the aspects of linguistic, grammatical and psychologi-
cal dimensions. It has been developed into the current enhanced version (Pennebaker
et al., 2015) over the past twenty years. During the same period, several studies (Pen-
nebaker, 2013; Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010), on the basis of LIWC, found that
function words were more informative than content words in terms of showing in-
dividual differences. The function words are capable of connecting, shaping and
organizing the texts, such as conjunctions, pronouns, and prepositions.

23 [Link]
282 4 Pragmatics Processing

The content words refer to those depicting an action or object, e.g., verbs, adjec-
tives and nouns. This means how, instead of what, people communicate fundamen-
tally reflects more of their psychological situation. However, the approaches based
on LIWC had some limitations. They were constrained by the inherent computation
mechanism, i.e., statistical features based on word counts, failing to capture some
implicit contextual elements such as irony or sarcasm (Pennebaker et al., 2003).
Additionally, these methods only explore and analyze the correlations between the
LIWC features and the personality, instead of automatically recognizing the person-
ality traits from texts (ätajner and Yenikent, 2020).

B. Computational Linguistic Approaches

With the development of machine learning and computational linguistics, researchers

started to think outside the box of previous research framework based on LIWC. Arg-
amon et al. (2005) were the first implementation of automatic personality recognition
from texts. They believed personality could be reflected by the writing style of the
texts and defined the stylish meaning of a text as non-denotational, i.e., independent
of the topic or the content of the text. Accordingly, function words, proven useful
for stylistic text classification (Argamon et al., 2003), were considered unlikely to
be subject to conscious control by the authors and their frequencies varies across
different genres and authors. Then, they proposed to utilize the relative frequencies
of 675 functional words under three system networks as lexical stylistic features,
i.e., cohesion, assessment and appraisal, based on the theory of systemic functional
grammar. Finally, they carried out binary classification task of recognizing neuroti-
cism (emotional stability) and extraversion from the Essays corpus by using the SMO
learning algorithm (Platt, 1999), obtaining an accuracy of 58%.
This work inspired Oberlander and Nowson (2006) to explore what else might
be good features for personality recognition tasks besides pre-defined semantic
and syntactic categories such as LIWC. They leveraged n-gram features (known as
open-vocabulary approach) to allow the classifier to discover linguistic signals for
the four personality traits of Big Five even other signals that cannot be exploited
by previous psycholinguistic studies (closed-vocabulary approach). Furthermore,
besides a binary classification task, they defined personality recognition as a multiple
classification task to approximate continuous rating modeling. They experimented
on personal weblogs instead of Essays corpus with Naïve Bayes and SVM.
Notably, their study showed that the classification accuracy could be improved
by a large amount (from 54% to 93% in terms of agreeableness) as the noise of
non-discriminating features was ruled out with manual restrictions such as cor-
pus frequency or relative frequency ratios. It also demonstrated the potential of
open-vocabulary approach in personality recognition tasks. Mairesse et al. (2007)
employed continuous modeling techniques, i.e., regression and ranking models. This
work is inspired by the work of Oberlander and Nowson (2006) which defined per-
sonality recognition as a fine-grained multiple-classification task. Mairesse et al.
(2007) are also the first to recognize personality traits in dialogues and to use both
self-reports and observer ratings as the golden labels.
4.4 Personality Recognition 283

They used a list of features including LIWC, MRC (Coltheart, 1981), utterance
features based on speech act categories from Walker and Whittaker (1990), and
prosodic features like voice’s pitch characterized by Praat (Boersma, 2001). Experi-
mental results came to several interesting conclusions: 1) The reported correlations
between features suggested by the psycholinguistic literature and the personality
ratings are weak in general; 2) Features selection is of vital importance; 3) More
complex models (e.g., SVMs and boosting algorithms) tend to perform better on a
large corpus than the simple ones (e.g., Naïve Bayes or regression trees); 4) Rank-
ing models outperformed classifiers in personality recognition task, which can be
attributed to that personality traits vary continuously among the population; 5) The
observer ratings can be captured more precisely than the self-report scores.
The dramatic performance improvement of deep learning models relax the con-
straint of feature selection in personality recognition, i.e., from predefined features
suggested by the psycholinguistic literature to more dimensions, longer input se-
quences, or multimodality features. Yuan et al. (2018) employed CNNs to extract
the features automatically from the textual content besides LIWC on the MyPer-
sonality dataset (Stillwell and Kosinski, 2015). They discovered the preference for
emotion words, social process words, positive words, or negative words varies among
different personality traits. This is almost contradictory to the traditional theories
mentioned above about the role of function words in personality recognition. It is
also notable that myPersonality is based on users’ Facebook homepages, i.e., social
media content. It also shows the trend of personality recognition from social media
data as well as using more powerful deep learning methods.

C. Automatic Personality Recognition from Social Media

As analyzed in the previous section, most of the aforementioned personality recogni-

tion research focused on small datasets and/or closed vocabulary approaches. Hence,
these methods usually had a poor performance in generalization and regression (or
classification) results (Plank and Hovy, 2015; Schwartz et al., 2013; Iacobelli et al.,
2011). Kosinski et al. (2013) modeled personality traits on a continuous scale, based
on the myPersonality dataset. They utilized singular value decomposition (SVD) to
reduce dimensionality of Facebook Likes data and fed them into logistic regression to
predict continuous individual personality trait scores. Experimental results showed
that, besides personality traits, individual personal attributes such as sexual orienta-
tion or intelligence can be inferred through their Facebook Likes automatically and
accurately.
Wu et al. (2015) employed LASSO linear regression models in personality recog-
nition to test whether they could surpass human judgements which are observer
ratings collected from the participant’s family and friends. The results showed the
participants’ self-reports are more correlated with the employed models (r = 0.56)
than the human judgements (r = 0.49), where r is the Pearson product-moment
correlation. However, in the study of Wu et al. (2017), Facebook contents showed
better performance than Facebook Likes and self-reports in homophily prediction
(prediction of the tendency to interact with or be attracted to similar others).
284 4 Pragmatics Processing

The aforementioned studies showed that social media can provide a good source
of data for personality recognition by mitigating the biases coming from ques-
tionnaires and predefined psycholinguistic features, as it contains fine-grained and
natural descriptions of an individual’s personality. The development of deep learning
methods exploited the potential of social media data and made it possible to capture
information directly from the input sequences, such as n-gram features, besides the
suggested features from psycholinguistic literature. Majumder et al. (2017) proposed
a novel CNN-based deep learning model for personality recognition. They used the
CNN feature extractor to obtain the n-gram sentence representation from the fed
sentences, in which each word is vectorized as a word embedding by pretrained
word2vec embeddings. The obtained vectors are concatenated with the Mairesse
features (Mairesse et al., 2007) to obtain the document-level representation which
was fed to a fully connected layer for classification. Experimental results indicated
that the was no performance improvement of SVM dealing with the extracted features
from CNN compared with a final fully connected layer. It suggested the potential of
deep learning models in personality recognition tasks and the research direction of
applying LSTM recurrent network to personality recognition.
Su et al. (2016) employed an RNN fed with LIWC-based and grammatical fea-
tures for personality recognition in conversations. However, both works highly re-
lied on domain expertise as they took predefined linguistic features as inputs and
could not exploit the semantic information from the sentences. In the same year
when Majumder et al. (2017) presented the CNN-based method, Liu et al. (2017a)
developed a hierarchical model, Character to Word to Sentence for Personality Traits
(C2W2S4PT), to obtain the vector representations of words and sentences from
character level and word level. C2W2S4PT obtained better performance than previ-
ous feature-engineering-heavy works and machine learning methods, such as SVM
Regression and Random Forest. These works inspired researchers to focus more
on explore the capability of deep learning models with engineering-free features in
personality recognition.
Sun et al. (2018) proposed to exploit the structures of texts to detect users’
personalities by developing a hybrid model, i.e., BiLSTMs concatenated with CNN
(2CLSTM). In this work, BiLSTMs are used to encode the context information,
and CNN is utilized to capture the structural feature named latent sentence group
(LSG) generated from BiLSTMs. According to Ramezani et al. (2022)’s research,
recurrent classifiers, e.g., RNN-based, LSTM-based, and BiLSTM-based classifiers,
outperformed CNN-based classifiers. They attributed the results to the reason that
the inputs are sentences in the form of sequences and recurrent classifiers are more
capable of processing temporal information, i.e., exploring the existing interactions
among the words in a sentence. BiLSTM was superior to other recurrent classifiers
as it does better in remembering information over several timesteps than RNN and
focusing more on future information than LSTM, which explains why 2CLSTM
employed BiLSTM for context encoding. Additionally, CNN-based classifier was
believed to be good at feature extraction, which provides a support for utilizing CNN
to capture the structural information in the work of Sun et al. (2018).
4.4 Personality Recognition 285

Recent studies showed that the researchers are not resigned to only semantic and
structural information extraction with lightweight models anymore. They started to
pay more attention to incorporating external knowledge graph or LLMs into per-
sonality classifiers. Kazemeini et al. (2021) investigated two approaches, a siamese
BiLSTM and Sentence-BERT (Reimers and Gurevych, 2019), on distinguishing per-
sonality types. Both approaches were of siamese structure, as they were supposed
to classify the personality trait type in an interpretable way where the semantics of
the statements were captured so that statements with similar personality traits could
be embedded close to each other in the semantic vector space. Poria et al. (2013)
utilized an SMO classifier, combining commonsense knowledge based features with
psycholinguistic features and frequency based features, for personality recognition.
The proposed method surpassed other state-of-art methods based on psycholin-
guistic features and frequency analysis. The commonsense knowledge mainly came
from resources such as ConceptNet and SenticNet. However, these methods usually
ignored the external knowledge, conventional psycholinguistic features, semantic
information, or LLM features and thus failed to fuse them all.
Mehta et al. (2020) developed a BERT-based model integrating traditional psy-
cholinguistic features, commonsense knowledge and language model embeddings for
personality prediction. The psycholinguistic features in this work included Mairesse
features and Readability. In their fine-tuning setup, they experimented with logistic
regression, SVM and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) with 50 hidden units. Ex-
perimental results showed that the language modeling features beat conventional
psycholinguistic features with commonsense knowledge features. Ren et al. (2021b)
proposed a multi-label model integrating the pretrained BERT model with a neural
network, which incorporated semantic and emotional features for personality recog-
nition from social media texts. This work provided several significant implications:
1) External emotion knowledge improved the effectiveness of the personality recog-
nition model; 2) Emotional information was found to be closely related to personality
traits and could be applied to the further explanation of personality traits; 3) LLMs
such as BERT could extract more contextual information than word embedding
methods like word2vec or GloVe (Pennington et al., 2014), and it should the basis
for future personality recognition with deep learning. These studies suggested that
social media data is a good resource for the assessment of individual personalities
in a more objective way than traditional questionnaires (Stachl et al., 2020).

[Link] MBTI Personality Recognition

A. Automatic Personality Recognition from Social Media

Compared to personality recognition with the Big Five personality traits which
has been studied from multiple types of texts and with various approaches, person-
ality recognition with MBTI did not attract the attention of researchers until recently
and it exclusively utilizes X data.
286 4 Pragmatics Processing

The MBTI model profiled X users based on their tweets with each personality
dimension modeled as a binary classification separately. Plank and Hovy (2015)
annotated a corpus of 1.2M English tweets with gender and MBTI type. They
trained a binary Logistic Regression classifier for each MBTI dimension (I-E, S-N,
T-F, J-P) with the features including gender, n-grams, and count-based meta-features
(e.g., the number of tweets, favorites, and followers). The models outperformed the
majority-class baseline model on only two personality aspects, Thinking / Feeling
and Introversion / Extroversion. Verhoeven et al. (2016) performed MBTI-based
personality recognition from Tweets in six European languages with n-gram features.
The models got the F1 score from 0.47 to 0.79. Yamada et al. (2019) built a model for
MBTI personality recognition on X posts in Japanese and behavioral features of X
users. Experimental results indicated that user behaviors are crucial for recognizing
the personality of users who have no posts, but it became less important as the
number of collected user posts increased. Although all these studies are performed
on large training datasets, they barely managed to surpass the majority-based or even
random-guessing baselines.

B. Theoretical Analysis on Performance of MBTI Models

As mentioned in the last subsection, MBTI frameworks rarely outperformed the

majority-base baselines. On the contrary, Big Five models trained on social media
data, e.g., Facebook data, are more capable of prediction personality traits even
than untrained humans (Wu et al., 2015). ätajner and Yenikent (2020) attributed the
different performance of Big Five models and MBTI models to mainly two causes.
First, the Big Five models are data-driven methods. However, MBTI frameworks
are relatively more complex, which cover cognitive and information processing hy-
potheses and require more sophisticated models for the recognition and aggregation
of different layers of personality traits. Second, the Big Five models were trained on
the Facebook dataset while MBTI models on the X dataset. It is possible that the
Facebook dataset has more content relevant to personal statements, thus it is more
suitable for personality recognition tasks.
For example, the Sensing / Intuitive (S-N) typology results from the user’s prefer-
ence for cognitive processing. However, the tweets usually cannot provide sufficient
data to figure out whether the user is interested in processing the data in an in-
terpretative and intuitive way, or in a numerical and sensing way. The Judging /
Perceiving (J-P) aspect covers the behavioral information of a user, e.g., planning
and organization skills. However, the tweets are usually short and thus do not con-
tain content about planning and organization. This had been pointed out and verified
through the experiments of both Big Five and MBTI models on X data in Celli and
Lepri (2018)’s research. Furthermore, ätajner and Yenikent (2020) carried out an
annotation experiment on randomly selected MBTI-X data (Plank and Hovy, 2015),
in which two annotators, one with psychology knowledge and the other with com-
putational linguistic knowledge, were invited to annotate the users’ personality traits
from the 16 categories of MBTI.
4.4 Personality Recognition 287

According to their experiments, both annotators felt confident to label for the J-P
and S-N tasks on only 15% and 30% of the samples, respectively. It is lower than
that for E-I and T-F tasks (53% and 43%, respectively). The annotators showed low
agreements with “gold labels”. Moreover, the results raised concern about whether
linguistic patterns in textual data could be expected in the MBTI framework con-
structed from traditional questionnaire. ätajner and Yenikent (2021) also analyzed
the poor performance of MBTI models on X data. They conducted an annotation
study to explore theoretical reasons behind this issue. Their research tested and
confirmed two hypotheses: 1) X posts lack sufficient linguistic signals for MBTI
personality recognition, even for trained annotators; 2) textual data do not align well
with MBTI questionnaire scores. The study revealed three key findings: the style and
content of texts can show signals of opposite polarities, individuals in the middle
ranges of personality traits may display mixed signals, and the language used in X
posts can make users appear more extroverted due to specific stylistic features like
grammar, exclamation marks, sentence structure, and tonality.

C. Automatic Personality Recognition based on Deep Learning Methods

Another reason for the mediocre performance of MBTI models could be that the fea-
ture engineering needs to be improved. In the previous studies, the selected features,
mainly in the form of n-gram and user behavioral meta-features, were quite simple.
In addition, the models employed for personality recognition were machine learning
methods, such as SVM, LinearSVC, and logistic regression. These models failed to
extract complex features and limited the representation of the fed features as well.
The advances of the deep learning methods contributed to the progress of the feature
engineering of MBTI personality recognition and better experimental results.
Yang et al. (2021a) categorized existing approaches to combining multiple posts
automatically into two groups. First, each document was encoded independently and
then averaged to get the user representation (Keh et al., 2019). Second, the posts
are concatenated into a long sequence in an arbitrary post order and then encoded
hierarchically (Lynn et al., 2020). However, the first approach treated each post of a
user equally and failed to distinguish their different importance weights or capture
the interactions among them. The second approach overcame the above weakness but
introduced the extra post-order bias, affecting the consistency of the users’ person-
alities and the generalization of the models. Additionally, existing methods ignored
the association between different post information and different personality aspects.
To this end, Yang et al. (2021a) proposed a multi-document Transformer model as
a post-order-agnostic encoder to gather the posts of a user without introducing the
post-order bias. Moreover, they designed a personality-specific attention mechanism
to allow each personality aspect to focus on relevant post information. Their model
obtained 0.7047 and 0.6092 in Micro-F1 on average on Kaggle24 and Pandora25
datasets, respectively.

24 [Link]
25 [Link]
288 4 Pragmatics Processing

However, most of the recent studies focus on applying various deep learning
models in a data-driven manner instead of leveraging psycholinguistic knowledge to
explore the connections between the user’s language use and his or her personality
traits. Motivated by the observation, Yang et al. (2021d) designed a psycholinguistic
knowledge-based tripartite graph network, TrigNet, consisting of a BERT-based
graph initializer and a tripartite graph network. The tripartite graph network injected
structural psycholinguistic knowledge from LIWC. A new flow GAT was proposed to
transmit information between neighboring parties in the tripartite graph and reduce
the computational complexity in graph learning. This work provided a new way
to exploit domain knowledge and an effective and efficient model for personality
recognition tasks.
Yang et al. (2021b) argued that existing data-driven personality recognition mod-
els, capturing personality cues in social media posts implicitly, usually lacked the
guidance of psychological knowledge. They believed that the user’s posts could con-
tain critical information which would help to answer the psychological questionnaire.
Therefore, they presented a novel model, the Psychological Questionnaire Enhanced
Network (PQ-Net), to guide personality recognition by linking the texts and questions
in the questionnaire. PQ-Net consists of two streams: 1) a context stream to encode
each textual input into a contextual text representation; 2) a questionnaire stream to
capture question-relevant information in contextual representations and generate can-
didate answer representations to enhance the contextual representations. According
to the experimental results, PQ-Net outperformed the baseline models and generated
representations which are more inductive and distinguishable in term of personality
dimensions.
Nevertheless, we may notice that there is still room for improvement. In the
questionnaire stream, the preferred answer to each question was inferred based on
the ground truth personality labels of the user. Then, the inferred answer labels were
employed for supervised training PQ-Net. We have known that each personality
aspect is based on the accumulation of the score in each question, although the
final category of each personality dimension is a binary class. There are cases
where people possibly belong to the middle ranges of certain personality aspect.
For example, there are two choices “Quiet and reserved.” and “A good mixer.”
corresponding to the Introversion and Extraversion categories, respectively, in the
question “Are you usually a good mixer with groups of people or rather quiet and
reserved?”. Even the ground truth personality label of a user is Extraversion, it is still
possible that his or her answer to the example question is “Quiet and reserved.” with
some cues in posts saying “I need time alone sometimes”. However, the labeling
method in Yang et al. (2021b)’s work would generate a pseudo label “A good
mixer.” to this question according to the user’s final personality label Extraversion.
The mismatch between the relevant post information and the inferred label might
introduce a personality representation bias to the contextual representation.
4.4 Personality Recognition 289

4.4.6 Downstream Applications

Although theoretical research about personality traits can date back to the last cen-
tury, personality recognition is still at a relatively early age. Most of the research
focuses were defining the task, building the dataset, feature engineering, and de-
signing methodologies. However, we can find some early applications of personality
recognition in different research domains according to existing literature (Vinciarelli
and Mohammadi, 2014).

[Link] Recommendation Systems

There are mainly two types of recommendation systems, i.e., conventional recom-
mendation systems and Personality-Aware recommendation systems according to
the research of Dhelim et al. (2022). Conventional recommendation systems usually
include three steps: 1) At the rating stage, the users show their interests or eval-
uations by rating the items; 2) At the filtering stage, the content similarity and/or
rating similarity are computed to find out the matched items; 3) At the recommen-
dation stage, the system recommends the systems retrieved by the filtering stage.
Compared with conventional recommendation systems, personality-aware recom-
mendation systems include two more stages before the rating stage and also adjust
the filtering stage. Firstly, at the personality measurement and matching stage, the
system obtains the personality traits of the users through a self-report questionnaire
or personality recognition techniques on the users’ history data, e.g., social media
data. Then, the user’s personality type is matched with relevant items. The relevance
can be determined by lexical matching or fine-grained rules. Secondly, at the filtering
stage, the personality similarity is also calculated between each pair of users, besides
the content and/or rating similarity.
Balakrishnan and Arabi (2018) proposed a hybrid movie recommendation sys-
tem, HyPeRM, enhanced by users’ personality traits and demographic information
(e.g., age and sex). Specifically, the system employed collaborative filtering to filter
the movies on the basis of demographic information and personality. Their work in-
dicated that incorporating users’ personality and demographic information improved
the results of movie recommendations. Asabere and Acakpovi (2020) designed a TV
program recommendation system based on personality and social properties. They
generated the group recommendations for TV programs by leveraging personality
similarity coupled with normalization procedure and computing tie strength with
folksonomy. In the studies mentioned, the users’ personality traits were collected
through questionnaires, but they proved the effectiveness of incorporating person-
ality traits in recommendation systems. There have been several papers presenting
recommendation systems compatible with both questionnaire-based and personality
recognition-based techniques. For example, Dhelim et al. (2020) designed a product
recommendation system named Meta-Interest to infer users’ needs based on their
topical interests. They integrated the users’ Big Five personalities to enhance the
interest mining process and filter the recommended product.
290 4 Pragmatics Processing

Recently, many research works focused on combining personality recognition

with recommendation systems. As some users are not willing to answer ques-
tionnaires for privacy issues (Wu, 2017), Lu and Kan (2023) studied whether the
automatically detected personality information could improve the performance of
recommendation systems through empirical experiments. They designed a Big Five
personality-enhanced neural collaborative filtering algorithm, which encoded user,
item, and personality into latent vectors and projected them through an MLP to get
the probability that the user would be the item. They found that the personality traits
of agreeableness and extroversion contributed to the improvement of the recommen-
dation performance. Yakhchi et al. (2020) inferred users’ personality traits implicitly
by analyzing their online-generated content and then incorporated such traits, users’
personal interests, and users’ knowledge level into their recommendation system.
Instead, Christodoulou et al. (2022) extracted MBTI personalities from online
reviews and employed them with themes obtained from topic modeling to represent
restaurant and user features. The two kinds of features with hard-coded review fea-
tures were combined to enhance the user-item matrix which was utilized to train an
XGBoost regression model for restaurant recommendation. The results showed the
integration of MBTI personality and topics surpassed the traditional collaborative
filtering techniques, such as SVD and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) mod-
els. Yang and Huang (2019) carried out an in-depth study on designing a task-specific
personality recognition model for game recommendation systems, instead of using
certain existing personality recognition models. They used two methods to recognize
the Big Five personality type, i.e., M5’ Regression Tree (Wang and Witten, 1996)
computing the Pearson’s Correlation Coefficients between the Big Five personalities
and LIWC, and myPersonality recognizer approach calculating Big Five scores for
each keyword of identify the personality traits from texts. Furthermore, they pro-
posed to calculate the personality of a game on top of user personality. Thus, they
devised three recommendation schemes, based on the relatedness between person-
alities: 1) user-based recommendation; 2) game-based recommendation; 3) hybrid
recommendation (considering both user- and game-based personality similarity).
Experimental results showed promising outcomes, offering a new perspective on
personality modeling in recommendation systems.

[Link] Social Network Analysis

There have been research works that studied the relationship between the personality
traits of individuals and different aspects of social media, and how their personality
influenced relations with other group members (Maria Balmaceda et al., 2014).
According to Dolgova et al. (2010), the user’s personality could shape his or her
structural position on social networks. Correa et al. (2010) investigated personality
traits as important factors for the social media engagement of individuals. They
studied the relationship between users’ personalities and the use of social media
and found that emotional stability is negatively related to social media use while
extraversion is positively related.
4.4 Personality Recognition 291

Maria Balmaceda et al. (2014) studied the association rules among Big Five
personality traits of users and provided some insights about how people communicate
and who they tend to communicate with based on the personalities on social networks.
Their research suggested that users with a certain personality aspect value tended
to communicate with others having a similar value in the same personality aspect.
Additionally, they also discovered some interaction patterns between different aspects
of personality. For example, emotionally stable people tended to communicate with
agreeable ones, and agreeable users tended to communicate with extroverted ones.
Their research also provided empirical support for friend recommendations, based
on the personalities on social networks.
The explosive increase in the user number on social media made it a hard task
for users to find interesting people to communicate with. Therefore, many research
works on social networks paid more attention to proposing personality-aware rec-
ommendation algorithms. Ning et al. (2019) utilized Big Five personality traits
obtained from the questionnaire and the users’ harmony rating to enhance the hybrid
filtering process for the personality-aware friend recommendation system PersoNet.
It outperformed the traditional collaborative filtering-based friend recommendation
algorithms. Chakrabarty et al. (2020) employed Hellinger-Bhattacharyya Distance
(H-B Distance) to compute the similarity of users’ Big Five personality traits and
used it to recommend friends in their personality-aware friend recommendation
systems, named FAFinder (Friend Affinity Finder).
However, the aforementioned methods have some limitations, as users are usually
reluctant to filling in the questionnaire even it is for non-commercial objectives
such as friend recommendation. Therefore, it is more feasible to use the personality
recognition-based friend recommendation algorithm instead of the questionnaire-
based. Tommasel et al. (2015) obtained the Big Five personality scores from X data
through the tool of Mairesse et al. (2007) and used them to analyze the influence
of personality traits on followee selection. They found that personalities should be
considered a distinctive factor in followee selection. Moreover, they also observed
the association between different dimensions of personality.
The study by Tommasel et al. (2016) also reached a similar conclusion, sug-
gesting that incorporating personality traits could improve friend recommendation
algorithms. Xiao et al. (2018) proposed a personality-aware followee recommenda-
tion model based on sentiment analysis, text semantics, and the Big Five personality
traits calculated by a Chinese language psychological analysis system TextMind
from the Chinese data collected from Sina Weibo. Experimental results showed the
personality traits obtained from personality recognition were crucial for followee
selection on Chinese social networks as well.
292 4 Pragmatics Processing

4.4.7 Summary

[Link] Technical Trends

As shown in Table 4.16, there are mainly two tasks in personality recognition, i.e., Big
Five personality recognition and MBTI personality recognition. Due to the distinct
research progress of the two tasks, different research trends were observed accord-
ingly. The Big Five personality model has been the subject of extensive research
in both psychology and linguistics for a considerable period of time. Therefore, the
early research on Big Five-based personality recognition used LIWC (Francis and
Booth, 1993) features, a “gold standard” from the aspects of linguistic, grammat-
ical, and psychological dimensions. The advance of machine learning approaches
and computational linguistics inspired researchers to attempt on open-vocabulary
approach, e.g., n-gram features (Oberlander and Nowson, 2006), and multimodality
features (Mairesse et al., 2007). At the same time, there is a trend to applying more
powerful deep learning models such as CNN to extract features automatically from
the texts (Yuan et al., 2018) besides LIWC.
With the rapid progress of social media like Facebook and X, there is a growing
need to automatically recognize the personality type of people through their posts in-
stead of their self-reports or questionnaire. The development of deep learning models
especially the pretrained LLMs enabled the researchers to build powerful models to
exploit more complicated structures of texts, and integrate external knowledge and
traditional psycholinguistic features for personality recognition (Mehta et al., 2020;
Ren et al., 2021b). The MBTI model was developed using an open-vocabulary
approach, lacking substantial theoretical research background in psycholinguistics.
This approach contrasts with Big Five-based personality recognition, where the the-
oretical discussion precedes empirical research. Furthermore, ätajner and Yenikent
(2020, 2021) focused on explaining why MBTI frameworks could not obtain good
performance in certain cases. Another major difference between MBTI- and Big
Five-based personality recognition is that MBTI frameworks (Plank and Hovy, 2015;
Yamada et al., 2019) were initially tailored for processing social media data instead
of self-reports. Like Big Five frameworks, MBTI frameworks benefited from the
advance of deep learning models (Yang et al., 2021a) and the integration of com-
monsense and psychological knowledge (Yang et al., 2021d).

[Link] Application Trends

As shown in Table 4.17, personality recognition has primarily been applied to product
recommendation systems and social network analysis. Initially, these fields relied on
questionnaires to determine personality types. Over time, they adopted personality
recognition frameworks for scoring. However, most applications favored machine
learning-based frameworks or existing tools with basic feature engineering over
designing more advanced models for downstream tasks.
4.4 Personality Recognition 293

Table 4.16: Technical trends in personality recognition. SA denotes statistical anal-

ysis. W2V denotes word2vec. C2W2S denotes character to word to sentence rep-
resentations. KG denotes knowledge graph. L&R denotes the number of like and
retweets. TPS-E denotes token, position, and segment embeddings. PWC-G denotes
post, word and category graphs. PQA denotes posts, questions, and chosen answers.
LR denotes logistic regression. TF denotes Transformers. In the metrics of Big Five,
the performance is averaged over different classes, where 5 denotes all Big Five (O,
C, E, A, and N) classes; 2 denotes N and E classes; 4 denotes C, E, A and N classes.
MBTI metrics are measured by the averaged performance on I-E, S-N, T-F, P-J. rRate
denotes the ratio of the predicted Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient to
the actual Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient.

Task Reference Tech Feature Framework Dataset Score Metric

Pennebaker and King SA LIWC - Essay - -
(1999)
Argamon et al. (2005) ML Linguistics SVM Self-collected 0.58 Acc-2
Oberlander and Now- ML LIWC, n-grams Naïve Bayes Self-collected 0.92 Acc-4
son (2006)
Mairesse et al. (2007) ML LIWC & MRC SVM Self-collected 0.57 Acc-5
Yuan et al. (2018) DL LIWC, W2V CNN Alam et al. (2013) 0.62 Acc-5
Kosinski et al. (2013) ML Facebook Likes SVD, LR Self-collected 0.53 rRate-5
Wu et al. (2015) ML Facebook Likes LASSO Self-collected 0.56 Acc-5
Big 5 Wu et al. (2017) ML Facebook content Linear Reg. myPersonality 0.33 Corr.-5
Majumder et al. (2017) DL n-grams, W2V CNN Essay 0.58 Acc-5
Su et al. (2016) DL LIWC, POS RNN Tseng (2004) 0.80 Acc-5
Liu et al. (2017a) DL C2W2S RNN Rangel et al. (2015) 0.13 MSE-5
Sun et al. (2018) DL GloVe BiLSTM, CNN Essay 0.56 Acc-5
Ramezani et al. (2022) DL KG BiLSTM Essay 0.71 Acc-5
Kazemeini et al. DL RoBERTa BiLSTM Essay 0.61 Acc-5
(2021)
Mehta et al. (2020) DL psycholing., BERT MLP Essay 0.61 Acc-5
Plank and Hovy (2015) ML Gender, n-grams LR Self-collected 0.67 Acc
Verhoeven et al. (2016) ML n-grams LinearSVC Self-collected 0.64 F1
Yamada et al. (2019) ML BOW, SVD, L&R SVM Self-collected 0.66 AUC
MBTI Yang et al. (2021a) DL TPS-E TF Kaggle 0.70 F1
Yang et al. (2021d) DL PWD-G, BERT Graph network Kaggle 0.71 F1
Yang et al. (2021b) DL PQA, BERT TF, soft gate Kaggle 0.71 F1

Instead, they paid more attention to how to combine the obtained personality
scores with the product recommendation systems (Yakhchi et al., 2020) or friend
recommendation systems (Tommasel et al., 2015; Xiao et al., 2018). As the down-
stream tasks of personality recognition are still at a relatively early stage, there are
a large number of papers studying the effect of incorporating the personalities into
the downstream tasks (Lu and Kan, 2023; Xiao et al., 2018; Ning et al., 2019).
Their research provided theoretical justification and valuable insights for combining
personality recognition with downstream tasks. It is also notable that most of the
applications utilized Big Five frameworks instead of MBTI frameworks, which is
possible because of the unsatisfying performance of personality recognition models
for MBTI.
294 4 Pragmatics Processing

Table 4.17: Personality recognition downstream task applications.

Reference Downstream Task Feature Parser Explainability

Balakrishnan and Arabi (2018) Recommendation Systems X X
Asabere and Acakpovi (2020) Recommendation Systems X X
Dhelim et al. (2020) Recommendation Systems X X
Lu and Kan (2023) Recommendation Systems X
Yakhchi et al. (2020) Recommendation Systems X X
Christodoulou et al. (2022) Recommendation Systems X X
Yang and Huang (2019) Recommendation Systems X X
Correa et al. (2010) Social Network Analysis X
Maria Balmaceda et al. (2014) Social Network Analysis X
Ning et al. (2019) Social Network Analysis X
Chakrabarty et al. (2020) Social Network Analysis X
Tommasel et al. (2015) Social Network Analysis X X
Tommasel et al. (2016) Social Network Analysis X
Xiao et al. (2018) Social Network Analysis X X

[Link] Future Works

Automatic personality recognition is to automatically detect and analyze an individ-

ual’s personality traits through his or her behavior patterns. The personality recog-
nition models are mainly machine learning or deep learning classifiers based on Big
Five frameworks or MBTI frameworks. Currently, on the basis of vast knowledge
and expertise in computing areas, the personality recognition approaches focused
on leveraging machine-detectable cues (e.g., psycholinguistics, affective computing,
and social signal processing) to understand and explain social and psychological
phenomena.
However, these approaches are more like applications of NLP or machine learning
in the psychology domain and seem to pay little attention to the psychological and
linguistic theories that set research grounds for modeling personalities. Hence, they
ignored the fact that certain personality traits may not be found in textual data
(at least social media posts) and tried hard to improve the classification accuracy
uncritically. This situation has been found in MBTI frameworks. On the contrary,
some psychology researchers seem to use more adequate datasets or well-designed
feature engineering for personality recognition, but they may fail to evaluate their
frameworks with the same rigorous metrics as the machine learning methods.
In addition, existing downstream applications made much effort to directly incor-
porate the personality traits into the recommendation systems or friend recommen-
dation algorithms or analyze the impact. However, the personality types or scores
in most of the research were collected by questionnaire or predicted by existing
open-vocabulary approaches-based frameworks. Thus it would be useful for future
research work to design both a task-specific personality recognition framework (Zhu
et al., 2023) and an effective method to combine the predicted personalities with the
application systems (Zhu et al., 2024a).
4.5 Aspect Extraction 295

Finally, there is a desire to combine persona analysis with other NLU tasks. Many
NLU tasks involve labels that are subjective to individuals, as the same statement can
cause different affective responses between different people. For example, introverted
individuals may react negatively to a suggestion to perform in front of audiences,
whereas extroverts might welcome such an opportunity. Current NLP research often
overlooks personalized prediction, as it tends to rely on majority-defined ground-
truth labels. However, this approach contradicts the spirit of human-centric AI, as it
neglects user diversity. Therefore, future endeavors could explore the integration of
persona analysis with a broader range of NLU tasks.

4.5 Aspect Extraction

Aspect extraction is the process of identifying and extracting specific components, at-
tributes, or features mentioned in text, typically employed to identify opinion targets
in the context of ABSA. Besides ABSA, aspect extraction is useful in tasks like text
summarization (Tang et al., 2024), financial forecasting (Du et al., 2023a), recom-
mendation systems (Karthik and Ganapathy, 2021), fake review detection (Bathla
et al., 2022), and many more. In customer feedback analysis, it pinpoints which
aspects of products or services are frequently mentioned and their associated senti-
ments. Aspect extraction also aids in topic modeling, trend analysis, and competitive
analysis by identifying specific subjects or features discussed in texts. In chatbots
and virtual assistants, it improves response accuracy to user inquiries. Moreover, it
enhances content recommendation and personalization by identifying aspects users
engage with, offering more relevant content and insights into market trends.
As mentioned, aspect extraction is key for ABSA and aspect-based opinion mining
(ABOM) in order to enable a more nuanced comprehension of specific requirements
or opinions related to a product or service. In particular, while ABSA is more
focused on analyzing sentiments associated with aspects, ABOM is a broader term
that includes not only sentiment analysis but also the extraction and analysis of
various types of opinion-related information. Hu and Liu (2004) identified two types
of aspects, namely explicit and implicit aspects. Aspect terms that are explicitly
specified in given sentences are explicit aspects, while aspects without corresponding
words are considered implicit aspects (Dalila et al., 2018).
For instance, consider the statement “it’s very light-weight and we can get amaz-
ing pix too”, where the aspect “weight” is explicitly specified (Ganganwar and
Rajalakshmi, 2019). In contrast, in the statement “It is very light. You can carry
it everywhere”, the aspect “weight” is implicit. Compared with explicit aspects ex-
traction (Tubishat et al., 2021; Behdenna et al., 2022), implicit aspects are more
challenging due to their indirect nature and reliance on contextual and common-
sense understanding (Verma and Davis, 2021; Zhuang et al., 2022; Ahmed et al.,
2022). However, implicit aspects are important linguistic phenomena that cannot be
ignored in real-world applications.
296 4 Pragmatics Processing

4.5.1 Theoretical Research

[Link] Ontology

Ontology refers to a structured collection of concepts and categories within a specific

subject area or domain, representing their properties and relationships. Ontology is
important for aspect extraction because it serves to define aspect taxonomies by
organizing aspects into classes and specifying their properties and interrelations.
While identifying food- and service-related aspects in the restaurant domain may be
straightforward, professional contexts such as environmental, social, and governance
(ESG)-related aspect extraction require a more systematic approach through ontology
engineering. Here, ontology defines the related aspects that need to be extracted,
emphasizing the crucial role of ontology engineering in this process.
Noy et al. (2001) defined eight steps for developing an ontology, starting with
defining classes to represent concepts or entities in the domain. These classes are
then organized into a taxonomic hierarchy, where subclasses inherit properties from
their superclasses, aiding in structuring the ontology. Slots are defined to represent
properties or attributes of classes, specifying relationships between them. Instances
are then created to fill in values for slots, representing specific examples or members
of classes. This process is iterative, with the ontology evolving through evaluation
and revision based on feedback from applications or experts.
Vrande iÊ (2009) highlighted key aspects of a good ontology, including concise-
ness, consistency, and organizational fitness. Conciseness assesses the inclusion of
irrelevant or redundant axioms and the ontological commitment imposed. Consis-
tency checks for logical contradictions and consistency between formal and informal
descriptions. Organizational fitness evaluates the ease of deployment within the
organization and alignment with existing ontologies.

[Link] Elliptical Constructions

The phenomenon of implicit aspects can be attributed to elliptical constructions in

language. These constructions enable speakers and writers to convey information
more efficiently by omitting redundant or predictable elements, thereby expediting
language production and comprehension (Pickering and Garrod, 2013). From a
cognitive point of view, elliptical constructions help conserve mental resources by
omitting elements that can be inferred from context, thus reducing processing and
memory load (Gibson, 1998). There are several types of elliptical constructions.
Verb phrase ellipsis involves the omission of verb phrases, as in the example
(6) You may like the book, but I don’t [like the book].
Noun phrase ellipsis involves the omission of a noun phrase, e.g.,
(7) My friend likes the first Chinese dish, but I like the second [Chinese dish].
4.5 Aspect Extraction 297

In both cases, the elided elements with square brackets can be inferred from context,
but the elided phrase does not necessarily have the same reference as the antecedent,
as references are context-dependent.
(8) Jim likes his new laptop. Jane does too.
In Example (8), Jim likes Jim’s new laptop, while Jane likes Jane’s laptop. The elided
element refers to a different entity. Such a situation also happens to Example (7),
where the two Chinese dishes are not the same. Another type of ellipsis is gapping,
which involves the omission of non-initial verb phrases in coordinated clauses, where
only the first verb phrase is fully expressed (Johnson, 2006).
(9) For the new laptop, Jim likes the appearance, and Jane [likes] the screen.
Gapping is restricted to coordinations and typically involves the removal of material
from the second conjunct, with remnants being major constituents like subjects, and
objects. Both verb phrase ellipsis and gapping involve the omission of verb phrases,
however, they occur in different contexts. Verb phrase ellipsis often requires the
presence of an auxiliary verb in the second clause (e.g., “don’t” in Example (6)),
while gapping does not have this requirement. Sluicing is another type of ellipsis that
occurs when a wh-phrase and a part of the containing clause are omitted, leaving a
clause with an interrogative meaning (Chung et al., 1995). For example,
(10) My friend wrote some reviews for the book, but I don’t know [what the
reviews are].
In sluicing, the missing information is not explicitly provided, making it challenging
for the listener or reader to infer the exact content of the missing elements. Aspect
extraction involves identifying and extracting aspects or attributes of entities or topics
mentioned in text. Elliptical constructions e.g., verb phrase ellipsis and noun phrase
ellipsis can pose challenges for aspect extraction because they involve the omission
of key elements (verb phrases or noun phrases) that are relevant for determining
aspects. Gapping and sluicing can lead to ambiguity regarding which aspects are
associated with which entities or topics in the sentence, further complicating aspect
extraction in NLU. Considering the frequent occurrences of elliptical constructions,
they cannot be overlooked in developing aspect extraction systems.

4.5.2 Annotation Schemes

Aspect extraction is usually formulated as a sequence-labeling task, in which each

token in a sentence should be assigned a label. The three common annotation schemes
are shown in Table 4.18. The IO scheme represents aspect extraction as a set of binary
classification tasks, where “I” (Inner) indicates that a token is part of an aspect, while
“O” (Other) indicates that it is not. In contrast, the BIO scheme introduces three
labels: “B” (Beginning), “I” (Inner), and “O” (Other).
298 4 Pragmatics Processing

The “B” label denotes the beginning of an aspect, the “I” label indicates that the
token is inside an aspect, and the “O” label signifies that the token is not part of
any aspect. Building upon the BIO scheme, the BIOES scheme incorporates two
additional labels: “S” (Single) and “E” (End). These labels are designed to provide
clearer annotations of aspect boundaries. The “S” label is used for single-token
aspects, while the “E” label marks the end of an aspect entity.

Table 4.18: The three common annotation schemes for aspect extraction.

token I like the user interfacedesign

, but the priceis unaffordable.
IO O O O I I I O O O I O O O
BIO O O O B I I O O O B O O O
BIOES O O O B I E O O O S O O O

4.5.3 Datasets

Widely used aspect extraction datasets are shown in Table 4.19. The SemEval-2014
Task 426 (Pontiki et al., 2014) consists of four subtasks: aspect term extraction, aspect
term polarity detection, aspect category detection, and aspect category polarity
detection. The task involves two domain-specific datasets focused on laptop and
restaurant reviews, which include over 6,000 sentences. These datasets are annotated
at a fine-grained aspect level.

Table 4.19: Aspect extraction datasets and statistics. AE denotes aspect extraction;
AC denotes aspect category detection; ATP denotes aspect term polarity detection;
ACP denotes aspect category polarity detection.

Reference Task Source # Sample

Pontiki et al. (2014) AE, AC, ATP, ACP Laptop and restau. reviews 6,000 sentences
Pontiki et al. (2015) AE, AC, ATP Laptop and restau. reviews 550 reviews
Pontiki et al. (2016) AE, AC, ATP Laptop and restau. reviews 24,897 sentences
Hu and Liu (2004) AC,ACP Digital product reviews 4,523 sentences
Orbach et al. (2021) AE, AC, ATP Business and product reviews 3,815 sentences
Alturaief et al. (2021) AE, ATP App reviews 11,323 sentences
Toledo-Ronen et al. (2022) AE, ATP Reviews from multi-domains 2M sentences
Jiang et al. (2019) AE, AC, ATP, ACP Restaurant reviews 13,854 instances
Peng et al. (2018) AE, ATP Product reviews 2,309 reviews
Vo and Zhang (2015) AE, ATP X 6,940 reviews

26 [Link]
4.5 Aspect Extraction 299

<sentence id=”813”>
<text>All the appetizers and salads were fabulous, the steak was mouth watering and
the pasta was delicious!!!</text>
<aspectTerms>
<aspectTerm term=”appetizers” polarity=”positive” from=”8” to=”18”/>
<aspectTerm term=”salads” polarity=”positive” from=”23” to=”29”/>
<aspectTerm term=”steak” polarity=”positive” from=”49” to=”54”/>
<aspectTerm term=”pasta” polarity=”positive” from=”82” to=”87”/>
</aspectTerms>
<aspectCategories>
<aspectCategory category=”food” polarity=”positive”/>
</aspectCategories>
</sentence>

The SemEval-2015 Task 1227 (Pontiki et al., 2015) is a continuation of SemEval-

2014 Task 4, which also contains restaurant and laptop reviews. The difference
between the two tasks is that the input of the latter dataset contains entire reviews,
rather than isolated sentences without context. The SemEval-2015 Task 12 contains
in-domain ABSA and out-of-domain ABSA task setups.
The food was delicious but do not come here on an empty stomach.
{category= “FOOD#QUALITY”, target= “food”, from: “4”, to: “8”, polarity= “positive”},
{category= “FOOD#STYLE”, target = “food”, from: “4”, to: “8”, polarity= “negative”}

SemEval-2016 Task 528 (Pontiki et al., 2016) was also developed for ABSA
from laptop and restaurant reviews, but it introduced new test datasets for evaluation
and included multilingual datasets encompassing English, Arabic, Dutch, Russian,
Spanish, and Turkish at both the sentence and document levels. Hu and Liu (2004)
proposed an aspect-level sentiment analysis dataset29 for mining and summarizing
customer reviews of digital products. The instances in the dataset contain aspect
category labels and sentiment polarities, where the sentiment polarities range from
-3 (strong negative) to +3 (strong positive). In the following example, the numbers
in the square brackets denote the sentiment polarities; the terms before the sentiment
polarities are aspects; ## denotes the start of a review sentence.
Title: great camera
canon g3[+3]##i bought my canon g3 about a month ago and i have to say i am
very satisfied .
photo quality[+2]##i have taken hundreds of photos with it and i continue to be
amazed by their quality .
feature[+2]##the g3 is loaded with many useful features , and unlike many smaller
digital cameras , it is easy to hold steady when using slower shutter speeds .

27 [Link]
28 [Link]
29 [Link]
300 4 Pragmatics Processing

Orbach et al. (2021) proposed a YASO dataset30 as a solution to the limitation

of current ABSA datasets, which are confined to a narrow range of review domains.
These datasets cannot accommodate a wide variety of reviews from various domains
found on websites such as Amazon or Yelp. The YASO dataset comprises 2215
sentences in English originating from numerous review domains. Aspect terms and
their corresponding sentiment are annotated in this dataset.

text: “Great food but the service was dreadful !”,

target: “food”,
from: “6”,
to: “10”,
sentiment: “positive”.

AWARE31 (Alturaief et al., 2021) is an ABSA dataset annotated for App reviews.
The 11,323 reviews were collected from 11,323, and were annotated for aspect terms,
categories, and sentiment. Reviews were collected from three domains: productivity,
social networking, and games.

domain: “productivity” ,
app: “things-3” ,
review_id: “c9274c0a-a120-4e09-816b-7a8ba3a16634” ,
sentence_id: “00808934-e8b9-42fa-b37f-cfeac234bbdd” ,
title: “Difficult to update from Things 2” ,
review: “This new version of Things has an entirely different aesthetic from Things 2.
Things 2 is much more minimalist; Things 3 seems to have a lot of UI bloat. Not quite
sure where the design award came from.” ,
sentence: “This new version of Things has an entirely different aesthetic from Things
2.” ,
rating: “3” ,
is_opinion: “TRUE” ,
category: “usability” ,
term: “new version” ,
from: “6” ,
to: “17” ,
sentiment: “positive”.

Besides the above datasets, TSA-MD (Toledo-Ronen et al., 2022), MAMS (Jiang
et al., 2019), and the studies (Peng et al., 2018; Vo and Zhang, 2015) are also ABSA
datasets, which contain aspect extraction as a subtask.

30 [Link]
31 [Link]
4.5 Aspect Extraction 301

4.5.4 Knowledge Bases

Table 4.20 shows various knowledge bases related to aspect extraction. Besides
WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998), SentiWordNet (Baccianella et al., 2010), BabelNet (Nav-
igli and Ponzetto, 2012b), FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al., 2016), ConceptNet (Speer
et al., 2017), SenticNet (Cambria et al., 2024), and Wiktionary (introduced earlier),
some other useful knowledge bases for aspect extraction are DBpedia (Auer et al.,
2007), YAGO (Suchanek et al., 2007), Freebase (Bollacker et al., 2008), Probase (Wu
et al., 2012), Knowledge Vault (Dong et al., 2014), and FinSenticNet (Du et al.,
2023b).
In particular, DBpedia is a large-scale multilingual knowledge base extracted from
Wikipedia containing millions of entities. YAGO is a large knowledge base with gen-
eral knowledge about people, cities, countries, movies, and organizations. Freebase
is a practical, scalable tuple database that contains structured human knowledge.
Probase is a large-scale concept knowledge map proposed by Microsoft, contain-
ing entities mapped to different semantic concepts and labeled with corresponding
probability labels. Knowledge Vault is a web-scale probabilistic knowledge base
that combines extractions from Web content with prior knowledge from existing
knowledge bases. FinSenticNet is a lexicon tailored for financial sentiment analy-
sis, including 6,741 concepts, over 65% of which are complex MWEs. Ontologies
from professional domains, e.g., medicine (Lipscomb, 2000; Donnelly et al., 2006;
Wishart et al., 2018; Hirsch et al., 2016; Johnson et al., 2016; Wheeler et al., 2007)
and geology (Ahlers, 2013), can be also helpful for domain-specific aspect extraction.

Table 4.20: Useful knowledge bases for aspect extraction. These knowledge bases
can also be helpful for polarity detection in Section 4.6 because they provide either
sentiment scores or commonsense knowledge.

Name Knowledge # Entities Structure

Probase Structured lexicon 12,551,613 Graph
SenticNet Structured lexicon 400,000 Dictionary
SentiWordNet Structured lexicon 1,105 WordNet synsets Graph
FinSenticNet Structured lexicon 6,741 Dictionary
DBpedia Structured entities 10M Graph
Freebase Structured entities 125M Graph
YAGO Structured entities 64M Graph
BabelNet Structured entities 22M Dictionary
Knowledge Vault Structured entities 45M Graph
302 4 Pragmatics Processing

4.5.5 Evaluation Metrics

As a standard sequence labeling task, precision, recall, F1 , and accuracy are the
main evaluation metrics in aspect extraction tasks. In particular, precision is used to
measure the proportion of correctly identified aspects out of all aspects identified by
the model, indicating how accurate the predictions are. Recall assesses the proportion
of correctly identified aspects out of all actual relevant aspects present in the data,
showing the model’s ability to find all relevant aspects. The F1 score, which is the
harmonic mean of precision and recall, balances these two metrics and provides
a single measure of a model’s performance, especially when there is an uneven
distribution between precision and recall. Accuracy measures the overall rate of
correct predictions, comparing the total number of correct aspect predictions to the
total number of predictions made. Together, these metrics provide a comprehensive
evaluation of the model’s ability to accurately identify aspects in text data.

4.5.6 Methods

[Link] Explicit Aspect Extraction

A. Unsupervised Method

Statistics-based methods are the most straightforward solutions for unsupervised

aspect extraction. Agrawal et al. (1994) observed that individuals tend to use nouns
and noun phrases to represent aspects within a sentence. Thus, they scanned docu-
ments for all nouns and noun phrases, categorizing those that exceeded a specified
support threshold as frequent aspects. After identifying all the commonly occurring
aspects, the closest adjectives were extracted as possible opinion words. This led to
the extraction of aspect-opinion pairs. However, Hu and Liu (2004) noted that not
all aspects are frequently mentioned. When a sentence had an opinion word but no
frequent aspect, they identified the nearest noun as an infrequent aspect. This method
produced lists of both frequent and infrequent aspects with their associated opinion
words for aspect extraction tasks.
Bafna and Toshniwal (2013) improved the study of Hu and Liu (2004) by intro-
ducing probabilistic approach. Aspect extraction was performed using association
rule mining. The frequent nouns were extracted as they often represent aspects.
However, not all frequent nouns are target aspects, so a probabilistic power equation
was utilized to eliminate those that do not represent aspects. Bloom et al. (2007)
manually constructed taxonomies of opinion targets for two datasets. Their algorithm
utilized a predefined set of dependency tree paths to detect opinion expressions and
their associated targets. Due to the absence of annotated datasets containing opinion
expressions and targets, they evaluated the accuracy of their algorithm by manually
examining a portion of the output in various aspects.
4.5 Aspect Extraction 303

There are also studies that utilized auxiliary information for aspect extraction.
Moghaddam and Ester (2010) employed known features mentioned in reviews to
identify specific aspects from customer reviews written in free text format. By intro-
ducing predefined aspects and their ratings, they improved the accuracy of opinion
mining. In addition, Meng and Wang (2009) employed supplementary details about
the products available on review websites and correlations between aspects and opin-
ions to pinpoint the relevant aspects. Bancken et al. (2014) proposed an algorithm
to automatically detect and rate the product aspects from customer reviews. This al-
gorithm works by matching syntactic dependency path among different words from
the sentence. To identify product aspects and their opinion words, ten handcraft de-
pendency paths were defined. Then, the algorithm generates a syntactic dependency
tree by using a dependency parser and extracts the basic aspect opinion pair from
the sentence. Luo et al. (2019b) proposed an unsupervised model that employs word
embeddings for aspect clustering. They utilized Probase and WordNet to identify
prominent aspects and emphasized explicit aspects.

B. Semi-supervised Method

We categorized semi-supervised methods for aspect extraction into four groups:

bootstrapping-based, parsing-based, statistics-based, and neural-based approaches.
Hai et al. (2012) proposed likelihood ratio set and latent semantic analysis boot-
strapping methods for computing the pair-wise associations between aspects and
opinions. Zhao et al. (2014) employed a combination of a refinement process and
a bootstrapping method to improve the aspect and opinion extraction process. The
bootstrapping method involves automatic rule refinement to remove false results and
update the rules, resulting in a more accurate extraction process. Yu et al. (2011a)
proposed a method for automatically identifying significant product aspects from
consumer reviews posted online with a shallow dependency parser. Their approach
involves using a predetermined list of aspects to determine which ones are frequently
ranked highly by users.
Mukherjee and Liu (2012) proposed two new statistical models for automatic
extraction and categorization of aspect terms. Based on a Dirichlet forest LDA ap-
proach, they jointly trained models for aspects and sentiments with the utilization of
distinct seed strategies. This study used the synonym lexicon to expand the aspect
list. Neural-based methods have recently dominated the semi-supervised aspect ex-
traction. Li et al. (2020d) introduced an end-to-end attentive framework comprising
a general encoding component, a cross-view training component, and a moving-
window attention component. Their findings highlighted the significant improve-
ment in aspect prediction achieved by incorporating past nearby information. Zhou
et al. (2021a) proposed an adaptive hybrid framework designed for cross-domain
ABSA. Their approach involved employing adversarial training to align features
through training a domain discriminator. Additionally, they developed an adaptive
mean teacher as a semi-supervised component to reduce the impact of noisy pseudo
labels.
304 4 Pragmatics Processing

Bajaj et al. (2021) argued that typical ABSA tasks suffered sentiment inconsis-
tency and colossal search space. To overcome such problems, they propose a similar
span-based extract-then-classify framework. An aspect extractor is separately used to
extract the multiple possible targets from the sentence. He et al. (2023b) introduced
a meta-based self-training method combined with a meta-weighter. They trained a
teacher model to produce pseudo-labeled data, which is utilized by a student model
for supervised learning. The meta-weighter component was jointly trained with the
student model, providing subtask-specific weights to each instance, coordinating
their convergence rates, balancing class labels, and reducing the impact of noise
introduced during self-training.

C. Supervised Method

Kobayashi et al. (2007) proposed a dictionary-based approach, which identified

aspects with the help of syntactic patterns. They found that the combination of con-
textual clues and a common co-occurrence statistics-based technique can yield a
notable enhancement. Later, HMMs were employed to extract aspects by Jin et al.
(2009). CRF is another popular method for aspect extraction at the early stage. Chen
et al. (2012) utilized CRF-based methods and showed that CRF-based models out-
perform HMMs in ABOM tasks. Jakob and Gurevych (2010b) further demonstrated
the cross-domain capability of CRF-based models in aspect extraction tasks. They
introduced domain portability to CRF and evaluated the proposed method in both
single and cross-domain settings.
Recently, there has been a trend towards integrating aspect extraction tasks
into ABSA or ABOM tasks using neural methods. Two common approaches for
ABSA and ABOM tasks are pipeline methods and MTL methods. In pipeline meth-
ods (Wang et al., 2017; Xu et al., 2018), aspect terms are first extracted, followed
by the identification of sentiment polarities or related opinions. In contrast, MTL
methods (He et al., 2019c, 2021) typically involve a shared encoder and multiple
linear classifiers built on top of the encoder. These methods prioritize enhancing in-
teractions among subtasks rather than focusing solely on aspect extraction. Mao and
Li (2021) integrated the tasks of aspect extraction, opinion extraction, and aspect
sentiment polarity classification into an MTL framework. They proposed a novel
Gated Bridging Mechanism to facilitate the exchange of relevant information among
distinct subtasks, while effectively screening out irrelevant information.
He et al. (2019c) proposed a message passing mechanism that facilitates com-
munication among different tasks by utilizing a shared set of latent variables. This
mechanism enables the simultaneous learning of multiple related tasks at both the
token and document levels. Chen and Qian (2020) proposed an MTL approach that
utilizes a stacked multi-layer network to capture collaborative signals among diverse
subtasks. Zheng et al. (2020) utilized transfer learning to address the challenge of
cross-domain ABSA. They proposed two approaches – Anchored Model Transfer
and Soft Instance Transfer. Both methods are based on MTL and consider both model
and instance transfer. The authors found that the proposed methods can mitigate the
shortage of labeled data across diverse domains.
4.5 Aspect Extraction 305

Supervised explicit aspect extraction is the most common setting for aspect ex-
traction tasks. In this setting, employing external knowledge is a popular approach
for enhancing performance. For example, Sentic LSTM (Ma et al., 2018) enhanced
LSTM by integrating a hierarchical attention mechanism that includes target-level
attention and sentence-level attention for ABSA. Additionally, they also incorporates
commonsense knowledge from SenticNet for sentiment-related aspects. Ghosal et al.
(2020) proposed a domain adaptive model to boost the performance of sentiment
analysis with specific aspects. They utilized a graph convolutional autoencoder that
leverages inter-domain concepts in a domain-invariant manner from ConceptNet.
Liang et al. (2022b) proposed Sentic GCN, building a graph neural network by
incorporating affective knowledge from external knowledge bases, which is done
to improve the dependency graphs of sentences. The novel approach integrates
both the contextual and aspect word dependencies, as well as the affective infor-
mation between opinion words and aspects, into the graph model, resulting in an
enhanced affective graph model. SentiPrompt (Li et al., 2021a) is a method based
on prompt tuning, which employs consistency and polarity judgment templates to
create prompts related to ground truth aspects. Nonetheless, Mao et al. (2023c)
raised concerns about potential biases that could exist in prompt-based methods for
sentiment analysis and emotion detection.

[Link] Implicit Aspect Extraction

A. Unsupervised Method

Zhang et al. (2012) proposed a Weakness Finder method that extracts features and
groups them explicitly using a morpheme-based approach and a similarity measure
based on HowNet. Implicit features are identified and grouped using a collocation
selection method for each aspect. Dependency parsing is a common technique in
sentiment analysis that uses predefined rules to extract opinion targets and sentiment
words by analyzing the relationships between words.
To enhance the unsupervised dependency parsing, Zainuddin et al. (2016) pro-
posed a hybrid approach that combines rule mining, dependency parsing, and Sen-
tiWordNet. This approach enables implicit aspect extraction in an unsupervised
manner. Karmaker Santu et al. (2016) utilized a probabilistic topic modeling method
to extract implicit features. They modeled the reviews as generative probabilistic
feature models, with the reviews represented as associations between sentences and
features using hidden variables. Then, they employed the expectation-maximization
technique to calculate the model parameters using tagged training data. Finally, they
extracted implicit features using hidden variables and the calculated parameter val-
ues.
306 4 Pragmatics Processing

B. Semi-supervised Method

Jiang et al. (2014) employed association rule mining to extract implicit aspects,
incorporating indicators like semi-supervised LDA topic models. These were inte-
grated into an improved collocation model, which was then used to extract basic
rules. These basic rules were further expanded with new rules generated by the
topic model. The combination of these basic and new rules enabled the extraction
of implicit aspects. Xu et al. (2015a) combined SVM with topic modeling to extract
explicit and implicit aspects. They enhanced the LDA topic model with the pro-
posed cannot-link, must-link, and prior knowledge. The must-link relation provides
information about pairs of words that must be present in the same cluster, while
the cannot-link relation provides information about pairs of words that cannot be
in the same cluster. The LDA explicit topic model, augmented with these enhanced
features, was then employed to identify relevant attributes from the dataset. Subse-
quently, several SVM classifiers were initiated, which were trained on the selected
attributes to uncover implicit features.
Yu et al. (2018) argue that many current methods overlook the syntactic relation-
ships between aspect terms and opinion terms, which can result in inconsistencies
between the model predictions and syntactic constraints. To address this issue, an
MTL framework is first employed to implicitly capture the relations between the
aspects and opinions. Then, a global inference method is proposed, which explicitly
models several syntactic constraints between aspects and opinions to reveal their
intra-task and inter-task relationship. This approach aims to achieve an optimal so-
lution over the neural predictions for both tasks. Maylawati et al. (2020) proposed a
method to extract implicit aspect extraction. The proposed method contains feature
extraction, feature selection, clustering, and association rule mining to recognize the
final implicit aspects.

C. Supervised Method

By utilizing aspect hierarchy and opinion terms, Yu et al. (2011b) identified implicit
aspects. They created a hierarchal organization by integrating product specifications
and customer reviews, which allowed him to infer implicit aspects within review
sentences. Yan et al. (2015) proposed a NodeRank algorithm which first identified
all co-occurrences of the opinion words with the explicit aspects. Then, the algorithm
calculates the NodeRank value for each potential aspect with the opinion word. The
aspect with the highest value was considered as potential implicit aspect.
Liao et al. (2019) identified fact-implied implicit sentiment at the sentence level.
To achieve this, they suggested a multi-level semantic fusion method for identifying
implicit aspects in sentiment analysis. The corpus is used to learn three distinct
features at varying levels, including sentiment target representation at the word
level, structure embedded representation at the sentence level, and context semantic
background representation at the document level. A fact-implied Chinese implicit
sentiment corpus was also developed in this work.
4.5 Aspect Extraction 307

Feng et al. (2019a) utilized a deep CNN with a sequential algorithm to label
words in a sentence. Implicit aspects were identified by treating them as topics, and
then, determining the degree of sentiment words and aspects that were matched.
Initially, They extracted aspects using word vectors, POS vectors, and dependent
syntax vectors to train a deep CNN. Next, a sequential algorithm was used to obtain
sentiment labels with implicit aspect identification. Rana et al. (2020) argued that
prior techniques for implicit aspect extraction have concentrated on certain types
of aspects while disregarding the fundamental issue at hand. To deal with such
a problem, they utilized co-occurrence and similarity-based techniques to identify
implicit aspects in a multi-level approach, which crafted rules to identify clues and
used recognized clues to extract implicit aspects. To identify implicit aspects, Xu et al.
(2020b) proposed a NMF-based approach. They employed clustering based on the
co-occurrence of opinion words and word vectors to gather contextual information
about opinion targets from review sentences. Then, they utilized a classifier to
forecast the implicit target of users’ opinions.

4.5.7 Downstream Applications

[Link] Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

ABSA and ABOM are the most popular downstream applications for aspect extrac-
tion. To tackle ABSA and ABOM in various settings, numerous tasks have been
developed to analyze different sentiment components and their associations, such as
aspect terms, aspect categories, opinion terms, and sentiment polarity. Unlike earlier
ABSA studies that focused solely on a single sentiment component, recent research
has investigated several compound ABSA and ABOM tasks that encompass multiple
components to capture more comprehensive aspect-level information. For example,
in the aspect-opinion pair extraction task, Chen et al. (2020); Zhao et al. (2020a)
aimed to obtain a clearer comprehension of the mentioned opinion target and its
associated opinion expression. It is necessary to extract the aspect and opinion terms
as a compound, such as the pairs of (pizza, delicious) and (price, expensive).
Dai et al. (2020) tried to deal with aspect extraction and aspect category identifi-
cation, simultaneously. Recently, finer-grained sentiment analysis tasks, e.g., Aspect
Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP), Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis (ACSA),
Aspect-Category-Sentiment Detection (ACSD), and Aspect Sentiment Triplet Ex-
traction (ASTE) were proposed (Cai et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2021b; Mao et al.,
2022b; Bao et al., 2022; Wan et al., 2020; Wu et al., 2021a; Xu et al., 2020a;
Mukherjee et al., 2021; Wu et al., 2020c). These tasks commonly considered aspect
extraction as one of the learning tasks, providing necessary information for sentiment
analysis. Fundamental aspect extraction tasks along with other advanced tasks can
be structured in either an end-to-end fashion or a pipeline approach. Moreover, some
tasks rely on explicit aspects, while others depend on implicit aspects.
308 4 Pragmatics Processing

[Link] Knowledge Graph Construction

A knowledge graph is a type of semantic network that employs a graph-based data

structure comprising nodes and edges. Within a knowledge graph, each node cor-
responds to a real-world “entity”, while each edge denotes a “relationship” linking
entities. A knowledge graph is one of the most efficient ways of representing rela-
tionships. The typical creation of knowledge graphs involves three principal com-
ponents: Information Extraction, Information Fusion, and Information Processing.
Aspect extraction technology is usually used for extracting properties for given enti-
ties in the step of Information Extraction. For example, He et al. (2021) proposed an
MTL-based technique for constructing genealogical knowledge graphs. The study
collected unstructured online obituary data. Then, they extracted named entities as
nodes and categorized the family relationships of recognized individuals as edges to
construct genealogical knowledge graphs. For extracted family members, they also
extract related aspects (properties), including their age, gender, and residence place
to form more complete graphs.
Li et al. (2020c) introduced a systematic method for constructing medical knowl-
edge graphs from electronic medical records. Then, technical experiments were con-
ducted to assess its efficacy. Instead of using the classical triplet (subject, predicate,
object), they adopted a novel quadruplet structure that added the property items to
represent medical knowledge. The property items facilitated flexible customization
for creating knowledge graphs. For instance, their costumed properties include the
specific symptom probabilities, specificity, and reliability for given patients. Li et al.
(2020a) developed e-commerce knowledge graphs that capture user issues, points
of interest, item information, and their corresponding relationships. This approach
assists in comprehending user requirements, responding to pre-sales inquiries, and
creating explanatory texts. The constructed knowledge graph was implemented in
various online business scenarios such as shopping guidance, property-based QA,
and recommendation reasoning, all of which yielded favorable outcomes. The con-
cept of item-property-value (IPV) is utilized to record property values of items,
e.g., “cleansing foam-ingredient-bisabolol”. The “ingredient” is an aspect of the
“cleansing foam”.

4.5.8 Summary

[Link] Technical Trends

As shown in Table 4.21, recent research focuses on addressing explicit and implicit
aspect extraction tasks. The difference is that explicit aspect extraction identifies
aspects explicitly mentioned in text, while implicit aspect extraction aims to uncover
aspects that are not explicitly stated but can be inferred from the context. Implicit
aspect extraction often involves identifying nuanced or indirect references to aspects,
requiring a deeper understanding of the text.
4.5 Aspect Extraction 309

Researchers have developed various techniques for both explicit and implicit as-
pect extraction, including rule-based methods, machine learning algorithms, and
neural network models. These approaches have been applied across different aspect
extraction domains, e.g., product, restaurant, and movie reviews, demonstrating the
importance of aspect extraction in understanding opinions and sentiments expressed
in text. At the early stage, linguistic features played a critical role in this domain.
Researchers tried to identify aspects by analyzing the linguistic associations, depen-
dency relationships, POS tags, and customer behaviors. However, such superficial
features cannot provide a deeper contextual understanding of aspects.

Table 4.21: Technical trends in aspect extraction. PS denotes product specifications.

PB denotes Probase. WN denotes WordNet. SWN denotes SentiWordNet. SN de-
notes SenticNet. Ling. denotes linguistic features. Dep. denotes dependency features.
Cons. denotes consistency features. Some works did not individually report aspect
extraction results, as they focused on evaluating models for polarity detection.

Task Reference Tech Feature and KB. Framework Dataset Score Metric
Agrawal et al. (1994) Rule Ling., trading Rule-based Synthetic data - -
Bafna and Toshniwal (2013) Rule Ling., POS Probabilistic Self-collected 0.92 Acc.
Pang and Lee (2004) Rule Ling. Graph-based Self-collected 0.90 Acc.
Bloom et al. (2007)⇤ Rule Ling., Lexic. Probabilistic Pang and Lee (2004) - -
Kobayashi et al. (2007) Rule Ling., Stat. Feature eng. Self-collected 0.72 Prec.
Moghaddam and Ester (2010) Rule Aspects, ratings Feature eng. Self-collected 0.80 Prec.
Meng and Wang (2009) Rule Ling., PS Feature eng. Self-collected 0.75 F1
Bancken et al. (2014) Rule Dep., WN Feature eng. Self-collected 0.60 Acc.
Luo et al. (2019b) Rule PB, WN, GloVe Feature eng. Self-collected 0.70 Acc.
Hai et al. (2012) ML Ling. Feature eng. Self-collected 0.73 F1
Jakob and Gurevych (2010b) ML Ling., opinion CRF-based Self-collected 0.52 F1
Zhao et al. (2014) ML Depend., opinion Graph-based COAE2008 0.79 F1
Yu et al. (2011a) ML Boolean, Dep. Probabilistic Self-collected 0.74 F1
Explicit
Mukherjee and Liu (2012) ML Ling. Probabilistic Self-collected - -
Jin et al. (2009) ML Ling., POS HMM Hu and Liu (2004) 0.75 F1
Li et al. (2020d) DL GloVe LSTM, att. SemEval-2014 Task 4 0.72 F1
Zhou et al. (2021a) DL word2vec Meta learn. SemEval-2014 Task 4 - -
Bajaj et al. (2021) DL BERT Transformer SemEval-2014 Task 4 0.76 F1
He et al. (2023b) DL BERT Meta learn. SemEval-2014 Task 4 0.82 F1
Chen and Qian (2020) DL BERT MTL SemEval-2014 Task 4 0.81 F1
He et al. (2019c) DL BERT MTL SemEval-2014 Task 4 0.77 F1
Mao and Li (2021) DL BERT MTL Lapt.14 & Rest.14 0.85 F1
Ghosal et al. (2020) DL Emb., ConceptNet Graph-based Self-collected - -
Liang et al. (2022b) DL Dep., SN, BERT Graph-based SemEval-2014 Task 4 - -
Li et al. (2021a) DL Bart, Cons. Prompt-tun. SemEval-2014 Task 4 - -
Hu and Liu (2004) Rule Ling., POS Feature eng. Self-collected 0.56 Prec.
Zhang et al. (2012) Rule Ling., HowNet Feature eng. Self-collected - -
Zainuddin et al. (2016) Rule Ling., dep., SWN Feature eng. Self-collected - -
Jiang et al. (2014) Rule Ling. LDA Self-collected 0.78 F1
Karmaker Santu et al. (2016) ML Ling., TF-IDF EM algorithm Self-collected - -
Xu et al. (2015a) ML Ling., PMI, POS SVM, LDA Self-collected 0.78 F1
Implicit Maylawati et al. (2020) ML Ling., TF-IDF Clustering SemEval-2014 Task 4 - -
Yan et al. (2015) ML Ling., NodeRank Feature eng. Self-collected 0.84 F1
Rana et al. (2020) ML Ling., Stat. Feature eng. SemEval-2014 Task 4 0.88 F1
Xu et al. (2020b) ML Ling., dep., Stat. Matrix factor. SemEval-2015 Task 12 0.72 F1
Yu et al. (2018) DL GloVe BiLSTM SemEval-2014 Task 4 0.85 F1
Liao et al. (2019) DL word2vec CNN Self-collected - -
Feng et al. (2019a) DL Ling., POS, dep. CNN Liao et al. (2019) 0.82 F1
310 4 Pragmatics Processing

Recently, deep neural networks and PLMs were widely employed. Aspect extrac-
tion tasks are learned with other related tasks, e.g., opinion extraction and sentiment
polarity prediction. Those related tasks may provide complementary information
for each other. Thus, learning these tasks simultaneously can share the useful in-
formation, yielding higher accuracy on each task. While implicit aspect extraction
is generally considered more challenging than explicit aspect extraction, recent re-
search has shown less interest in this linguistic phenomenon, with a greater focus on
achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets without considering
linguistic properties. Alternatively, another type of effort is to achieve fine-grained
analysis of affective expressions, e.g., ASTE aims to extract aspect terms, opinion
terms, and their corresponding sentiment polarities. The studies on aspect extraction
from different linguistic contexts deserve more research efforts.
Finally, current aspect extraction research commonly focuses on conventional
application scenarios, e.g., product or service reviews. This emphasis is likely due to
the fact that most research in this field aims to identify sentiment polarities for specific
aspect categories, which can hold commercial significance, such as understanding
customer preferences for various aspects of a product or service. However, the scope
of aspect extraction can be broadened to encompass other scenarios. Unlike NER,
which targets specific entities in text, aspect extraction involves identifying various
attributes or features of entities, such as food quality, service speed, or restaurant
cleanliness. While these are not specific named entities, they contribute to a richer
understanding of attributes associated with entities.
Current aspect extraction methods tailored to specific domains may not work
well in general domains. Training a model on a domain-specific dataset, like one for
restaurant reviews, may not apply to other areas, such as extracting research findings
in scientific texts. While aspect extraction is useful in scientific research, there has
been limited exploration of domain-agnostic methods.

[Link] Application Trends

As mentioned before, aspect extraction is usually considered a subtask within fine-

grained sentiment analysis and opinion mining tasks. A current application trend
involves various task setups that integrate aspect extraction with sentiment analysis
and opinion mining, including ABSA, ABOM, ASQP, ACSA, ACSD, and ASTE.
Those related works are summarized in Table 4.22. ABSA involves identifying and
analyzing sentiments toward specific attributes or aspects of entities, such as products
or services, mentioned in text. It seeks to determine whether opinions are positive,
negative, or neutral regarding these specific aspects. ABOM is similar to ABSA but
has a broader scope, involving the extraction of opinion terms related to aspects.
ACSA focuses on detecting the category of an aspect and its sentiment polarity.
Categories are broader concepts than aspects. For example, “sushi” is an aspect, and
“food” is its associated category in the restaurant domain. ACSD goes further by
also detecting the aspect term itself, along with the aspect category and sentiment
polarity. ACSD provides additional aspect extraction functionality.
4.5 Aspect Extraction 311

However, ACSA offers flexibility in cases of implicit aspects (e.g., “this is an

expensive restaurant”) such as when “price” related aspect terms are not explicitly
mentioned in the text. ASTE aims to extract sentiment triplets, including an aspect
term, an opinion term, and a sentiment polarity, combining elements of both ABSA
and ABOM. ASQP builds on ASTE by additionally detecting aspect categories in
text. Nevertheless, the aforementioned task setups can be generally named as ABSA,
because they all involve analyzing sentiment and aspects. Among these tasks, aspect
terms are extracted either explicitly, e.g., ABSA, ABOM, ASTE, ASQP, or implicitly
via the identification of aspect categories, e.g., ACSD and ACSD. However, to the
best of our knowledge, the retrieval of implicit aspects from elliptical constructions
(see Section [Link]) was rarely studied. In real-world applications, it would be useful
if an ABSA model could infer the elliptical aspects from text. The benefit is to achieve
more fine-grained sentiment analysis and opinion mining, e.g., ASTE.

Table 4.22: Application trends for aspect extraction tasks.

Reference Downstream Task Feature Parser

Zhang et al. (2015a) ABSA X X
Wang et al. (2018a) ABSA X X
Li et al. (2019b) ABSA X X
Li et al. (2019b) ABSA X X
Luo et al. (2019a) ABSA X X
He et al. (2019c) ABSA X X
Hu et al. (2019) ABSA X X
Chen and Qian (2020) ABSA X X
Luo et al. (2020) ABSA X X
Liang et al. (2020) ABSA X X
Yu et al. (2021) ABSA X X
Zhao et al. (2020b) ABOM X X
Chen et al. (2020) ABOM X X
Wu et al. (2020c) ABOM X X
Gao et al. (2021a) ABOM X X
Wu et al. (2021b) ABOM X X
Cai et al. (2021) ASQP X X
Zhang et al. (2021b) ASQP X X
Mao et al. (2022b) ASQP X X
Bao et al. (2022) ASQP X X
Zhang et al. (2021b) ASQP X X
Schmitt et al. (2018) ACSA X X
Cai et al. (2020) ACSA X X
Liu et al. (2021a) ACSA X X
Wan et al. (2020) ACSD X X
Wu et al. (2021a) ACSD X X
Zhang et al. (2021c) ABOM, ABSA, ASTE, ACSD X X
Peng et al. (2020) ASTE X X
Xu et al. (2020a) ASTE X X
Wu et al. (2020c) ASTE X X
Zhang et al. (2020a) ASTE X X
Chen et al. (2021a) ASTE X X
Mao et al. (2021b) ASTE X X
Yan et al. (2021a) ASTE X X
Xu et al. (2021) ASTE X X
Fei et al. (2021b) ASTE X X
Mukherjee et al. (2021) ASTE X X
He et al. (2021) KGC X
Li et al. (2020c) KGC X
Li et al. (2020a) KGC X
312 4 Pragmatics Processing

[Link] Future Works

A. Aspect Extraction with Unified Framework

As mentioned above, the main technical trend for aspect extraction is the integra-
tion with other sentiment and opinion mining tasks, such as ABSA, ABOM, ASQP,
ACSA, ACSD, and ASTE. Different task setups allow users to retrieve different
types of information related to sentiment analysis. Then, the natural idea is to design
a unified framework to tackle multiple related tasks at the same time. Its practical
usefulness lies in the fact that one may prefer not to alter the model architecture
and undergo retraining for each instance of new data with varying types of opinion
annotations. There are two main paradigms for designing such a unified framework.
The first possible unified framework is to form the tasks as QA tasks. Gao
et al. (2021a) divided ABOM into two subtasks: aspect term extraction and aspect-
specified opinion extraction. They extract all the candidate aspect terms, followed
by extracting the corresponding opinion words given the aspect term. The proposed
model employed a span-based tagging scheme and constructed a question-answer-
based MRC task to achieve efficient extraction of aspect-opinion pairs. To address
the challenges of the ASTE task, Chen et al. (2021a) convert the task into a multi-
turn MRC and propose a bidirectional MRC framework. This framework includes
three types of queries (non-restrictive extraction, restrictive extraction, and sentiment
classification) to establish relationships between various subtasks.
The second possible framework is to develop a Seq2Seq learning framework by
directly generating the required sentiment elements in the natural language form.
Zhang et al. (2021c) proposed a generative framework comprising two types of
modules: annotation-style and extraction-style modeling. The former module adds
annotations to a given sentence to include label information in the construction
of the target sentence, while the latter module directly adopts the desired natural
language label of the input sentence as the target. Yan et al. (2021a) redefined every
subtask target as a mixed sequence of pointer indexes and sentiment class indexes,
converting all related subtasks into a unified generative formulation. With this unified
formulation, they utilized the pretraining Seq2Seq model BART to solve all ABSA
subtasks in an end-to-end framework.

B. Multimodal ABSA

The field of sentiment analysis faces a current challenge and opportunity in an-
alyzing emotions and opinions expressed through graphics and videos on social
media platforms. This challenge arises from the rapid development of social net-
works and the increased expressive tendencies of individuals on these platforms.
Specifically, the challenge lies in analyzing sentiment in multimodal data, including
voice, image, and text. Given that there is often a strong connection between various
forms of content, utilizing multimodal information can enhance the analysis of users’
sentiments towards different aspects.
4.5 Aspect Extraction 313

Yu et al. (2022) argued that previous approaches either use separately pretrained
visual and textual models or use vision-language models pretrained with general
pretraining tasks, which are inadequate to identify fine-grained aspects, opinions,
and their alignments across modalities. To tackle these limitations, they propose a
task-specific Vision-Language Pretraining framework, which is a unified multimodal
encoder-decoder architecture for all the pretraining and downstream tasks. They fur-
ther design three types of task-specific pretraining tasks from the language, vision,
and multimodal modalities, respectively. Ling et al. (2022) argue that existing meth-
ods did not effectively capture both coarse-grained and fine-grained image-target
matching, which includes the relevance between the image and the target, as well
as the alignment between visual objects and the target. To address this issue, they
proposed a new MTL architecture called the Coarse-to-Fine Grained Image-Target
Matching Network. This architecture jointly performs image-target relevance classi-
fication, object-target alignment, and targeted sentiment classification.

C. Cross-lingual and Cross-domain ABSA

Currently, much of the research in ABSA is centered around English and Chi-
nese languages, predominantly focusing on commercial domains such as products
and services. To address the scarcity of data for languages and domains with limited
resources, cross-lingual and cross-domain learning is necessary in the domain of
ABSA. This approach requires an understanding of the world knowledge pertaining
to relevant aspects, in addition to their linguistic meanings. World knowledge should
be independent of languages, because it reflects the properties of entities, cultures,
and information of the world. Ontology serves as a formal model of world knowl-
edge, delineating the categories of entities existing in the world and the relationships
between them.
The aspects of a concept cannot be naïvely defined by meanings. For exam-
ple, “dog” may include properties such as “color”, “size”, “weight” and “kind”.
While these properties are related to the concept of a dog, they may not be con-
sidered semantically central to the definition of a dog. The intra-semantic relevance
of this properties is also weak. Therefore, in aspect extraction, without access to
world knowledge, identifying all aspects associated with an unseen entity becomes
challenging, as different aspects may carry varying meanings and contextual associa-
tions. Additionally, transferring knowledge learned from supervised learning across
different entities is complex, as different entities may be associated with distinct
aspects. For example, a classifier trained on restaurant-related aspects cannot be di-
rectly applied to extract aspects related to dogs. Incorporating a systematic ontology
can facilitate cross-language and cross-domain transfer learning. In this context, the
learning system is not focused on detecting similar aspects from labeled datasets.
Instead, its objective is to understand the relationship between entities and their
properties based on an ontology and textual data. As ontologies encapsulate world
knowledge, which is only loosely dependent on languages, this learning paradigm
can aid in cross-language inference as well.
314 4 Pragmatics Processing

4.6 Downstream Task

The NLU suitcase model proposed in this textbook (Fig. 1.12) can be applied to any
downstream task, e.g., polarity detection, emotion detection, text summarization,
QA, information retrieval, topic modeling, text classification, machine translation,
dialogue systems, and more. Depending on the task, one or more modules may be
omitted. For example, if training/test data do not contain any sarcasm, the sarcasm
detection module is unnecessary. In this textbook, we pick polarity detection as
downstream task. In its simplest form, it can be solved by a binary classifier that
merely categorizes text as either “positive” or “negative”. Catching all the nuances
of how polarity can be expressed (either explicitly or implicitly) in natural language,
however, requires a more sophisticated model like the NLU suitcase model.
Polarity detection has received increasing attention from the research community
in the past decade mainly because of the rise of massive UGC such as movie reviews
and product comments. Unlike formal documents where “factual” and “neutral”
content is in the majority, UGC contains a large number of subjective expressions
from which valuable information can be extracted. Traditional research analyzes the
sentiment polarities, based on textual meanings. The hypothesis is that the words
and phrases used in a text carry certain emotional weights that can be classified as
positive, negative, or neutral. Recently, Zhu et al. (2024b) proposed personalized
sentiment analysis, suggesting that sentiment polarities should be defined by the
perceived impressions from the text. This approach acknowledges that individuals
may perceive sentiment differently from the same message, such as a proposal to
dance in front of a crowd. Therefore, sentiment analysis should incorporate person-
alized information to differentiate the perceived sentiment accordingly. The research
of polarity detection also simulates the interest from the industry as it is used in
different application scenarios, such as stock market forecasting (Ma et al., 2023,
2024). In the financial domain, while information that causes stock market fluctu-
ations can be considered positive or negative (Du et al., 2024c), Ma et al. (2023)
argued that market sentiment does not always align with the semantic sentiment of
text. For example, raising debt may cause different investor reactions depending on
the market environment.
Besides text, polarity detection is also applied to images and speech (Fan et al.,
2024). The goal of image polarity detection is to differentiate images raising positive
emotions in users from images causing negative emotions (Ragusa et al., 2019).
An image may contain much information such as facial expressions (Cowen et al.,
2021), body posture (Ferres et al., 2022), gestures (Keshari and Palaniswamy, 2019;
Atanassov et al., 2021), and scene context information (Kosti et al., 2019; Yang
et al., 2021c), which significantly increases the complexity of the task. In recent
years, researchers put forward a lot of efforts to deal with difficulties in image
polarity detection, e.g., a series of facial expression encoding methods (Li et al.,
2009; Soleymani et al., 2015) have been built on the basis of Facial Action Coding
System (Ekman and Friesen, 1978) to accurately describe the face and recognize the
polarity afterward.
4.6 Downstream Task 315

Nowadays, smartphone users interact frequently with voice assistants such as Siri
and Google Assistant. It is essential for voice assistants to identify the sentiment of the
user and generate empathetic responses accordingly. Compared with text, audio may
contain rich tone information which is a good indicator for determining the polarity of
the speaker. For instance, a high pitch is usually linked with a positive polarity while
low-frequency tones often correspond to negative polarity (Chaturvedi et al., 2022).
The main challenge of speech polarity detection is how to learn an intermediate
representation of input speech signal without any manual feature engineering (Latif
et al., 2021) in an uncontrolled natural environment (Fahad et al., 2021).

4.6.1 Theoretical Research

Despite the fact that most words, idioms, or phrases may occur in both affirmative
and negative sentences, there are some which may occur only in affirmative, or
only in negative sentences. These words, idioms, or phrases are termed “polarity-
sensitive” (Baker, 1970). Here are some examples:
(11) I would rather go to New York.
(12) I would rather not go to New York.
(13) She did pretty well on the project.
(14) She didn’t do pretty well on the project.
In this case, “polarity-sensitive” is a strict concept that covers only a small range of
polarity-sensitive words, idioms, or phrases. Fauconnier (1975a) described a more
general polarity with the extended notion: semantic and pragmatic polarity based on
the following observations:
• Some words or phrases are polarized with respect to logical structures.
• Some words or phrases are polarized with respect to context, which means their
polarity can therefore vary from context to context.
• The polarity items such as words and phrases have the property of polarity-
reversal (Baker, 1970).

[Link] Logically Polarization

It was noted in the work of Fauconnier (1975b) that grammatical superlatives could
yield quantificational effects in some sentences:
(15) The most stylish suit looks bad on Maxwell (“Any suit looks bad on
Maxwell”).
(16) Maxwell cannot solve the simplest question (“Maxwell cannot solve any
question”).
316 4 Pragmatics Processing

In the above sentences, superlatives such as “the most stylish” and “the simplest”
serve as a universal quantifier in terms of semantics. Nonetheless, there are still many
sentences in which the superlative cannot occur even with the semantic value:
(17) The most stylish suit looks good on Maxwell (,“Any suit looks good on
Maxwell”).
(18) The simplest question is easy for Maxwell (,“Any question is easy for
Maxwell”).
The aforementioned examples illustrate that superlatives are not always quantifi-
cational. Nonetheless, a weak polarity principle can be formulated: a quantifying
superlative that is appropriate for use in an affirmative sentence is generally un-
suitable for use in the corresponding negative sentence. According to Fauconnier
(1975a), quantifying superlatives are polarized in compliance with this principle.

[Link] Contextually Polarization

As mentioned, the polarity of some words or phrases may change from context to
context. Consider the following sentences:
(19) Even Maxwell doesn’t understand “Elements”.
(20) Even the monk is tempted to use contraceptives.
These sentences are suitable only in certain contexts that are compatible with the
“premise” of the even-phrase. For instance, Example (20) is appropriate only if it
is assumed that the monk is highly unlikely to be tempted to use contraceptives;
otherwise, it would not be appropriate. It turns out that, in a given context, an
even-phrase is suitable in an affirmative sentence, but not suitable in the negative
counterpart of that sentence:
(21) Even Maxwell understands “Elements”.
(22) Even the monk is not tempted to use contraceptives.
It is concluded from Sections [Link] and [Link] that it is impossible to lexically mark
words, idioms, or phrases whose polarity highly depends on the logical structure and
the context within the sentence. Despite all this, in the 1980s and 1990s, Krifka
(1992, 1994); Kadmon and Landman (1993); Lee and Horn (1994) attempted to
offer lexical semantics explanations for the distribution of polarity-sensitive items
(words, idioms, phrases). The target is to find out general properties to unite a large
number of heterogeneous polarity-sensitive items. Israel (1996) argued that polarity
sensitivity arises from the interaction of two lexical semantic properties, quantitative
and informative values (Kay, 1990), where the quantitative value reflects the fact
that a sizable portion of polarity-sensitive items encodes some notion of amount or
degree, and the informative value reflects the fact that some propositions are more
informative than others in context.
4.6 Downstream Task 317

In this case, polarity-sensitive items are lexical expressions combining a high

or a low quantitative value with a conventionally emphatic or understanding in-
formative value. Furthermore, the author argued that polarity-sensitive items are
scalar operators that require interpretation with respect to a suitable structured scalar
model (Fillmore et al., 1988; Kay, 1990). The lexical semantic-pragmatic content
of polarity-sensitive items makes them sensitive to scalar inferences. To be specific,
scalar operators
are themselves a special class of what Kay (1990) calls contextual operators, that is, expres-
sions whose meanings involve not only what situations they can appropriately describe, but
also some notion of the situations in which they can appropriately be used (Fillmore et al.,
1988).

contextual operators
are lexical items or grammatical constructions whose semantic value consists, at least in part,
of instructions to find in, or impute to, the context a certain kind of information structure
and to locate the information presented by the sentence within that information structure in
a specified way (Kay, 1990).

To sum up, a unified and comprehensive account of polarity sensitivity is proposed

on the basis of scalar operators and two lexical semantic properties: quantitative and
informative values. It cannot be applied to all polarity items but brings insights into
the diversity of polarity phenomena (Hoeksema, 1994; Rullmann, 1996).
Szabolcsi (2004) further studied the positive polarity and negative polarity items.
It turns out that the distribution of positive polarity items is significantly more
complex and shares properties with negative polarity items in certain conditions.
Spector (2014) studied two types of positive polarity items that have not been
recognized before. For the first type, anti-licensing is a strictly local phenomenon
while another type is anti-licensed if and only if their global syntactic environment
satisfies a specific semantic property. In recent years, Homer (2021) provided a
unified theory of the licensing of negative and positive polarity items some and any.
The author argued that licensing has both a syntactic and a semantic component.
Here licensing
is viewed in terms of a structural relation between a polarity item and an operator equipped
with certain features (negativity and downward-entailingness) (Homer, 2021).

The polarity of words, idioms, or phrases has been thoroughly studied from the
perspective of linguistics. The polarity of sentences, paragraphs, or documents is
defined as an opinion toward a topic, rather than a linguistic concept.

4.6.2 Annotation Schemes

Kim and Hovy (2004) defined opinion as follows:

The holder believes a claim about the topic, and in many cases associates a sentiment, such
as positive or negative.
318 4 Pragmatics Processing

Opinions are not always associated with the sentiment. For instance, the sen-
tence “I believe Jacky Chan is a famous star” contains no sentiment but a claim.
Hence, there are mainly two types of annotation schemes of polarity, i.e., 1) bi-
nary classification where Y 2 {Positive, Negative}; 2) 3-class classification where
Y 2 {Positive, Negative, Neutral}. Specifically, the annotation schemes of word-
level, phrase-level, sentence-level, paragraph-level, and document-level text are
slightly different from each other. Besides, when annotating, it is essential to take
the domain of the text into consideration.
In the beginning, word-level annotation is conducted in a supervised manner
or by experts, e.g., Opinion Lexicon (Hu and Liu, 2004), NTUSD (Ku et al.,
2006), SentiWordNet (Baccianella et al., 2010), SO-CAL (Taboada et al., 2011)
and AFINN (Nielsen, 2011). The quality of these lexicons is satisfactory. However,
it requires huge human resources to build and cannot generalize to certain domains.
To this end, researchers developed many data-driven sentiment lexicon construction
methods to annotate the polarity of words in a semi-supervised way. Typically, these
approaches (Rao and Ravichandran, 2009; Velikovich et al., 2010; Feng et al., 2012;
Tang et al., 2014a; Saif et al., 2016; Wu et al., 2016; Li et al., 2018b) employ a
limited set of seed words (either through manual annotation or existing sentiment
lexicons) to disseminate sentiment labels to a large number of unlabeled words and
thus yield a large, domain-specific sentiment lexicon.
Wilson et al. (2005) proposed to identify contextual polarity for a large number
of phrase-level sentiment expressions. Annotators are required to tag the polarity
of subjective expressions as positive, negative, both, or neutral. Here, both is ap-
plicable to expressions that have both positive and negative sentiments. In addition
to expressions that do not contain polarity, neutral is extended to a different type
of subjective expression like speculation. Below are the annotation examples of the
contextual polarity annotations:
1) Moreover, politicians use the concepts of good and evil (both) solely for the
purposes of intimidating and exaggerating.
2) Throughout the night, a vast number of individuals who supported the coup
celebrated (positive) by waving flags and blowing whistles.
3) According to Jerome, the hospital does not feel (neutral) any different from a
hospital in the United States.
Annotation acquisition is a crucial step in developing supervised classifiers. How-
ever, it is time-consuming and cost-intensive to annotate the polarity of texts solely
by experts. Therefore, crowdsourcing (Howe, 2008) is introduced to quickly acquire
annotations for the purposes of constructing all kinds of predictive models. Hsueh
et al. (2009) studied the difference between expert annotators and non-expert anno-
tators (e.g., AMT) in the light of annotation quality. They found that the quality of
labels can be improved by eliminating noisy annotators and ambiguous examples.
It is also proven that quality measures are useful for selecting annotations that give
rise to more accurate classifiers.
4.6 Downstream Task 319

4.6.3 Datasets

Initially, polarity detection was performed mostly movie reviews, product reviews,
and social media posts in English. Subsequently, many polarity detection datasets for
low-resource languages were constructed. Maas et al. (2011) proposed a large movie
review dataset32, including 25,000 training instances and 25,000 testing instances
with positive or negative labels sourced from IMDB. Negative reviews are defined
as those with a score of 4 or less out of 10, while positive reviews are those with a
score of 7 or more out of 10. Neutral reviews are excluded from the dataset.
Movie review 1: “This short deals with a severely critical writing teacher whose
undiplomatic criticism extends into his everyday life. When he learns why that’s not
a good idea, we learn a bit about the beautiful craft of writing that he’s been
lecturing on.”,
Label 1: “Positive”
Movie review 2: “I found this movie really hard to sit through, my attention kept
wandering off the tv. As far as romantic movies go..this one is the worst I’ve seen.
Don’t bother with it.”,
Label 2: “Negative”

Pang and Lee (2004) introduced a movie dataset33 with 2,000 reviews written
before 2002. They extracted at most 20 reviews for each author (312 authors in
total). They also released a subjectivity dataset that contains 5,000 subjective and
5,000 objective reviews from Rotten Tomatoes. Only sentences or snippets with more
than 10 tokens are selected. Go et al. (2009) introduced a social media posts dataset
(Sentiment140)34 extracted from the X API. There are 160,000 tweets in this dataset
annotated using distant supervision.
Tweet 1: “Maxwell is my new best friend.”,
Label 1: “Positive”
Tweet 2: “just landed at New York.”,
Label 2: “Neutral”
Tweet 3: “Math exam studying ugh”,
Label 3: “Negative”

Socher et al. (2013b) introduced a movie review dataset (Stanford Sentiment

Treebank)35, consisting of 11,855 single sentences extracted from movie reviews.
In this dataset, each sentence is labeled as either negative, somewhat negative,
neutral, somewhat positive, or positive. Binary classification experiments (negative
2 {somewhat negative, negative}, positive 2 {somewhat positive, positive}) on full
sentences refer to the dataset SST-2 or SST binary.

32 [Link]
33 [Link]
34 [Link]
35 [Link]
320 4 Pragmatics Processing

Zhang et al. (2015b) built a dataset36 for binary polarity detection. The authors
provided a set of 560,000 highly polar Yelp reviews for training and 38,000 for
testing by considering stars 1 and 2 negative, and 3 and 4 positive. Nakov et al.
(2013) proposed a message polarity detection task and a corresponding X dataset.
The authors extracted tweets from the X API and crowdsourced them on AMT for
annotation. Li et al. (2018b) presented a Chinese Tourism Review dataset, consisting
of reviews of popular tourism products. The authors manually annotated 30,180
tourism reviews and created a balanced dataset with 7,995 instances and a real-world
dataset with the all annotated instances.

4.6.4 Knowledge Bases

Knowledge bases are valuable tools for polarity detection in sentiment analysis
because they provide a structured repository of factual information, relationships,
and concepts that enhance the understanding of text. Knowledge repositories such
as SentiWordNet (Baccianella et al., 2010), SenticNet (Cambria et al., 2024) and
FinSenticNet (Du et al., 2023b) (introduced earlier) include dictionaries, ontologies,
and databases that encompass various domains, providing context and background
knowledge that can be crucial for accurate sentiment interpretation.
As discussed earlier in the textbook, knowledge bases can enable important sub-
tasks, e.g., WSD and NER, and hence, increase the accuracy of polarity detection.
Moreover, they can offer insights into metaphorical expressions and cultural nuances
that might not be evident from the text alone. For example, understanding that the
phrase “break the ice” means to alleviate tension can prevent misinterpretation of its
literal meaning, which might not directly convey sentiment. By linking such expres-
sions to their underlying meanings, knowledge bases help in correctly identifying
polarity. Knowledge bases also facilitate understanding relationships between enti-
ties and concepts, which is crucial for detecting sentiment polarity. For instance, if
a text mentions a company’s stock dropping after a ‘scandal’, a knowledge base can
provide background on the negative connotations of ‘scandal’ and its typical impact
on public perception.
In the era of LLMs, knowledge bases are still important because they provide a
reliable source of factual accuracy and consistency that LLMs alone cannot guar-
antee. LLMs generate responses based on patterns in the data they were trained on,
which may not always be up-to-date or factually accurate. Knowledge bases, on the
other hand, are curated and regularly updated repositories of structured information,
ensuring that the data they contain is accurate and reliable. Furthermore, knowledge
bases offer domain-specific expertise that LLMs may lack. While LLMs are gener-
alists, capable of discussing a wide range of topics, they may not possess the depth
of knowledge needed for specialized fields like medicine, law, or finance.

36 [Link]
4.6 Downstream Task 321

The structured nature of knowledge bases also complements the unstructured data
processing capabilities of LLMs. Knowledge bases use ontologies and structured for-
mats to organize information, making it easier to understand relationships between
different concepts and entities. This structure is particularly useful for complex
queries where precise relationships matter, something that LLMs might not inher-
ently handle well due to their training on unstructured data. Additionally, knowledge
bases offer a way to maintain temporal consistency, especially for information that
frequently changes. Since LLMs are trained on datasets that may quickly become
outdated, they can struggle to provide accurate information on recent developments.
Knowledge bases, with their regular updates and mechanisms for tracking changes,
help ensure that the information remains relevant and up-to-date.

4.6.5 Evaluation Metrics

Polarity detection is a typical classification task. Therefore, accuracy, precision, re-

call, and F1 score are the main indicators to evaluate the performance of the models.
These different indicators measure different aspects of a model. Alternatively, senti-
ment polarity can sometimes be represented as sentiment intensity. In such cases, a
commonly used evaluation metric is the MAE.

1’
n
MAE = |yi ŷi |, (4.1)
n i=1

where n is the total number of observations. yi is the actual value for the i-th
observation. ŷi is the predicted value for the i-th observation. |yi ŷi | is the absolute
difference between the actual and predicted values for the i-th observation.

4.6.6 Methods

This subsection outlines three trends in polarity detection methods: lexicon-based

methods, PLMs, and neurosymbolic methods.

[Link] Lexicon-based Methods

Lexicon-based methods refer to the methods using sentiment lexicons to identify

the polarity of sentences. The polarity of a sentence is regarded as the summation
of the sentiment scores of positive and negative words within the sentence. To this
end, it is essential to build a high-quality sentiment lexicon with a wide coverage of
words and phrases. There are three main sentiment lexicon construction methods for
polarity detection (Shi et al., 2019).
322 4 Pragmatics Processing

A. Statistics-based Approach

The main idea of the statistics-based approaches is to design proper statistics rules
to extract potential sentiment words from documents. Researchers identified effec-
tive statistics-based rules such as pointwise mutual information (PMI) (Church and
Hanks, 1990), symmetrical conditional probability (Bu et al., 2010) and enhanced
mutual information (Zhang et al., 2009) by observing, analyzing, and summarizing.
PMI is an effective statistical indicator that measures statistical relatedness/ similarity
between two words. The calculation of PMI is as follows:
n(wi, w j )/N
PM I(wi, w j ) = log , (4.2)
(n(wi )/N)(n(w j )/N)

where n(wi, w j ) refers to the co-occurrence number of words i and j; N is the total
number of documents. Supposing that wi is a word with polar, if PM I(wi, w j ) is
high, then w j is likely to share the same polarity with wi .
Feng et al. (2012) provided an unsupervised method to learn a sentiment lexicon
from massive Microblog data with emoticons. In the paper, emoticons acted as
noisy labels and are partitioned into positive and negative sets. If a word wi is more
similar to positive emoticons (PE) than negative emoticons (NE), i.e., score(wi ) =
PM I(wi, PE) PM I(wi, N E) > 0, then the polarity of wi is regarded as positive,
otherwise negative. Emoticon makes it feasible to build a domain-specific sentiment
lexicon in an unsupervised manner. However, it cannot detect user-invented words
that frequently appear on social media platforms, which may reduce its practical
usage. To this end, Wu et al. (2016) extended the previous work by introducing
new word detection in Chinese Microblog. The authors also used three types of
knowledge to assign sentiment intensities for words. Nevertheless, it did not consider
semantic knowledge. Subsequently, Li et al. (2018b) further improved Chinese new
word detection in the tourism domain via assembled mutual information (AMI), and
introduced semantic similarity knowledge to refine sentiment intensities of words.
In summary, statistics-based methods do not require extra human efforts and can
easily extend the coverage of lexicons. Besides, it considers user-invented words and
utilizes knowledge from different sources (statistic knowledge, semantic knowledge,
prior knowledge) to determine relatively precise sentiment intensities for words. One
drawback of this method is that it requires massive data, which may lead to biased
sentiment intensity if without enough data.

B. Semantic-based Approach

The idea of semantic-based approaches is to employ paradigm symbols such as

sentiment words, emoticons, or any other symbol that delivers polarity as the noisy
label and measure the semantic relatedness between paradigm symbols and other
words to build sentiment lexicons.
4.6 Downstream Task 323

Kamps et al. (2004) put forward an approach calculating semantic similarity be-
tween evaluative factors “good” and “bad” and adjectives. If a word is closer to the
reference word “good” than “bad” in terms of distance, then it is regarded as positive,
otherwise negative. Here, the distance is computed by the shortest path in WordNet
between “good” (“bad”) and the word, i.e., EV A(w) = d(w,bad) d(w,good)
d(good bad) . However,
WordNet-based measures of distance or similarity mainly focus on taxonomic rela-
tions, which makes it almost impossible to calculate the noun and adverb categories
in WordNet.
Velikovich et al. (2010) presented a graph propagation method to build polarity
lexicons. It starts from a small set of seed polarity words and then propagates
information from the seed set to the rest of the graph through the edges. The weights of
edges are obtained from the cosine similarity of context vectors of two words. Graph
propagation is supposed to overcome the drawbacks of common graph propagation
algorithms. However, a destination word may be influenced by a seed word through
different paths, resulting in a high polarity. Finally, it is worth noting that the cosine
similarity of the context vectors is an indirect way of calculating the semantic
similarity of two words, which may be inaccurate or biased.
Viegas et al. (2020) proposed an unsupervised method to expand sentiment lex-
icons by exploiting semantic relationships. Specifically, the authors employed pre-
trained word embeddings to directly calculate the semantic similarity between words
based on the hypothesis that a closer distance between word vectors indicates a
closer polarity and intensity. This unsupervised method provided a simple, yet very
effective, technique for improving the coverage of sentiment lexicons. Although
the empirical study demonstrated the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed
method, the directly computed semantic similarity between word embeddings can-
not avoid a typical error that words that are close in vector space may have opposite
semantic meanings, e.g., the semantic similarity between pleasant and unpleasant
is 0.7451 according to Spacy. Therefore, a more accurate measurement of polarity
similarity should be the future research focus for semantic-based sentiment lexicon
construction approaches.

[Link] Pretrained Language Model-based Methods

The majority of the existing deep learning-based polarity detection models are
trained on large labeled data. In general, these supervised methods significantly
improve the performance of polarity detection on many benchmark datasets. RNN
techniques (Basiri et al., 2021), such as GRU (Cheng et al., 2020) and LSTM (Imran
et al., 2020), have been proven to be very effective in the polarity detection task as
they naturally support the calculation of sequential text data. In recent years, atten-
tion mechanism (Vaswani et al., 2017) and transformer-based techniques, especially
PLMs such as BERT, become the standard paradigms and yield state-of-the-art per-
formance on almost all the benchmark datasets. In this subsection, we introduce the
trends of PLM-based polarity detection models.
324 4 Pragmatics Processing

A. PLM as Contextualizer

A typical application scenario is to use PLM as a contextualizer as it is a pow-

erful representation encoder. Satapathy et al. (2022) presented an MTL framework
for polarity and subjectivity detection. The authors employed BERT to generate
context-aware sentence-level embeddings. NTN (Li et al., 2021c) is designed as a
soft parameter-sharing module for both subtasks. An ablation study on a benchmark
dataset indicated that BERT representations outperform GloVe (Pennington et al.,
2014) embeddings by 2.5% on average. Rahman et al. (2022) proposed a BERT-
based model for reputation polarity detection in social media. In the paper, the last
BERT hidden state from the first token [CLS] is used to represent the whole input se-
quence. To address the class imbalance problem, the authors integrated a cost-based
strategy (Zhou and Liu, 2005) into the BERT-based model.
Jiang et al. (2022) presented Retweet-BERT, a simple and scalable model for
political leaning polarity detection, that encourages profile embeddings to be more
similar for users who retweet each other. To this end, BERT is first used to generate
profile embedding for each X user with an objective function to minimize the distance
between profile embeddings between retweeted users. Then, such embeddings are
used to fine-tune S-BERT (Reimers and Gurevych, 2019). A case study indicated that
the most retweeted users by left-leaning users are also left-leaning, and vice versa
for right-leaning. As this study mainly focuses on those who reveal their political
preference in their profile descriptions, detecting the leaning polarity of users who
are more “modest” in vocalizing their opinions remains a challenging task.

B. Fine-tune-based PLM Approaches

Pota et al. (2020) provided an effective BERT-based pipeline for X polarity de-
tection. The authors converted Italian tweets into plain texts by removing emoticons,
emojis, hashtags, etc., and used it to fine-tune the BERT model. It is worth noting that
overall positive (opos) and overall negative (oneg) are analyzed by two classification
tasks in this paper. Hence, the final polarity can be derived by the combination of
opos and oneg, e.g., oneg(0) + opos(0) = Neutral, oneg(1) + opos(0) = Negative,
oneg(1) + opos(1) = Mixed. One insightful conclusion is that preprocessing can
significantly improve the performance of fine-tuning as BERT is also trained on plain
text. Catelli et al. (2022) presented a framework to detect deceptive reviews and iden-
tify the sentiment polarity of the review by a multi-label classification mechanism.
The label powerset technique is used to transform the multi-label problem into a
single-label problem considering the 2 L possible combinations (deceptive positive,
deceptive negative, truthful positive, and truthful negative) of the transformed labels,
where L is a set of non-disjoint labels. Reviews with deceptive and polarity labels
are used to fine-tune BERT to enable dependency modeling between polarity and
opinion truthfulness, yielding better performance over baselines. Nevertheless, the
transformation is applicable only when the number of non-disjoint labels is low,
preventing it from being widely applied to similar problems.
4.6 Downstream Task 325

C. Prompt-based PLM Approaches

In recent years, prompt-tuning (Brown et al., 2020) PLM approaches for polar-
ity detection attract more attention from the research community as they yield better
performance on a wide range of NLU tasks such as polarity detection (Gao et al.,
2021b) and relation extraction (Han et al., 2022b). Li et al. (2021a) put forward a
model named SentiPrompt for aspect-based polarity detection (Pontiki et al., 2016)
leveraging sentiment knowledge enhanced prompts to tune the PLM in the unified
framework. Here, a typical sentiment knowledge enhanced prompt template looks
like this: “The A is O? [MASK]. This is [MASK]” , where A and O are randomly
sampled aspect and opinion terms(e.g., A is sampled from {Sushi, Price}, O is sam-
pled from {Good, High}). [MASK] can be either “yes” (consistent with ground truth)
or “no” (inconsistent with ground truth). BART (Lewis et al., 2020) with pointer
network (Vinyals et al., 2015b) is used as an Encoder-Decoder module for output
(including [MASK] filling) generation. SentiPrompt surpasses the strongest base-
lines on ABSA by a large margin. Nonetheless, the effect of prompts with different
templates remains unclear.
Mao et al. (2023c) conducted a systematic study on prompt-based polarity detec-
tion to investigate the influence of prompt templates. The paradigm of the prompt-
based PLM is to add a prompt with a [MASK] token upon a sentence (e.g., “I feel
[MASK], the movie is very horrible.”) and then predict the probabilities of pre-
defined emotion word (e.g., joyful, sad, and frustrated) in the [MASK] position. The
polarity of the sentence can be induced by label-word mapping, where each polarity
corresponds to a set of sentiment words. One of the advantages of prompt-based
approaches over fine-tuning approaches is that it does not require annotating large-
scale datasets, which is favored by low-resource languages. This study also observed
that different positions of prompts deliver different results, which indicates the PLM
is biased on positions as cognitively, different positions do not change the polarity of
the original input. Thus, it is essential to design proper prompts to achieve optimal
performance.
Du et al. (2024b) introduced an innovative framework called Hierarchical Prompt-
ing for Financial Sentiment Analysis. This framework aims to enhance the under-
standing of crucial factors in financial sentiment analysis for LLMs, focusing on
semantic overview, contextual exploration, and influencing variables. It was ob-
served that some LLMs lack the logical reasoning capabilities required for effective
financial sentiment analysis. To address this, the hierarchical prompting framework
queries additional knowledge from the LLMs, structuring the reasoning process to
ultimately improve their performance. Finally, Zhu et al. (2024b) (introduced earlier)
also belongs to the group of fine-tune-based PLM approaches to polarity detection.
In particular, an LLM was employed for tailored sentiment analysis, based on seven
different levels of personalization. Subsequently, the LLM was prompted to evaluate
the sentiment perceptions between two interlocutors.
326 4 Pragmatics Processing

[Link] Neurosymbolic Methods

Neurosymbolic AI integrates symbolic and statistical paradigms of cognition (Wang

and Yang, 2022). It is a promising paradigm that combines the advantages of rea-
soning and interpretability of symbolic representation and robust learning in neural
networks and it might be a crucial step toward the next generation of powerful,
trustworthy, and robust AI. Neurosymbolic AI takes inspiration from the concept of
System 1 and System 2 types of thinking, introduced by Stanovich and West (2000).
System 1 and 2 refer to dual modes of thinking – the former fast and intuitive guided
by pattern matching, the latter slow and analytical guided by deliberative reasoning.
In this sense, neurosymbolic AI is also brain-inspired as it attempts to emulate the
cognitive processes involved in both human learning and reasoning, e.g., bottom-up
learning (by examples) and top-down learning (by rules). A recent interpretation
of neurosymbolic AI are LLM-Modulo frameworks (Kambhampati et al., 2024),
which offer a tight integration between LLMs and symbolic components, extending
the scope of model-based planning and reasoning regimes towards more flexible
knowledge, problem and preference specifications.
This subsection discusses recent landmark neurosymbolic approaches for polarity
detection categorized according to the representation of symbolic knowledge, i.e.,
lexicon-based, knowledge graph-based, and FOL-based.

A. Lexicon-based Neurosymbolic Approaches

Lexicon-based neurosymbolic approaches refer to frameworks leveraging sentiment

lexicon as external symbolic knowledge to improve both accuracy and interpretabil-
ity of neural network models. Huang et al. (2020b) presented a model to effectively
extract features from sentiment words and text utilizing a context-dependent, lexicon-
based CNN. The model is first trained with the co-occurrence pattern of polarized
words and labels. Subsequently, a context-dependent lexicon is generated and is used
to generate sentiment embeddings. These embeddings together with pretrained word
embeddings are fed into a 3-channel CNN for sentiment word intensity prediction.
Furthermore, the trained model is applied to learning a sentiment strength-specific
lexicon. This lexicon has proved to be more effective than baselines in predicting the
polarity intensity of documents. However, the neural part (CNN) of this model did
not learn sentence- or document-level semantics which may weaken the performance
and application scope. Besides, the lexicon-based symbolic knowledge is not fully
utilized as it is only treated as an enhancement of word embeddings.
Li et al. (2020f) proposed a lexicon-integrated CNN-LSTM family model for
polarity detection in user reviews. In this study, sentiment intensities of words are
used as an indicator to augment sentiment-relevant information in an input sentence.
Augmented input sentences are then fed into a two-channel CNN-LSTM family
model for classification. Extensive experiments on the Chinese Tourism Review
dataset demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed sentiment padding mechanism
and the polarity detection framework. Similarly, this approach cannot capture the
complicated dependencies in a long sequence.
4.6 Downstream Task 327

Polignano et al. (2022) introduced BERT-WMAL, a hybrid approach that inte-

grates knowledge from a neural network model and a polarized lexicon for Italian
polarity detection. As the name suggests, WMAL is a weighted version of MAL,
a morphologically-inflected affective lexicon (Marco et al., 2019), where different
forms relate to the same lemma and share the same polarity as that of the lemma.
An input sentence is encoded in two parallel branches, i.e., BERT followed by an
LSTM and a dense layer, and WAML representation followed by a dense layer.
The outputs of two branches are fed into a dense layer for final prediction. BERT-
WMAL achieved better performance on three benchmark Italian polarity detection
datasets. Moreover, the authors proposed an explanatory approach using aggregate
attention values jointly computed by BERT attention heads and WMAL values to
measure how much attention each term receives from the other neighborhoods in the
input sentence. The explanatory approach for hybrid models provides an intuitive
human-like explanation that makes the model transparent.
Conventional deep neural networks embed word senses with vectorized hidden
states, which lack human interpretability. On the other hand, traditional WSD meth-
ods frame the task as word sense classification. However, this setup and its outputs
are not directly applicable to downstream systems. To this end, as discussed earlier,
Zhang et al. (2023b) proposed a neurosymbolic framework that explicitly distin-
guishes word senses with a paraphrasing paradigm. This is also reflected in the
already discussed neurosymbolic framework by Zhang et al. (2024c), who utilized
only POS tag sequences and pragmatic representations as input, employing two fully
connected layers as the neural classifier. Unlike the conventional practice of assign-
ing a fixed sentiment score to a word, these vector representations account for the
subjectivity of annotators, resulting in more robust performance in cross-domain and
cross-lingual sentiment analysis tasks.
Finally, SenticNet (introduced earlier) has also been proposing a neurosymbolic
approach to polarity detection since its inception back in 2010. The latest ver-
sion (Cambria et al., 2024) utilizes an ensemble approach that integrates common-
sense knowledge representation with HANs (Han et al., 2022a) to improve both
performance and transparency of polarity detection in different affective computing
domains. In particular, SenticNet leverages a revisited version of the Hourglass of
Emotions (Fig. 4.5) to extract emotion-cause pairs from text and, hence, translate
different intensities and categories of emotions into polarity values associated to
distinct opinion targets in a completely interpretable manner.
SenticNet also aims to reduce the symbol grounding problem via a sort of univer-
sal symbolism. For example, it represents BUY(x) as a double transfer of ownership
where, at time t 1 , agent A owns $ (a certain amount of money) and agent B owns x
while, at time t0 , agent A owns x and agent B owns $. This semiotic mechanism rep-
resents an interesting attempt to recreate language-agnostic representations to refer
to concepts in a universal way, the same way as mathematical symbols or musical
notes allow anyone to perform mathematical operations or read and write music, no
matter what language they speak. Moreover, it uses grounded representations that,
unlike words or word embeddings, can better replicate or visualize the current state
of affairs of a virtual operating environment on the fly, as narratives unfold.
328 4 Pragmatics Processing

Fig. 4.5: The Hourglass of Emotions revisited (Susanto et al., 2020). This emotion
categorization model represents affective states both through labels and through four
independent but concomitant affective dimensions, which can potentially describe
the full range of emotional experiences that are rooted in any of us.

B. Knowledge Graph-based Neurosymbolic Approaches

Graphs are a popular and widely used knowledge representation tool. One of the
typical representation forms is the subject-predicate-object (SPO) triplet, where
subject and object are entities (e.g., people, places, things), and the predicate (e.g.,
is_a, is_located_in) is the relation pointing from subject to object. The knowledge
recorded in triplets is commonsense knowledge yet essential for people to under-
stand sentences, especially less informative sentences. Researchers developed effec-
tive methods to represent graph-based knowledge and combine it with numerical
connectionists (neural networks) for a more powerful polarity detection ability.
Liao et al. (2022) presented a framework named KG-MPOA using dynamic
commonsense knowledge for Chinese implicit polarity detection. Compared with
explicit polarity detection, the implicit one is more challenging due to the lack of
sentiment words. To this end, external symbolic knowledge triplets from ConceptNet
are fused to the semantic representation of implicit sentences. To embed the graph-
based knowledge, the authors designed a pipeline for knowledge distillation, i.e.,
subjective triplet distillation (step 1), literal-related triplet distillation (step 2), noisy
triplet filtering (step 3), and semantic-related triplet distillation (step 4). Specifically,
step 1 extracts triplets whose subject or object can be retrieved from an existing
sentiment lexicon. Step 2 removes triplets whose subject and object cannot be found
in input sentences. Step 3 is used to filter certain triplet relations (e.g., “RelatedTo”).
Step 4 leverages BERT to compute the similarity between an input sentence and a
triplet-converted expression. The distilled triplets are regarded as a knowledge graph
and encoded by a dynamic graph attention layer integrating into the neural module.
4.6 Downstream Task 329

Swati et al. (2022) offered an alternative perspective on leveraging graph-based

knowledge. They employed a popular neural knowledge model COM ET (Hwang
et al., 2020) trained on ATOM IC20 20 knowledge graph to generate the Inferential

Commonsense knowledge (IC_Knwl) for each input news headline, e.g., for given
news headline H, certain inference type (I) like “xWant, xNeed and xEffect”, and
the number of returned references (N), the symbolic knowledge can be obtained by
IC_Knwl = COM ET(H, I, N). The generated IC_Knwl is further processed to fit
the expression of natural language and then combined with the input news headline
for classification by PLM. The framework is designed as language-agnostic through
the translate-retrieve-translate (TRT) mechanism (Fang et al., 2022b). Experiments
conducted on news headline political polarity detection proved the effectiveness of
the aforementioned usage of graph-based symbolic knowledge.

C. First-Order Logic-based Neurosymbolic Approaches

FOL, also called quantified logic or predicate logic, is used to express the rela-
tionship between objects by allowing for variables in predicates bound by quanti-
fiers (Wang and Yang, 2022). For example, “cat is an animal” can be induced by FOL
8x Cat(x) ) Animal(x). Here, 8 is a quantifier and Cat and Animal are variables.
A few solutions have emerged to enable the combination of FOL based symbolic
knowledge and neural networks. Huang et al. (2022a) presented a novel logic tensor
network (Badreddine et al., 2022) with massive rules (LTNMR) for aspect-based
polarity detection. Specifically, the authors integrate two types of knowledge into the
logic tensor network (LTN), i.e., dependency knowledge and human-defined knowl-
edge rule. A mutual distillation structure knowledge injection (MDSKI) strategy is
proposed to transfer dependency knowledge from teacher BERT to student network
LTNMR to achieve better performance. Human-defined knowledge is represented in
FOL “R(x, a) ^ emo+ ! P(R(x, a), l+ )” form integrated into the LTN, where emo+
is the positive sentiment tag of the word from SenticNet, l+ is the polarity label, x
the input text, and a the aspect term. Intuitively, the logic is to encourage the polarity
of the whole sentence to be close to the implicit polarity of aspect-related words.
Zhang et al. (2022) advanced a sentiment interpretable logic tensor network
(SILTN) for aspect-term polarity detection. SILTN is interpretable as it is a neu-
rosymbolic formalism that naturally supports learning and reasoning about data
with differentiable FOL. FOL provides a flexible declarative language for conveying
high-level cognition and representing structured knowledge. Despite the effective-
ness of explainability, the performance of SILTN is still unsatisfactory due to its
relatively shallow network structure. Therefore, the authors proposed a two-stage
syntax knowledge distillation (TSynKD) strategy to improve the inferring accuracy
of SILTN. Specifically, a large network BERT serves as teacher one, a big network
aspect-specific dynamic GCN (AsDGCN) as teacher two, and SILTN as a student.
In the output distillation stage, BERT’s logits are used as AsDGCN’s learning ob-
jective. In the feature distillation stage, SILTN learns dependency knowledge from
AsDGCN and also uses BERT’s logits as its training objective.
330 4 Pragmatics Processing

In short, the FOL-based approaches are a promising solution for building trust-
worthy, explainable, and powerful AI. However, current approaches rely heavily
on the strong representation ability of the subsymbolic system. Hence, improving
the predictive performance of the symbolic system without overly leveraging the
pretrained subsymbolic system would be a future research focus.

4.6.7 Downstream Applications

Polarity detection supports a variety of downstream tasks, including opinion min-

ing, emotion detection, social media monitoring, social media marketing, customer
relationship management, product review summarization, market research, brand
positioning, cyber-issue detection, content moderation, political trend analysis, fake
news detection, user experience enhancement, competitor analysis, conversational
agents, human-robot interaction, recommender systems, stock price prediction, and
stock portfolio allocation. In this subsection, we only focus on the last four tasks due
to space constraints.

[Link] Human-robot Interaction

Human-robot interaction refers to the conversation between human and robot agents
in this chapter. People often express their opinions over a topic or event in a conver-
sation with a robot agent. Hence, it is essential to identify the polarity or sentiment
of the user in this sentiment-aware dialogue system. On one hand, it helps to improve
the deficiencies of a product by understanding the user’s polarity toward the product.
On the other hand, it assists in generating human-like empathetic responses that are
appreciated by the users. In recent years, many conversational polarity detection ap-
proaches have been presented to better recognize user polarities (Zhong et al., 2019;
Li et al., 2021b; Lee and Choi, 2021; Li et al., 2022; Lee and Lee, 2022; Li et al.,
2023b). These approaches may act as a pretrained classifier module in the empathetic
chatbot to help identify polarity and generate empathetic responses accordingly.
Tahara et al. (2019) proposed an empathetic dialogue system on the basis of
extracted X polarity. The authors assumed that the degree of a user’s empathy can
be increased if the system can generate an utterance from topic-related tweets that
contain the same polarity as the user’s utterance. The assumption is confirmed by a
preliminary experiment that the degree of empathy can be improved in the case of
a polarized user utterance. However, the proposed method cannot increase empathy
in the case of a neutral user utterance. Besides, the authors utilized Google API37 to
measure the polarity while fine-grained emotion may provide more insights that are
beneficial for an empathetic dialogue system.

37 [Link]
4.6 Downstream Task 331

Instead of only generating empathetic responses, Liu et al. (2021b) introduced a

new paradigm of human-robot interaction, which is to build an emotional support
dialogue system grounded on the Helping Skills Theory (Hill, 2009). To this end, the
authors defined an emotional support conversation (ESC) task and constructed an
associated dataset termed ESConv. ESConv is annotated in a help-seeker (User) and
supporter mode (Agent). Specifically, the goal of the robot agent in a conversation
is to provide better support to comfort the bad emotional state (e.g., anxiety, shame,
depression, and anger) of the user through conversation. Emotional support generally
follows the following order: exploration (identify problems), comforting (express
empathy and understanding), and action (help the seeker solve the problem). In the
conversation of the ESConv dataset, the help-seeker was asked to give feedback every
two new utterances to measure the helpfulness of the supporter. The ESC task and
ESConv dataset were then measured by both automatic and manual indicators, and
the results demonstrated the utility of ESConv in improving the emotional support
of the dialogue system.
More recently, Tu et al. (2024) proposed AdaCLF, an adaptive curriculum learning
framework to dynamically choose courses of varying complexity according to the
learning status of the ESC model. The framework operates within the reinforcement
learning paradigm, where a teacher model utilizes feedback from a student model
to optimize its teaching strategy, fostering collaborative evolution. Both automatic
and human evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that this framework
significantly improves existing ESC methods, generating more effective supportive
responses.

[Link] Recommendation System

As discussed in Section 1.3.2, recommender systems gradually spread to most areas

of our lives. Polarity detection is crucial for recommender systems because it helps
understand and cater to users’ preferences and attitudes. For instance, if a user
consistently expresses positive emotions towards certain types of content, the system
can prioritize similar items. Conversely, it can avoid suggesting items that have
received negative feedback. Additionally, understanding polarity allows the system to
filter out unwanted content, ensuring that users are only exposed to recommendations
that align with their tastes and interests. This level of personalization enhances the
user experience and increases user engagement.
Ray et al. (2021) presented an ensemble-based hotel recommender system utiliz-
ing polarity detection and aspect categorization of hotel reviews. This study is based
on the fact that the decision-making process of choosing a suitable hotel is affected
by an ample amount of online reviews. These reviews contain polarities over differ-
ent aspects (e.g., cleanliness, service, and value) of a hotel. The authors employed
BERT and random forests to build an ensemble framework to analyze the polari-
ties of reviews over each pre-defined aspect. Finally, a comprehensive recommender
system is built to sort hotels based on the user-preferred aspect (e.g., location, food,
room, and facility).
332 4 Pragmatics Processing

In the context of RRSs, polarity detection can also be applied for analyzing
recommender system bias. It is believed that the algorithm of the news recommender
system could potentially form filter bubbles, leading users to become more selective
in their exposure to news. This could result in increased vulnerability to polarized
opinions and fake news. Alam et al. (2022) utilized the users’ polarities toward news
to analyze and quantify the degree to which the recommendation is biased. The
authors paired pre-defined questions with news articles, and categorized the articles
into “in favor” or “against” the pre-defined question (e.g., refugee and migration)
to transfer German news-related polarity detection to a pretrained classifier. The
bias of a recommender system is measured by the average polarity bias score of
recommended articles and user history articles. If the score of recommended articles
is significantly different from that of user history articles, the recommender system is
considered to be biased. Experiments on four news recommender systems indicated
that text-based systems tend to amplify user attitudes related to polarity, while
knowledge-aware systems are less prone to bias.

[Link] Stock Price Prediction

The opinions of investors toward a stock, to some extent, reflect the future trend (up
or down) of the price of that stock (Du et al., 2024a). Hence, it is valuable to regard
investor polarity as an indicator to predict stock price. Derakhshan and Beigy (2019)
introduced a human sentiment model to identify investors’ opinions. The authors
collected comments with explicitly expressed label words such as “buy” and “sell”
and used these label words as handcrafted features for classification. Experiments
on both English and Iranian datasets demonstrated that the classifier benefited from
investor polarity information.
Colasanto et al. (2022) presented a stock price prediction approach utilizing
a fine-tuned BERT-based model named AlBERTino to capture polarity from the
market. AlBERTino was fine-tuned on Italian financial news and outperformed its
base version AlBERTo (Polignano et al., 2019) by a large margin in terms of polarity
detection. The authors exploited the Bayesian inference (Bernardo and Smith, 2001)
to obtain a new set of bounded drift and volatility values on the basis of the polarity
score from AlBERTino. Finally, the exact future value of the price can be determined
on an hourly and daily basis. An empirical study indicated that the proposed approach
achieved better results on an hourly basis prediction. This approach brings more
insights into the prediction of the exact value of stock price other than only the trend
(up or down) prediction.
Ma et al. (2023) proposed a framework for stock price movement prediction. The
model incorporated information from multiple sources, e.g., numerical indicators,
news, and company relationships. They believed that semantic sentiment is not equal
to market sentiment. Thus, they used the stock price movement directions as market
sentiment signals, training a sentiment representation generator. The generator is
used for embedding news data in the stock price movement classifier.
4.6 Downstream Task 333

[Link] Stock Portfolio Allocation

Stock portfolio allocation refers to the task of allocating funds among the stocks
to maximize profit. A profitable yet low-risk allocation strategy would be valued
by all investors. Koratamaddi et al. (2021) put forward a market sentiment-aware
DRL (Arulkumaran et al., 2017) framework for developing an optimal policy that
maximizes returns with minimal risk given historical stock prices, polarity infor-
mation, and current portfolio. Specifically, observations, i.e., stock price movements
and polarity from social media, are fed into the state of the agent. The actor and critic
networks are updated based on observations and prediction errors are employed to
update Q-value. An empirical study showed that the proposed method achieved bet-
ter return values than the non-sentiment-aware baseline throughout the experimental
period. Ma et al. (2024) investigated the portfolio optimization task by simultane-
ously learning risk and return. This task is formulated as a ranking problem, where
stocks that are highly ranked based on predicted risk and return are included in the
portfolio for the next trading day. In a manner similar to (Ma et al., 2023), they also
utilized a pretrained news embedding generator, which was trained using market
sentiment signals.

4.6.8 Summary

The concept of polarity can be traced back to the 1970s. Researchers studied word-
to phrase-level polarity from the perspective of linguistics, which serves as the
theoretical base of polarity detection study. As discussed throughout this section,
polarity detection can be a downstream task within the NLU suitcase model but
also an upstream task for many other applications such as chatbots, recommender
systems, and financial forecasting. Thanks to the development of social media plat-
forms and mobile applications, UGC has increased fast in the past decade, which in
turn calls for accurate and automatic polarity analysis of users. Real-world polarity
detection shows promising commercial value as it can be applied to improving cus-
tomer service, and product quality contrapuntally. It is worth noting that, while this
section mostly surveyed text-based polarity detection in English, multimodal and
multilingual polarity detection are also very popular research fields.

[Link] Technical Trends

As shown in Table 4.23, polarity detection is categorized into three research streams:
lexicon-based, PLM model, and neurosymbolic methods. Lexicon-based methods,
common in early research, aim to build comprehensive and accurate sentiment
lexicons but require significant manual effort and are not easily adaptable to specific
domains. Data-driven methods, including statistical and semantic approaches, later
automated lexicon creation, particularly for specific domains.
334 4 Pragmatics Processing

The advent of PLM-based methods improved detection by capturing complex

semantics and dependencies in long texts. PLM techniques include using PLMs as
contextualizers, fine-tuning them, or employing prompt-based approaches, which
are especially useful for low-resource languages and do not require large annotated
datasets. A hybrid of subsymbolic and symbolic methods (neurosymbolic approach)
is widely recognized as the enabler of the next generation of AI. We roughly cate-
gorize neurosymbolic methods into three types based on the representation form of
symbolic knowledge, i.e., lexicon-based, knowledge graph-based, and FOL-based
neurosymbolic approaches. Neurosymbolic AI combines the learning ability (learn
from experience) of the subsymbolic system and the reasoning ability (reason from
what has been learned) of the symbolic system. However, the integration of sym-
bolic and neuro parts remains a challenging problem, especially fully integrated
systems that directly embed a symbolic reasoning module inside a neural module.
Also, defining when, how, and why the subsymbolic components of a neurosymbolic
framework interact with the symbolic ones is now an active research area.

Table 4.23: Technical trends in polarity detection. NeSy stands for neurosymbolic
AI. SA denotes statistical analysis. DR denotes dynamic rewarding; TRT denotes a
translate-retrieve-translate strategy. LTN denotes logic tensor network.

Trend Reference Tech

Feature and KB. Framework Dataset Score Metric
Feng et al. (2012) SA
Lexicon, emoticons PMI Self-collected 0.63 Macro-F1
Wu et al. (2016) SA
Lexicon, WN, syntax PMI NLPCC 2012 0.58 Macro-F1
Li et al. (2018b) SA
Lexicon, w2v, semant. AMI Self-collected 0.87 Macro-F1
Lexi.
Kamps et al. (2004) SA
Lexicon, WN, syntax Distance General Inquirer 0.68 Acc.
Velikovich et al. (2010) SA
Lexicon, ling. Vote-flip Self-collected 0.81 Avg prec.
Viegas et al. (2020) SA
Lexicon, ling., emb. Cos. sim. 20 datasets 0.75 Macro-F1
Satapathy et al. (2022) DL
BERT PLM, MTL Pang and Lee (2005) 0.95 Acc.
Rahman et al. (2022) DL
BERT PLM Amigó et al. (2013) 0.73 Acc.
Jiang et al. (2022) DL
BERT, profile PLM Amigó et al. (2013) 0.93 F1
Pota et al. (2020) DL
BERT PLM SENTIPOLC 2016 0.75 Macro-F1
PLM Catelli et al. (2022) DL
BERT PLM YelpNYC 0.94 Acc.
Li et al. (2021a) DL
BART Prompt Restaurant 14 0.75 Macro-F1
Mao et al. (2023c) DL
RoBERTa Prompt Blitzer et al. (2007) 0.85 Acc.
Structured prompts,
Du et al. (2024b) LLM Prompt Malo et al. (2014) 0.98 Acc.
GPT-4
Zhu et al. (2024b) LLM Persona info., GPT-4 Prompt Chen et al. (2023b) 0.91 Acc.
Huang et al. (2020b) DL Lexicon, emb., ling., CNN Thelwall et al. (2012) 0.08 Avg. MAE
Li et al. (2020f) DL Lexicon, w2v CNN-LSTM Socher et al. (2013b) 0.5 Acc.
Polignano et al. (2022) DL Lexicon, BERT LSTM-Att. SENTIPOLC 2016 0.73 Macro-F1
Zhang et al. (2023b) DL WN, ALM HAN, DR Malo et al. (2014) 0.88 Acc.
Lexicon, opinion,
NeSy Cambria et al. (2024) DL HAN, DR Go et al. (2009) 0.89 Acc.
emo., commonsense
Zhang et al. (2024c) ML Lexicon, POS HAN, FFN Go et al. (2009) 0.85 Acc.
Liao et al. (2022) DL Lexicon, BERT Graph, LSTM SMP2019-ECISA 0.78 Macro-F1
Swati et al. (2022) DL Commonsense, PLMs TRT, Att. Self-collected 0.92 Macro-F1
Huang et al. (2022a) DL Dep., rules, BERT, FOL, LTN Restaurant 14 0.75 Macro-F1
Zhang et al. (2022) DL Syntax, BERT FOL, LTN Restaurant 14 0.76 Macro-F1
4.6 Downstream Task 335

[Link] Application Trends

As discussed, polarity detection is beneficial for a number of downstream tasks but

we only reviewed four (see Table 4.24). The first application is human-robot interac-
tion, where understanding user sentiment polarity enables empathetic responses and
supports emotional comfort through conversation. The second application is rec-
ommender systems, which use polarity detection to personalize content and assess
bias, potentially reducing information cocoons. The third application is stock price
prediction, involving the forecasting of stock movements. The fourth application is
stock portfolio allocation, where polarity detection helps analyze market sentiment
and investor attitudes.

Table 4.24: Polarity detection downstream task applications.

Reference Downstream Task Feature Parser Explainability

Tahara et al. (2019) Human-robot Interaction X
Liu et al. (2021b) Human-robot Interaction X
Ray et al. (2021) Recommendation System X
Alam et al. (2022) Recommendation System X
Derakhshan and Beigy (2019) Stock Price Prediction X
Colasanto et al. (2022) Stock Price Prediction X X
Ma et al. (2023) Stock Price Prediction X
Koratamaddi et al. (2021) Stock Portfolio Allocation X
Ma et al. (2024) Stock Portfolio Allocation X

[Link] Future Works

Polarity detection research has gained increasing attention due to its importance
and promising application value in a number of downstream tasks. Despite the fact
that researchers have made great progress in identifying different kinds of (e.g.,
sentiment and political) polarities of users, several challenges remain unsolved. The
first challenge is context-dependent errors. People usually use sarcasm to express
their negative sentiments with positive words. For example, “Very good; well done!”
is sarcastic when someone does something wrong. One approach to addressing this
issue is to incorporate a sarcasm detection module as shown in the NLU suitcase
model.
The second challenge is limited training data in low-resource languages. Most
of the existing polarity detection datasets are collected from English platforms like
X and Amazon. Some low-resource languages have different characteristics (e.g.,
preprocessing, stopwords, structural differences across languages) that make it diffi-
cult to effortlessly transfer English-based models to low-resource languages. Finally,
current polarity detection models suffer from bias problems as the training data is
collected from human posts which may involve human biases.
336 4 Pragmatics Processing

Existing studies suggest that polarity detection serves an important role in down-
stream tasks (Liu et al., 2021b; Alam et al., 2022; Colasanto et al., 2022; Koratamaddi
et al., 2021). Apparently, these downstream tasks still suffer from the challenges of
polarity detection. Apart from this, dialogue systems are relatively weak at generat-
ing controllable responses, which may cause side effects to users in a bad emotional
state. The main challenge of the recommender system is the bias problem. People get
trapped in similar content so that their attitudes or opinions are strengthened again
and again. This is not good for people to have a comprehensive understanding of the
world. The stock price is influenced by many factors which cannot be fully reflected
in investor comments. Besides, as a financial-related task, stock price prediction calls
for a high accuracy as either false positive or false negative results in huge losses.
Amin et al. (2024) found that current expert affective computing systems can
exceed LLMs in a wide range of subtasks. Developing robust polarity detection
systems is still valuable but challenging. Despite PLMs achieved great accuracy in
polarity detection, neurosymbolic approaches significantly improve the reasoning
ability without compromising the representation ability of neural models, yielding
a trustworthy, powerful and robust AI. In general, the research of neurosymbolic
AI is still in its early stages. Hence, there are a series of key problems that remain
unsolved. The first problem is how to effectively represent symbolic knowledge. As
mentioned, FOL is a promising paradigm but it is hard to model the infinitary FOL
in the finiteness neural networks (Bader and Hitzler, 2005). Therefore, it is crucial to
explore some other representation paradigms such as programming languages (Nye
et al., 2020; Jin et al., 2022) and symbolic expressions (Lample and Charton, 2019;
Li et al., 2020e) in future research. On the other hand, subsymbolic and symbolic
systems can be combined in different ways and a better combination, especially a
fully integrated neurosymbolic system (Wang and Yang, 2022), should be investi-
gated further. Last but not least, the aforementioned four downstream tasks could
also benefit from the powerful reasoning ability of the subsymbolic system, e.g., gen-
erating controllable empathetic responses with the help of subsymbolic knowledge
in human-robot interaction, and reducing the bias of recommender systems.

4.7 Conclusion

In this chapter, we systematically surveyed five important pragmatic processing

tasks, namely: metaphor understanding, sarcasm detection, personality recognition,
aspect extraction, and polarity detection. We reviewed each task in terms of the
relevant theoretical research, datasets, useful knowledge bases, common evaluation
metrics, methodology, and downstream applications. By surveying these tasks, we
found that most current research has focused on algorithm development, while the
scope of the tasks has expanded relatively little over the years. For example, many
research tasks have evolved from statistical or rule-based methods to deep learning
or PLM-based methods, reflecting the advancement of machine learning algorithms
and general NLP research.
4.8 Learning Resources 337

These advancements have significantly improved the accuracy of performing

pragmatic processing tasks. However, the fundamental definitions of some pragmatic
processing tasks have remained largely unchanged, adhering to their original task
setups in general. This limitation significantly reduces the usefulness of pragmatic
processing tools in downstream applications. LLMs have embedded more general
knowledge compared to previous NLP systems or knowledge bases. However, it
is unsurprising to see that LLMs were exceeded by expert systems when directly
employed or prompted to handle linguistic or pragmatic tasks (Mao et al., 2024a;
Amin et al., 2024). Expanding the scope of pragmatic processing tasks, such as
introducing new tasks and functions of pragmatic analysis, can likely be achieved
by leveraging the knowledge embedded in LLMs, rather than merely focusing on
improving accuracy. Relevant theoretical research in pragmatic processing tasks
reveals significant opportunities and diverse directions for expanding pragmatic
analysis. Future work should emphasize both the linguistic and application aspects
of these tasks.

4.8 Learning Resources

A. Reading List
• Rui Mao, Kai He, Claudia Beth Ong, Qian Liu, and Erik Cambria. MetaPro 2.0:
Computational Metaphor Processing on the Effectiveness of Anomalous Lan-
guage Modeling. In Proceedings of ACL, 9891–9908, 2024 (Mao et al., 2024b)

• Bin Liang, Lin Gui, Yulan He, Erik Cambria, and Ruifeng Xu. Fusion and Dis-
crimination: A Multimodal Graph Contrastive Learning Framework for Mul-
timodal Sarcasm Detection. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 15,
2024 (Liang et al., 2024)

• Kai He, Rui Mao, Tieliang Gong, Chen Li, and Erik Cambria. Meta-based Self-
Training and Re-Weighting for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis. IEEE Transac-
tions on Affective Computing 14(3): 1731–1742, 2023 (He et al., 2023b)

B. Relevant Videos
• Labcast about Metaphor Understanding: [Link]/pwSAoR15esw

• Labcast about Persona and Personality Recognition: [Link]/JVFrhbo9eYU

• Labcast about ABSA: [Link]/g88JRIkrRkY

338 4 Pragmatics Processing

C. Related Code
• Github repo about Sarcasm Detection: [Link]/SenticNet/Sarcasm-Detection

• Github repo about Personality: [Link]/SenticNet/Personality-Recognition

• Github repository about ABSA: [Link]/SenticNet/Sentic-GCN

D. Exercises
• Exercise 1. Perform metaphor understanding on the sentence “Navigating life’s
ocean, we face stormy seas of challenges and serene waters of joy; while the sun
of hope illuminates our path, we must also beware the shadows of doubt lurking
beneath the surface”. Take a step-by-step approach whereby you first detect which
parts of text are metaphors, then identify source and target for each of the detected
metaphors, and finally perform ABSA based on these.

• Exercise 2. Choose a set of social media posts and determine if they are sar-
castic. Explain the reasoning behind your decisions. Outline a basic approach
for detecting sarcasm in text using a rule-based system or machine learning.
Discuss potential features, such as word choice, punctuation, sentiment reversal,
and context. Discuss the challenges of sarcasm detection in NLU. Consider as-
pects like lack of tonal clues, cultural differences, and the complexity of language.

• Exercise 3. Design a simple system with four independent rule-based classifiers,

each responsible for predicting one of the MBTI dichotomies (E/I, S/N, T/F, J/P).
Next, develop a second system using a statistical classifier trained on predicting
MBTI types. Explain how and why the two systems are different. Compare and
discuss results of applying the two systems to a personality recognition dataset.

• Exercise 4. Propose a machine learning approach for aspect extraction. Discuss

the use of labeled datasets, feature extraction (e.g., POA tagging, word embed-
dings), and potential algorithms (e.g., CRFs, SVMs, neural networks). Outline
the evaluation metrics you would use to assess the performance and accuracy
of aspect extraction methods and describe how these metrics can be specifically
applied in the context of ABSA.

• Exercise 5. Create a simple system able to detect and handle ambivalence in

text, where mixed sentiments (both positive and negative) are expressed simulta-
neously. Discuss possible scenarios where ABSA is an effective solution to the
problem and when it might not be suitable.
Chapter 5
Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

Abstract Commonsense knowledge acquisition and representation is a core topic

in AI, which is crucial for building more sophisticated and human-like AI systems.
Existing commonsense knowledge bases organize facts in an isolated manner, like
bag of facts, lacking the cognitive-level connections that humans commonly possess.
People have the ability to efficiently organize vast amounts of knowledge by linking
or generalizing concepts using a limited set of conceptual primitives that serve as the
fundamental building blocks of reasoning. Such primitives are basic, foundational
elements of thought that humans use to make sense of the world. By combining and
recombining these primitives, people can construct complex ideas, solve problems,
and understand new concepts. In this chapter, we describe the development of a com-
monsense knowledge base, termed PrimeNet, to emulate this cognitive mechanism.
PrimeNet is organized in a three-layer structure: a small core of conceptual primitives
(e.g., FOOD), a bigger set of concepts that connect to such primitives (e.g., fruit),
and an even larger layer of entities connecting to the concepts (e.g., banana).

Key words: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Conceptual Primitives,

Knowledge Graph Construction, Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition

5.1 Introduction

As covered in previous chapters, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic processing

techniques are crucial for NLU. While it might be tempting to rely solely on machine
learning algorithms, given the popularity of subsymbolic AI, it is important to
note that LLMs are trained on documents. However, these documents often lack
commonsense knowledge. Commonsense knowledge refers to the information about
everyday life that humans are expected to know, such as painters use pencils, things
fall downwards when dropped, and animals do not drive cars.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 339
E. Cambria, Understanding Natural Language Understanding,
[Link]
340 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

This kind of knowledge is usually taken for granted in human communication

and reasoning, even though it may not be explicitly stated (Cambria et al., 2009).
However, machines lack access to this innate commonsense knowledge, which of-
ten results in their inferior performance in simple reasoning tasks. As mentioned
by Oren Etzioni, commonsense is “the dark matter” of AI: it shapes so much of
what we do and what we need to do, and yet it is ineffable. To address this limita-
tion, researchers have dedicated significant effort to construct diverse commonsense
knowledge bases like Cyc (Lenat, 1995), FrameNet (Baker et al., 1998), Concept-
Net (Speer et al., 2017), ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019a), TransOMCS (Zhang et al.,
2020b), ASER (Zhang et al., 2020c), CSKG (Ilievski et al., 2021b), VoCSK (Liu
et al., 2022c), and SenticNet (Cambria et al., 2024). These knowledge bases are
compiled from diverse sources (e.g., encyclopedias, crowdsourcing, and expert an-
notations), aiming to empower machines with access to commonsense knowledge
and enhance the reasoning abilities of AI systems.
Despite advancements in existing knowledge bases, the reasoning capabilities of
AI systems remain unsatisfactory (Yeo et al., 2024c). One notable limitation is that
current knowledge bases often organize facts in a manner resembling a “millions
of facts”, lacking the cognitive-level connections inherent in human understanding.
Humans, on the other hand, exhibit the ability to efficiently organize extensive
amounts of knowledge. This capability goes beyond mere accumulation of facts and
involves the intricate weaving of cognitive-level connections, enabling a deeper and
more nuanced comprehension of the information at hand. We have two observations
for human-like knowledge organization.
Firstly, individuals are able to function well in most real-world situations using
a much smaller set of concepts, as opposed to dealing with an exhaustive list of
specific entities. For example, humans generally describe commonsense knowledge
like hammer can be used to drive nails into wood, as illustrated in Fig. 5.1. In this
example, the more general concepts such as hammer, nail, and wood are used for the
description, rather than getting into overly specific terms like engineering hammer
or rubber hammer. From estimates of effective vocabulary, the number of words that
people need in order to understand 95% of everyday texts is around 3000 words,
and the average size of American freshman college students’ vocabulary has been
estimated at about 12,000 words (Zechmeister et al., 1995). This underscores the
human ability to distill extensive information into manageable concepts, facilitating
a more streamlined expression and understanding of daily experiences.

Fig. 5.1: Example of the description of commonsense knowledge with concepts (e.g.,
hammer, nail, and wood), instead of specific entities (e.g., claw_hammer) or abstract
primitives (e.g., tool).
5.1 Introduction 341

Secondly, human cognition relies on a small set of fundamental and innate build-
ing blocks called primitives. In the conceptual dependency theory (Jackendoff, 1976;
Minsky, 1974; Rumelhart and Ortony, 1977; Schank, 1972; Wierzbicka, 1996), prim-
itives serve as elemental units of information and actions, like COLOR, SHAPE, SIZE,
INCREASE, and DECREASE, and forms the foundation for humans to make general-
izations, inferences, and predictions, ultimately facilitating efficient reasoning and
understanding in a wide range of real-world situations. For example, we generalize
concepts with relevant higher-level primitives. Verb concepts such as eat, slurp, and
munch could be related to a primitive EAT. Noun concepts like pasta, bread, and
milk can be associated with the primitive FOOD. Therefore, eat pasta or slurp milk
can be generalized into a primitive-level description, i.e., EAT FOOD. Hierarchical
concept representations have significant applications in diverse domains, e.g., con-
ceptual metaphor understanding (Ge et al., 2022; Mao et al., 2023b) and cognitive
analysis (Mao et al., 2023a).
In history, some efforts have been devoted to building knowledge bases more in
line with human cognition. For example, VoCSK is designed to exploit concept-level
knowledge representation for implicit verb-oriented commonsense knowledge (e.g.,
person eats food instead of John eats bread). SenticNet is developed for organizing
sentiment knowledge with a core set of primitives. ASER (short for Activities,
States, Events, and their Relations) is built to extend the traditional definition of
selectional preference to higher-order selectional preference over eventualities. These
methods share a common goal of conceptualizing diverse types of commonsense
knowledge, mapping them to higher-level cognition, and moving beyond the explicit
representation of knowledge as discrete facts. Following this line, we take a further
step by constructing a new framework for representing the intricate commonsense
knowledge based on conceptual dependency theory.
In this chapter, we propose a new framework for commonsense knowledge repre-
sentation and reasoning based on conceptual primitives, named PrimeNet. The data
and the code used to develop PrimeNet are available on SenticNet github1. Addi-
tionally, PrimeNet is also available as an API for verb-noun generalization2 and as
a set of embeddings for ABSA available in 80 different languages3. The PrimeNet
framework consists of three layers, as illustrated in Fig. 5.2:

• Primitive: The primitive layer comprises fundamental and universal elements

that act as the building blocks of cognition. These primitives form the foundation
upon which the entire knowledge representation is constructed. Examples of basic
primitives include COLOR, SHAPE, SIZE, OBJECT, TOOL, INCREASE, DECREASE,
and others. These primitives are essential for understanding and reasoning about
the world.

1 [Link]
2 [Link]
3 [Link]
342 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

• Concept: The concept layer is commonly used mental representations of cat-

egories or classes of objects, ideas, or events that share common features or
characteristics. For example, concepts like hammer and nail fall into this layer.
They allow for efficient information organization and grouping based on shared
attributes.

• Entity: The entity layer represents specific instances or examples of concepts.

For example, given the concept hammer, specific entities include brick_hammer,
rubber_hammer, and engineer_hammer. This layer enables a more specific rep-
resentation of knowledge, capturing individual objects or instances in the real
world.

We begin by gathering extensive commonsense knowledge from diverse sources

and integrate it to form a raw knowledge graph (Fig. 5.3). Unlike a simple aggregation
of facts, we adopt a gradual expansion approach. Initially, we construct the graph with
core concepts and relation types, systematically expanding it by adding more specific
entities and incorporating diverse relation types. In the next stage, we establish the
conceptual layer of PrimeNet, by assessing the abstractness of all nodes using a
new scoring function tailored for conceptualization. We leverage the probabilistic
taxonomy Probase (Wu et al., 2012) to identify the abstract concepts. The adopted
scoring method centers around core words rather than the peripheral leaves (Liu
et al., 2022c; Wang et al., 2015b).
Then, we perform primitive detection on the concepts to build the primitive layer
of PrimeNet. Formulating a thorough primitive set demands considerable time and
effort. To address this, we design a lexical substitution task to discover the set of
primitives. This is grounded in the assumption that within a shared context, the
associated concepts under a primitive can be seamlessly interchanged, resulting in
grammatically accurate sentences upon substitution. To allocate a representative
primitive to each concept cluster, we leverage LLMs to generate the primitive and
employ an LLM-based verifier to validate the assignment of the primitive to concepts.

gunlock industrial_equipment
isA Superordinate-level Primitive Tool Primitives
partOf isA (e.g., Tool)
mannerOf power_tool Hammer
beat hammer Basic-level Concept Concepts
madeOf usedFor hit (e.g., hammer)
isA isA Subordinate-level Entity Entities
forged_metal (e.g., Engineer Hammer)
brick hammer (e.g., engineer Hammer)
claw hammer
Three-layer Knowledge Representation

Fig. 5.2: Illustration of three-layer structure in PrimeNet. Given the factual knowl-
edge, a concept layer is generated as the basic level, comprising widely recognized
mental representations associated with various categories or classes of objects. Its
subordinate layer is termed as entity layer, which consists of specific entities, and
its superordinate layer is defined as primitive level, encapsulating overarching and
fundamental primitives.
5.1 Introduction 343

Fig. 5.3: PrimeNet preliminary knowledge graph. The initial knowledge graph col-
lects all natural language relationships (edges) between concepts (nodes) found in
the training data. After several rounds of normalization, the final PrimeNet graph
only leverages 34 relationships.

Moreover, we manually check the primitives, refine the hierarchy structure of the
primitives, and generate the explanation of primitives. For example, DEACTIVATE
is defined as change the status from on to off, i.e., STATE=ON ! STATE=OFF. In
Table. 5.1, we present several cases of verb primitives used in PrimeNet. This
strategy of constructing a primitive layer balances the need for human hand-coding
for accuracy with that for crowdsourcing and machine-based knowledge extraction
for coverage.

Table 5.1: Examples of verb primitives in PrimeNet. Given the input string, we
illustrate the detected verb primitives, and its primitive-level representation and
explanation. Primitives are marked in green.

Input String Verb Primitives Primitive-level Representation and Explanation

turn off light turn off DEACTIVATE DEACTIVATE(light) [Link]=ON [Link] = OFF
add salary add INCREASE INCREASE(salary) salary salary++
cut budget cut DECREASE DECREASE(budget) budget budget
drive car drive ACCELERATE ACCELERATE(car) INCREASE([Link]) := [Link]++
build house build GENERATE GENERATE(house) ö house 9 house
butcher chickens butcher KILL KILL(chicken) TERMINATE(LIFE(chicken))
revise the manuscript revise FIX Fix(manuscript) [Link]=BAD [Link]=GOOD
illuminate the idea illuminate SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY(idea) [Link]=DIFFICULT [Link]=EASY
344 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

The key novelties introduced by PrimeNet are summarized below.

1) Representation of commonsense knowledge based on conceptual primitives.
We propose a multi-layer commonsense knowledge base based on conceptual
primitives under the hypothesize that commonsense reasoning could depend on a
concise core of concepts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work incor-
porating the idea of conceptual primitives into a general-purpose commonsense
knowledge base to provide a generalizable, effective representation of common-
sense knowledge for AI tasks.
2) Construction of a new commonsense knowledge base PrimeNet. Based on the
designed multi-layer structure, we construct a brand new commonsense knowl-
edge base. We first collect commonsense knowledge from various sources and
perform knowledge integration to build a knowledge graph.
3) Conceptualization for PrimeNet. We design a new scoring method to measure
the abstractness of a term for conceptualization, according to the conditional
probability and connections to core words. Compared with previous methods, the
proposed method centers around core words rather than the peripheral leaves,
which is effective in measuring the abstractness of concepts.
4) Primitive Detection for PrimeNet. We design a new primitive detection method
to build the primitive layer. We employ a lexical substitution task to discover
related concepts under the assumption that they share a similar context. For the
clusters of related concepts, we leverage LLMs to label their primitives and verify
the detection process.
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows: Section 5.2 introduces concep-
tual primitive theory and the challenges of building a commonsense knowledge
base; Section 5.3 describes the overall framework; Section 5.4 explains the steps
for PrimeNet’s initial knowledge graph construction; Section 5.5 illustrates how the
concept layer of PrimeNet is built; Section 5.6 introduces the primitive detection
algorithm for building the primitive layer of PrimeNet; Section 5.7 reports experi-
ments; Section 5.8 discusses future work; finally, Section 5.9 provides concluding
remarks.

5.2 Background

5.2.1 Theory of Conceptual Primitives

In linguistics and cognitive science, conceptual primitive commonly refers to a

basic, irreducible concept or idea that serves as a foundation for understanding
more complex concepts. Conceptual primitives are fundamental elements that are
not further defined in terms of other concepts but are instead used to define other,
more complex ideas. They are often considered to be the building blocks of thought
and language. The exploration of conceptual primitives has a rich history within
linguistics.
5.2 Background 345

In the 1950s, Chomsky (1957) introduced the universal grammar theory, positing
innate linguistic structures as foundational conceptual primitives. According to this
theory, humans inherently possess the capacity to acquire language, with universal
linguistic structures serving as fundamental building blocks shared across all lan-
guages. The conceptual dependency theory, put forth by Schank (1972), suggested
that the basis of natural language is conceptual, forming an interlingual foundation
composed of shared concepts and relationships across languages. Jackendoff (1976)
delved into explanatory semantic representation, asserting the existence of semantic
primitives common to all languages, enabling humans to express a diverse range
of semantic information. Wierzbicka (1996) emphasized that “conceptual primitives
and semantic universals are the cornerstones of a semantic theory”, asserting that this
limited set of primitives can determine interpretations for all lexical and grammatical
meanings in natural language. These theories collectively aim to identify a core set
of fundamental primitives for language, facilitating the description of lexicalized
concepts.
In the realm of cognitive science, theoretical studies on commonsense knowl-
edge representation align with similar insights. Jackendoff et al. (1983) highlighted
a strong correlation between semantic primitives and cognitive representation. Ac-
cording to Pesina and Solonchak (2015), the primitives studied in linguistics form
the basis for the formation of a person’s conceptual system, which is both unique and
universal in many aspects. In this view, language emerges as a central tool for cog-
nitive functions, including conceptualization and categorization. In the development
of knowledge representation theories in cognitive science, many have been based
on the idea that humans possess a core set of knowledge connecting a vast array of
specific knowledge.
In the early stages, Minsky (1974) studied the framework for knowledge repre-
sentation and introduced the concept of “frames” as a structured way to organize
information about situations or objects. He proposed that humans when encounter-
ing new situations, retrieve typical knowledge from their minds. Piaget et al. (1952)
introduced the term “schema”, representing both the category of knowledge and the
process of acquiring that knowledge. The knowledge representation based on schema
has also been further researched by Rumelhart and Ortony (1977); Winograd (1976);
Bobrow and Norman (1975); Johnson (1989) and others. Spelke and Kinzler (2007)
introduced the core knowledge theory, suggesting that infants are born with “core
knowledge systems” supporting basic intuitions about the world. West (2011) intro-
duced a data modeling structure divided into primitive and derived concepts, with
primitive concepts serving as building blocks for other concepts. These theories col-
lectively underscore that the core primitive set constitutes the fundamental structure
of human cognition and provides guidance for knowledge representation.
346 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

5.2.2 Challenges

In modern large-scale commonsense knowledge bases, there have been rela-

tively few attempts to build a knowledge base in a way incorporating core
primitives based on conceptual dependency theory and linking a vast amount
of facts. Cambria et al. (2024) have developed a sentiment analysis system
based on primitives such as DECREASE and INCREASE aimed at generalizing
sentences into a sort of protolanguage in which it is easier to perform polar-
ity detection, e.g., the sentence “the device’s temperature sky rocketed” is first
generalized to “INCREASE([Link])” and then later transformed into
“[Link]++” (Fig.5.4). Wachowiak and Gromann (2022) proposed to
build on large multilingual PLMs and a small dataset of examples from image schema
literature to train a supervised classifier that classifies natural language expressions
of varying lengths into image schemas. Liu et al. (2022c) designed conceptualiza-
tion for verbs and built a knowledge base with conceptual verb-oriented knowledge
to represent various instances, e.g., “John eat apple” and “Helen eat bread” are
represented as “people eat food”.
The primary challenge hindering progress in this field stems from the complexity
of constructing a comprehensive set of core primitives to encompass extensive
knowledge across diverse domains. On the one hand, managing large-scale factual
data makes manual editing and maintenance of a core primitive set impractical. While
it is possible to manually craft a small, high-quality core primitive set, this approach
becomes intricate when using primitives to interpret other specific concepts, and its
coverage of specific knowledge is limited.

Fig. 5.4: Generalization of sentences into a more abstract, conceptual form.

5.2 Background 347

On the other hand, primitives are not fixed but rather flexible and adaptable.
The core primitives are deeply embedded in the human conceptual system, which is
both unique and universal in many aspects. The proposed number of semantic prim-
itives varies significantly, ranging from a few units in some studies (Wierzbicka,
1996; Jackendoff et al., 1983) to several dozens (Wierzbicka, 1996) or even hun-
dreds (Cambria et al., 2024) in others. Pesina and Solonchak (2015) stated that the
main concepts of human society remain relatively stable, but their overall volume
changes over time.

5.2.3 Related Works

In this section, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on commonsense

knowledge acquisition, including crowdsourcing methods, automatic extraction
methods, and approaches centered around extracting implicit knowledge from PLMs.
Then, we introduce the conceptual primitives theory, which is a pivotal component
in the construction of PrimeNet.

[Link] Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition

Because of its nature, commonsense knowledge is not explicitly stated in documents.

It is an inherent understanding of the world that humans possess but machines lack.
To narrow the gap between human and machine intelligence, the process of acquir-
ing commonsense knowledge is crucial for improving AI. There are mainly three
major approaches to knowledge acquisition: crowdsourcing, automatic extraction,
and mining from PLMs.

A. Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a useful approach for collecting commonsense knowledge from a

diverse group of human contributors, such as human experts (Miller, 1995; Lenat,
1995), web users (Singh et al., 2002; Chklovski, 2003), and participants in hu-
man computation games (von Ahn et al., 2006; Kuo et al., 2009). By tapping into
the collective wisdom of individuals, this approach captures intuitions and insights
commonly held by people, thus contributing valuable data to the construction of
commonsense knowledge bases. The crowdsourcing approach exhibits high adapt-
ability across diverse tasks and domains. By involving a varied group of contribu-
tors, it ensures that multiple viewpoints are considered, leading to the creation of a
more comprehensive and balanced knowledge pool. Existing knowledge bases built
through crowdsourcing typically encompass the following categories of common-
sense knowledge: factual knowledge, lexical knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge,
and domain knowledge (discussed below).
348 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

Factual knowledge represents concrete and specific details about the world, events,
people, places, objects, and other observable phenomena, such as “wheel is part of
bicycle”, “dog is an animal”, and “Los Angeles is located in California”. In the early
1980s, the Cyc project (Lenat, 1995) undertook the task of manually constructing
a comprehensive knowledge base encompassing the basic facts and rules about the
world. After the efforts of its first decade, the Cyc project expanded to include
around 100,000 terms. By the time of its release in 2012, known as OpenCyc 4.0,
the knowledge base had undergone substantial growth, encompassing over 2 million
facts across 239,000 concepts. The DOLCE project (Gangemi et al., 2002) was de-
signed to manually collect the ontological categories underlying natural language
and human commonsense with disambiguated concepts and relations. Freebase (Bol-
lacker et al., 2008) is a collaborative knowledge base by gathering data from various
sources, including Wikipedia, the Notable Names Database, and contributions from
community users. Google Knowledge Graph4 is powered in part by Freebase, with
an extensive collection of billions of facts about people, places, and things. As
discussed in earlier sections, ConceptNet (Speer et al., 2017) also leverages crowd-
sourcing contributions from users to acquire commonsense knowledge. Moreover,
ConceptNet is available in 83 languages and can be linked to other knowledge bases,
such as WordNet, Wiktionary, OpenCyc, and DBpedia.
As for lexical knowledge, there are several databases manually created by experts,
such as WordNet (Miller, 1995), Roget’s Thesaurus (Kipfer, 2006), FrameNet (Baker
et al., 1998), MetaNet (Dodge et al., 2015), VerbNet (Schuler, 2005), and Prop-
Bank (Palmer et al., 2005). As discussed earlier in the textbook, WordNet is also a
highly popular lexical knowledge base which captures semantic relations between
words. WordNet is now available in over 200 languages, allowing researchers and
linguists worldwide to explore the complexities of language and word associations
across diverse contexts.
Encyclopedic knowledge is related to a broad understanding of various subjects
and topics. For example, Wikidata (Vrandecic and Krötzsch, 2014) is a knowledge
graph coupled with Wikipedia, which is a free, open, and multilingual online encyclo-
pedia that is collaboratively edited by volunteers. DBpedia (Auer et al., 2007) extracts
structured information from Wikipedia data and converts it into a machine-readable
format for use in the Semantic Web and data mining domains. The encyclopedic
knowledge resources offer a wide range of information to help people understand
various topics and fields.
More recently, commonsense knowledge bases have been specifically developed
to cater to particular tasks, such as dialogue systems (Young et al., 2018). For
example, SenticNet has been specifically developed for affective computing tasks.
Visual Genome (Krishna et al., 2017) contains annotations of concepts and their
relations found in a collection of images. ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019a) is developed to
capture inferential commonsense knowledge, such as cause-and-effect relationships.
Finally, ATOMIC20 20 (Hwang et al., 2020) is proposed to unify the triples from
ConceptNet and ATOMIC, together with some newly developed relations.

4 [Link]
5.2 Background 349

B. Automatic Extraction

Despite commonsense knowledge is not explicitly defined, it has been observed that
certain types of commonsense knowledge can be extracted through automatic meth-
ods, such as text mining and information extraction. Compared with crowdsourcing,
these automatic extraction methods can handle large volumes of data efficiently and
at a lower cost, making them valuable tools for efficiently capturing and updating
commonsense knowledge from various domains.
Firstly, automatic extraction methods generally acquire commonsense knowledge
from large-scale text and web pages. For example, Never-Ending Language Learning
(NELL) project (Mitchell and Fredkin, 2014) is designed to automatically extract
structured information from unstructured Web pages. With hundreds of pre-defined
categories and relations, NELL extracts knowledge from more than 500 million web
pages, resulting in a large knowledge base comprising over 2.8 million instances.
WebChild (Tandon et al., 2014) is constructed through automated extraction and dis-
ambiguation from Web contents. It utilizes seeds derived from WordNet and pattern
matching techniques on large-scale text collections to gather information, including
fine-grained relations like “hasShape,” “hasTaste,” and “evokesEmotion”. As dis-
cussed earlier, ASER, SenticNet and Probase also contain elements of automatic
extraction. A subsequent version of Probase, named as Microsoft Concept Graph (Ji
et al., 2019), harnesses billions of web pages and search logs to build a huge graph
of relations between concepts, and has been proven valuable in enhancing search
engines, spell-checkers, recommendation engines, and other AI-driven systems.
Secondly, several methods are used to improve existing commonsense knowl-
edge bases. The automatic extraction methods can help fill gaps, update outdated
information, and supplement missing commonsense knowledge in existing knowl-
edge bases. For example, BabelNet (Navigli and Ponzetto, 2012a) is a multilingual
knowledge base which is automatically created by mapping Wikipedia to English
WordNet based on multilingual concept lexicalizations and machine translations.
Dense-ATOMIC (Shen et al., 2023a) is designed to overcome the limitations of
ATOMIC in knowledge coverage and multi-hop reasoning, by employing a knowl-
edge graph completion approach.
Thirdly, some efforts have been made to automatic integrate diverse common-
sense knowledge bases, enhancing the overall coverage and richness of the knowledge
base. For example, YAGO (Suchanek et al., 2007) is designed to extract common-
sense knowledge from Wikipedia, WordNet, WikiData, GeoNames, and other data
sources. Bouraoui et al. (2022) employed Region Connection Calculus to merge
open-domain terminological knowledge. CommonSense Knowledge Graph (CSKG)
integrates knowledge bases from seven diverse, disjoint sources such as ConceptNet
and WordNet. Based on ASER, Zhang et al. (2020b) have developed TransOMCS
with an algorithm for discovering patterns from the overlap of existing commonsense
and linguistic knowledge bases, and a commonsense knowledge ranking model to
select the highest-quality extracted knowledge.
350 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

C. Implicit Knowledge in Pretrained Models

Recent advancements in pretrained models have demonstrated significant improve-

ments across various tasks, underscoring their robust representation and generaliza-
tion capabilities. These models, pretrained on large-scale corpora, have proven adept
at encoding diverse forms of knowledge (AlKhamissi et al., 2022; Bhargava and Ng,
2022). For example, BERT uses a masked language model objective in pretrain-
ing, where parts of the input are masked, enabling the model to predict concealed
words bidirectionally. This process empowers BERT to capture contextualized rep-
resentations, comprehensively understanding intricate relationships and meanings
in different linguistic contexts. Similarly, a GPT (Radford et al., 2019; Brown et al.,
2020) follows the generative language model paradigm, predicting the next word
based on preceding context. With a unidirectional architecture processing text from
left to right during training, it acquires knowledge of grammar, facts, reasoning, and
even some degree of commonsense.
Currently, there is a trend to mine commonsense knowledge directly from PLMs,
leveraging the rich information embedded in these large models. Several works are
designed to probe commonsense knowledge directly from large pretrained models,
such as KB-BERT (Yao et al., 2019), KB-BERTSAGE (Fang et al., 2021b), and
PseudoReasoner (Fang et al., 2022a). These approaches involve fine-tuning PLMs,
such as BERT and BART, on commonsense knowledge bases like ATOMIC, Con-
ceptNet, and ASER, with the tasks typically entails providing the head and relation
in a commonsense triple as input, with the tail serving as the expected output.
COMET (Bosselut et al., 2019) (COMmonsEnse Transformers) is designed to
leverage GPT to generate rich and diverse commonsense descriptions in natural
language. It effectively transforms implicit knowledge from pretrained models into
explicit knowledge within commonsense knowledge graphs, and generates novel
knowledge that humans rate as high quality. LAMA (Petroni et al., 2019) (LAn-
guage Model Analysis) is an unsupervised method to leverage BERT to acquire
commonsense knowledge. It also serves as a framework5 for probing and evaluating
the factual knowledge encoded in PLMs (Petroni et al., 2020).
West et al. (2022) designed a symbolic knowledge distillation to leverage some
seeds from ATOMIC as prompts to acquire commonsense knowledge from GPT-3,
resulting a large commonsense knowledge graph ATOMIC10x and a compact com-
monsense model COMETTDII LS . Their work demonstrates the efficacy of collaborative
efforts between humans and language models for curating commonsense knowledge
graphs and training efficient, high-performing commonsense models.

5 [Link]
5.2 Background 351

[Link] Commonsense Knowledge Representation

Commonsense knowledge representation plays a vital role in AI, as it entails

transforming intricate and valuable human commonsense knowledge into machine-
readable formats, and enables the facilitation of complex reasoning tasks. Knowledge
representation and reasoning are tightly intertwined, as one of the primary objec-
tives of explicitly representing knowledge is to enable the capacity for reasoning,
inference drawing, and asserting new knowledge.
Reflecting the complexities of human cognition, commonsense knowledge is
represented through a variety of methodologies. Early techniques, like FOL and
logic rules, provided structured frameworks for capturing relationships and rules
governing the world. These methods encoded knowledge in terms of logical state-
ments and rules, enabling systems to perform deductive reasoning and inference.
Beyond logic-based approaches, other methods have emerged to represent com-
monsense knowledge. For example, semantic networks employ graph structures to
depict concepts and their relationships, allowing for intuitive representation and rea-
soning; frame-based systems organize knowledge into structured frames, capturing
attributes, roles, and hierarchies among entities.
More recently, some commonsense knowledge bases have achieved significant
success and are widely applied across various AI domains to support different
reasoning tasks. Typically, their knowledge representation frameworks adopt a “mil-
lions of facts” approach. For instance, ConceptNet summarizes millions of facts into
a knowledge graph format, where nodes denote entities and edges denote their rela-
tionships. Each commonsense knowledge or fact can be represented as a triplet, such
as <dog, isa, animal>, forming millions of triplets within the knowledge base.
Similarly, ATOMIC is a commonsense knowledge graph with 1.33 million everyday
inferential knowledge tuples about entities and events. It is represented in the form
of IF-THEN statements, like “if X pays Y a compliment, then Y will likely return the
compliment”, resulting millions of if-then statements within the knowledge base.
While these knowledge representation frameworks have been effectively utilized
in many applications, one of main limitations of these knowledge representation
frameworks is the lack of a cognitive-level connection. When humans store common-
sense knowledge, there are often underlying connections that involve the relevance
between concepts, underlying reasoning, contextual information, and so on. How-
ever, current knowledge representation methods typically only capture surface-level
relationships and lack a deep understanding of cognitive processes and underlying
thought mechanisms. Consequently, these frameworks may not fully capture human
cognitive levels in complex reasoning tasks, limiting their application and effective-
ness in some complex reasoning and inference tasks. Moreover, in implementing
commonsense knowledge representation, the absence of cognitive-level connections
can lead to challenges in identifying meaningful patterns and relationships within
data, resulting in suboptimal performance, limited accuracy, and increased risk of
erroneous conclusions. This inefficiency may further lead to resource wastage and ul-
timately diminish effectiveness in addressing complex reasoning tasks across various
AI applications.
352 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

[Link] Conceptual Primitives

Conceptual primitives can be defined as concepts that cannot be defined in terms

of other concepts in an integration data model which provides an overview of data,
thereby forming foundations for definitions of other concepts (West, 2011). Con-
ceptual primitives have been of practical and theoretical interest to researchers in
computer science (Minsky, 1974), linguistics (Jackendoff, 1976; Wierzbicka, 1996)
and psychology (Rumelhart and Ortony, 1977). Such research reports that the de-
composition of meanings into lower-level parts is essential for conceptualization.
We apply the idea of conceptual primitives to construct commonsense knowledge
by comprising a small core of primitive commonsense concepts and relations, linked
to a much more extensive base of factual knowledge instances. Naturally, humans
tend to categorize things, events, and people by identifying common patterns and
forms, which is the basis of conceptual dependency theory. Thus, commonsense
knowledge bases built upon conceptual primitives possess the greater potential to fa-
cilitate reasoning tasks. SenticNet also generalizes words and MWEs into primitives
and super-primitives annotated with emotion labels via PLMs, which achieved better
performance on various affective tasks and showed the power of conceptual primi-
tives. Unlike SenticNet, which focuses on sentiment knowledge, PrimeNet covers a
broader range of general commonsense knowledge based on conceptual primitives.

5.3 Overall Framework

In this section, we first introduce the task definition. Then, we introduce the solution
of constructing PrimeNet and the key ideas of each module.

5.3.1 Task Definition

PrimeNet is a hybrid graph H combining a traditional graph G where each edge is

built among nodes to represent commonsense knowledge in triplets, and a hypergraph
G ⇤ where each edge is built over the nodes to linked their concepts and primitives.
For example, in the graph G, its edge is represented as a triplet like (corgi, isA, dog),
where dog and corgi are nodes, and isA is a relation type. In the hypergraph G ⇤ , corgi
is linked to dog in the concept layer, and dog is linked to ANIMAL in the primitive
layer. We devise the formal definition of PrimeNet as below.
Definition (PrimeNet) PrimeNet is a hybrid graph H of a knowledge graph G and
a hypergraph G ⇤ . The knowledge graph is denoted as G = {V, E, R} where V is
a node set, E is an edge set connecting pairs of nodes, and R is the set of distinct
relation types associated with the edges in E. Each node v 2 V is a term. Each edge
e 2 E is a triplet (vi, r, v j ) where vi and v j are the connected nodes, and r 2 R is the
relation type.
5.3 Overall Framework 353

The hypergraph is denoted as G ⇤ = {V, C, P, M}, where V represents the set

of entities, C represents the set of concepts, and P represents the set of primitives.
The hyperedge set M = {M v!c, M c!p } contains two types of hyperedges. The
hyperedge (v, c) 2 M v!c links the entity v 2 V to its concept c 2 C, and the
hyperedge (c, p) 2 M c!p links the concept c 2 C to its primitive p 2 C. Overall,
we have the PrimeNet H = {V, E, R, C, P, M}. ⇤

5.3.2 Overall Framework of PrimeNet Construction

The solution of PrimeNet mainly consists of three modules. The first module is
to construct the knowledge graph G = {V, E, R} to organize the large-scale com-
monsense knowledge. This knowledge graph is designed to cover a wide range of
commonsense knowledge, encompassing specific entities and extensive informa-
tion. We refer to this graph as the entity layer of PrimeNet. The second module is
a conceptualization module, which identifies a small set of concepts C on top of
the set of specific entities E in G, as well as the hyperedges M v!c to link entities
to concepts. We consider this concept set and the mapping between concepts and
entities as the concept layer of PrimeNet. The third module is a primitive detection
module that constructs the core primitive set P on top of the concept set C and builds
the hyperedges M c!p to link concepts to their primitives. This small primitive set
and the mapping between primitives and concepts are used as the primitive layer of
PrimeNet. In the following, we will provide a more in-depth introduction to each
module, along with corresponding examples for illustration.

[Link] Module-1: Knowledge Graph Construction

Over the course of many years, a vast reservoir of factual knowledge has accumulated,
taking on various forms and originating from diverse sources. In order to system-
atically organize this wealth of knowledge, we have undertaken the construction of
a knowledge graph. Drawing inspiration from the theory of cognitive development
put forth by Piaget et al. (1952), which posits that human cognitive development
occurs in stages, we have adopted a gradual expansion strategy to build the knowl-
edge repository. Rather than merging disparate sources abruptly, our approach is to
delicately expand the knowledge base.
The fundamental idea underlying our strategy is that human knowledge acquisition
follows a pattern of continuous expansion, rooted in commonly shared and widely
accepted information. For instance, individuals typically begin by learning that a
“hammer” is a “tool” used for driving “nails”, and subsequently delve into more
intricate details, such as discerning the differences among various types of hammers
like “engineer hammer” and“brick hammer”. To emulate this cognitive process, we
initially construct a basic graph consisting of widely used concepts and relations as
the entity layer of PrimeNet.
354 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

Subsequently, we systematically enlarge the graph by incorporating a multitude

of facts from diverse sources. This method allows for the gradual incorporation of
information, mirroring the incremental nature of human knowledge acquisition. We
detail this module in Section 5.4.

[Link] Module-2: Concept Detection

To construct the concept layer over the knowledge graph G, this module focuses
on identifying a suitable concept set C from the node set V and establishing hy-
peredges in the set M v!c to link entities with their respective concepts. Within
PrimeNet, this concept layer encapsulates commonly used mental representations
of categories, classes, or ideas that share common features or characteristics. For
instance, “hammer” is the concept that represents a category encompassing entities
such as “engineering hammer”, “brick hammer”, and “rubber hammer”. Conse-
quently, we initialize the concept set layer using Core WordNet6, a compilation of
about 5000 most commonly used words meticulously curated by experts. Then, we
design a concept detection method to discover new concepts and expand the concept
set, leveraging Probase and build the edges to link entities to the detected concepts.
Our observation underscores that, for a concept, its hyponyms tend to establish
robust connections with diverse concepts in a probabilistic taxonomy, whereas a
specific entity is more concentrated in its connection to concepts. To capture this
regularity, we introduce a novel scoring function designed to identify whether a
term qualifies as a concept. In contrast to alternative conceptualization methods, our
approach stands out by centering around core words rather than initiating from the
leaves of an extensive taxonomy for concept detection. The pre-defined core words
enhance diversity and accuracy, distinguishing our strategy as effective in steering
clear of misleading information stemming from isolated graphs or incorrect circles
within the large-scale taxonomy.

[Link] Module-3: Primitive Discovery

This module is dedicated to constructing the primitive layer of PrimeNet, involving

the establishment of a core primitive set P and the creation of the hyperedge set
M c!p to connect concepts with their higher-level primitives. For instance, the
primitive INCREASE is associated with concepts like ramp up, go up, broaden, step
up, elevate, supplement, redouble, pile up, upward spiral, distend, and more. The
manual definition of the primitive set and linking of primitives to their lower-level
concepts is impractical. In our approach, an automated method is designed, utilizing
concept clustering and subsequent labeling of their primitives using LLMs, followed
by error checking to refine both the primitives and concept clusters.

6 [Link]
5.4 Knowledge Graph Construction 355

Specifically, it is observed that concepts under the same primitive often share a
similar meaning and context. For instance, elongate and stretch fall under the same
primitive GROW and share a similar context. Although intuitive, lexical substitution
tends to overlook crucial differences between concepts. For example, verbs such as
stretch and compress belong to opposite primitives, GROW and SHRINK respectively,
yet can be identified within similar lexical contexts. To address this issue, we lever-
age powerful LLMs to filter out incorrect concepts within each cluster, generating a
primitive that accurately describes the concept cluster. Manual checks are also em-
ployed to ensure the quality of primitives in building the primitive layer. This strategy
strikes a balance between human hand-coding for accuracy and crowdsourcing and
machine-based knowledge extraction for comprehensive coverage.

5.4 Knowledge Graph Construction

In this section, we detail the construction of the knowledge graph (G) of PrimeNet. It
mainly contains four stages. First, commonsense knowledge acquisition is to collect
high-quality knowledge from diverse sources which are created through manually
annotated or crowdsourcing. Then, knowledge integration is to map the nodes and
relations among different sources. Next, the graph construction is to organize the
knowledge in a graph. Finally, exploration is to define functions to leverage the
knowledge graph in the downstream tasks. We detail each stage as follows.

5.4.1 Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition

In constructing a commonsense knowledge base, the acquisition of knowledge stands

out as a pivotal initial phase. Collecting commonsense knowledge is a challenging
task due to its sheer volume, implicit nature, and diverse forms of expression. With
decades of human efforts, a wealth of commonsense knowledge has been amassed
and stored in various knowledge bases. To ensure quality, we extract knowledge from
expert-crafted databases and crowdsourced repositories, as summarized in Table 5.2,
including:

• Lexical knowledge extracted from WordNet, FrameNet, and Roget (Kipfer, 2006);
• Factual knowledge extracted from ConceptNet;
• Structured information in Wikidata and DBpedia. For DBpedia, we extract knowl-
edge from InfoBoxes which provide information about a wide variety of topics,
e.g., people, places, and organizations, as well as knowledge from InstanceTypes
which contains instances of 438 types, e.g., book, company, city, and plant.
• Task-specific knowledge, such as inferential knowledge extracted from ATOMIC,
which is organized as typed “if-then” relations with variables, and visual knowl-
edge extracted from Visual Genome (Krishna et al., 2017).
356 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

Table 5.2: Sources of commonsense knowledge for building the knowledge graph of
PrimeNet. Creation denotes the construction methods, # R denotes the number of
relation types, and Size denotes the graph scale.

Source Creation #R Size Example

WordNet manual 10 155K words, 176K synsets (denied, morphy, deny)
FrameNet manual 10 1.2K frames, 12K roles, 1.9K edges (Criminal_process, Subframe, Arrest)
Roget manual 2 72k words, 1.4M edges (explore, Synonym, investigate)
ConceptNet crowdsourcing 34 8M nodes, 21M edges (keyboard, part of, computer)
Wikidata crowdsourcing 6.7K 75M objects, 900M edges (George Washington, isInstanceOf, human)
DBpedia crowdsourcing 53.1K 4.8M nodes, 62M edges (Applied_Artificial_Intelligence, discipline, Arti-
ficial_intelligence)
ATOMIC crowdsourcing 9 300K nodes, 877K edges (Person X bakes bread, Before X needed to, buy
the ingredients)
Visual Genome crowdsourcing 42.4K 3.8M nodes, 2.3M edges, 2.8M attributes (man, sit on, bench)

5.4.2 Knowledge Integration

In commonsense KGC, multiple sources can provide complementary knowledge

of different types. However, the integration of knowledge from diverse sources is
impeded by the varying representation formats. It is noted that many databases pro-
vide mappings to other databases, e.g., ConceptNet contains mappings to DBpedia,
WordNet, Wikidata, and FrameNet. Yet, these mappings may be incomplete. Re-
cent research endeavors to create high-quality mappings among different knowledge
bases, offering a pathway for knowledge integration. For example, CSKG constructs
mappings across seven knowledge bases (i.e., ATOMIC, ConceptNet, FrameNet,
Roget, Visual Genome, Wikidata, and WordNet). Yang et al. (2023), instead, drew
insights from case-based reasoning, which aims to solve a new problem by rea-
soning with retrieved relevant cases, and investigate the direct application of it to
commonsense KGC.
We conduct knowledge integration to build a knowledge graph of PrimeNet using
these high-quality mappings, as well as lexical-level and semantic-level matching
methods. First, we process the individual sources. More specifically, we keep the
initial sets of nodes, edges, and relations in ConceptNet and ATOMIC. For other
sources, we extract their nodes and edges and convert their relations to the format
of relations in ConceptNet. Then, we conduct mappings between sources for node
resolution. On the one hand, we leverage mappings released by Ilievski et al. (2021b)7
to map nodes from different sources. On the other hand, we represent each node
using its label and use exact lexical matching to establish the mappings of nodes
from different sources. Moreover, we conduct semantic-level matching to identify the
same nodes with different labels. We convert all labels of nodes to embeddings using
pretrained Sentence-BERT (Reimers and Gurevych, 2019)8. Subsequently, we use
node labels from another source as queries for embedding-based semantic search.
A link is established between the query and the top-1 similar node if they share the
same representation after NLTK lexical tokenization.

7 [Link]
8 [Link]
5.4 Knowledge Graph Construction 357

5.4.3 Graph Construction

Confronted with an extensive dataset of knowledge triplets, creating a graph by

incorporating all of them directly is a blunt method. Humans develop core conceptual
primitives grounded in the most frequently utilized knowledge. For example, in
the realm of geography, individuals effortlessly understand fundamental concepts
like country, continent, and ocean, forming a foundational understanding without
the need to memorize every specific detail, including aspects like the area and
visual representation of each country available in DBpedia and Visual Genome,
respectively. This insight guides our approach to graph construction through a gradual
expansion strategy. We illustrate the construction process in Fig. 5.5.
Initially, we start from core nodes and relations to construct a new knowledge
graph. For core nodes, Core WordNet9, which contains the most frequently used
5,000 words, i.e., 3,300 nouns, 1,000 verbs, and 700 adjectives. We mainly consider
knowledge from WordNet and ConceptNet, with a set of core relations: isA, madeOf,
partOf, mannerOf, usedFor, and capableOf. Table 5.3 details the core relations and
their descriptions and examples. We denote this graph as a basic graph, which
contains 488,216 nodes and 962,228 edges. Then, we extract instanceOf and isA
relations from DBpedia to expand the core graph with more specific nodes. In this
step, we employ an embedding-based semantic similarity method using pretrained
Sentence-BERT for mapping. After integration, the graph is expanded to 1.4M nodes
and 3M edges.
Finally, we integrate commonsense knowledge from diverse sources into our
graph, ensuring a wide-ranging and diverse coverage. To map nodes from other
sources to our graph, we employ the mappings developed by CSKG for integration.
Moreover, to merge nodes, we use the embedding-based similarity method to identify
nodes with the same meaning, and then use the tokenization-based method for
verification. After integration, the nodes in PrimeNet are enriched with different
kinds of commonsense knowledge, with 2.04M nodes and 6.03M edges.

Fig. 5.5: Illustration of graph construction of PrimeNet. Starting with Core WordNet,
we first construct a basic graph with core words and relations from WordNet and
ConceptNet. Then, we add instanceOf knowledge from DBpedia and Wikipedia.
Next, diverse types of knowledge from other knowledge bases are incorporated into
the graph of PrimeNet.

9 [Link]
358 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

Table 5.3: Core relations of PrimeNet, and their description, example, and mappings
to WordNet and ConceptNet.

Relations Description Example Mapping to WordNet Mapping to ConceptNet

isA A is a specific instance of B (car, isA, machine) hyponym, hypernym /r/IsA, /r/InstanceOf
madeOf A is made of B (car, madeOf, metal) meronymy /r/MadeOf
usedFor A is used for B; the purpose of A is B (hammer, usedFor, hit) - /r/UsedFor
partOf A is a part of B (gunlock, partOf, gun) holonymy /r/PartOf
mannerOf A is a specific way of B (screw, mannerOf, revolve) - /r/MannerOf
capableOf Something that A can typically do is B (bowl, capableOf, hold_water) - /r/CapableOf

Table 5.4: Functions designed for exploring PrimeNet. For each function, we intro-
duce its input, output, and description.

Function Input Output Description

nodes - a list of nodes Return all nodes in PrimeNet.
edges - a list of edges Return all edges in PrimeNet.
get_number_of_nodes - an int number Return the number of nodes in PrimeNet.
get_number_of_edges - an int number Return the number of edges in PrimeNet.
relation_types a node a list of relation types Return all relation types that the node involved.
what_is a node a path of the node Return the first edge of a node.
what_can_be a node a list of edges Return all edges of a node.
relation_exist a node and a relation type True or False If a relation type exists in the node return True, else False.
Given a node A and a relation R, return node B if there is an
get_node_with_relation a node and a relation type a node
edge (A, R, B).
explain a node and a relation type a chain of this node Return the chain of a node and a relation type.
generalize a node a list of edges Return the root node of each of its relationships.
Return a score that denotes how similar two nodes are, based on
get_similarity two nodes a float score
the path similarity computed by SequenceMatcher.
get_polarity a node Positive or Negative Return the sentiment polarity of a node.
get_path start_node and end_node a path Return a path from the start_node to the end_node .
find_last_nodes a node a list of paths Return all edges where the end_node is the given node.
find_all_paths start_node and end_node a list of paths Return all paths from start_node to end_node.
get_node_degree a node a number Return the number of edges which connect with the given node.
get_phonetic a concept the phonetic information Return the phonetic information of a concept.
add_node a node - Add a node to PrimeNet if it does not exist in PrimeNet.
add_edge an edge - Add an edge to PrimeNet.
add_primenet_new a new knowledge graph - Add a new knowledge graph to PrimeNet.
print_to_file a knowledge graph - Save a knowledge graph to a file.

5.4.4 Exploration

Then, we design multiple functions for exploring the graph that are capable of:
• Exploring graph structure of PrimeNet. For example, nodes and edges functions
are designed to generate all concepts and relations in PrimeNet, respectively,
and get_number_of_nodes and get_number_of_edges are designed to count the
number of nodes and edges in the knowledge graph.
• Exploring commonsense knowledge for specific concepts. For example, given a
concept, what_is function is designed to get all its relations, get_polarity function
is used to get its sentiment polarity, and find_path function is designed to find a
specific path in PrimeNet given a pair of concepts.
5.5 Concept Detection 359

• Integrating new knowledge into PrimeNet. For example, the add_node and
add_edge functions are designed to add new concepts and relations into PrimeNet,
and the add_primenet_new function is able to incorporate a new knowledge base
into PrimeNet.
We detail all the designed functions in Table 5.4, including their input, output, and
description. These functions make it easy to apply PrimeNet in downstream tasks,
as well as update PrimeNet with new commonsense knowledge or domain-specific
knowledge.

5.5 Concept Detection

To create the concept layer of PrimeNet, we conduct concept detection to identify

concepts that represent categories or classes of objects, ideas, or events based on
shared features or characteristics (Cambria et al., 2022). An intuitive approach is
to use the isA relation to establish mappings between concepts and entities. For
example, (dog, isA, animal), (cat, isA, animal), and (lion, isA, animal) indicate that
animal is a concept, and dog, cat, and lion are entities falling under that concept.
Though simple, in practice, it is sub-optional to identify concepts by checking
whether exist entities fall under them. For example, animal, dog, and corgi have
specific entities. However, only animal and dog are widely-used as concepts in
human daily reasoning, corgi are too specific. In this section, we study how to
conduct concept detection with appropriate abstractions.

5.5.1 Preliminaries

When considering the conceptualization, it is important to measure the abstractness

of a term. For example, person is a more abstract concept compared with student.
Given a graph with isA relation, it is observed that abstract terms are usually located
at the higher levels in a graph, while the specific terms tend to be positioned at the
lower levels (Liu et al., 2022c). Specifically, the leaf nodes are regarded as the most
specific terms, and they are considered as first level. The level of non-leaf nodes
defined as the length of the longest path from the leaf nodes to itself. Formally, the
level of a term is defined as follows.
Definition (Level Score) Given a term c, the level score of c is defined as:
8
>
<
> max level(c 0) + 1, if hypo(c) ,
level(c) = c0 2hypo(c) (5.1)
>
> 1, otherwise
:
where hypo(c) is a set of hyponyms of c, and denotes an empty set. ⇤
360 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

The abstract words have higher-level scores and specific terms have smaller level
scores. For example, the level scores of dog, mammal, and animal, are 72, 89, and 362,
respectively. It is also observed that, for an abstract term, its hyponyms are usually
positioned at diversified levels, while its hyponyms would be more concentrated for
a specific term. Based on it, (Liu et al., 2022c) defined an entropy-based metric for
the abstractness measurement. Formally, the entropy score of a term is defined as
follows.
Definition (Entropy Score) Given a term c, its entropy score is defined as:
(
0, if c is a leaf term
entropy(c) = Õl (5.2)
i=1 pi (c) · log pi (c) otherwise

where l is the maximum level, and pi (c) is the ratio of the number of cs hyponyms
at the i-th level to the total number of cs hyponyms. ⇤

The entropy of abstract terms is often greater than that of specific terms. For ex-
ample, the entropy scores of pupil, student, and people are 0.563, 0.927, and 1.790,
respectively. In general, abstract concepts and concrete entities are differentiated us-
ing these abstractness measure methods by manually-defined thresholds (Liu et al.,
2022c). However, these methods are inaccurate and not suitable when applied to
complex graphs with large-scale commonsense knowledge. The primary reason is
the vast amount of knowledge, inevitably leading to the presence of cycles and iso-
lated subgraphs, significantly reducing the accuracy of the aforementioned methods.
Furthermore, some commonly used vocabulary lacks numerous lower-level nodes,
e.g., voice, track, and driver, and they have lower scores compared with other words
with more hyponyms, e.g., transport, symbol, and medicine. As such, the conceptu-
alization methods which only rely on hierarchical information are not reasonable for
such cases.
We perform a probing experiment as illustrated in Fig. 5.6. We assume that words
from Core WordNet are concepts, given their fundamental role in describing the
world. For all nodes in Core WordNet and our knowledge graph G of PrimeNet, we
show probability distributions of their level scores and entropy scores. It is observed
that a considerable number of words in Core WordNet have level scores below 50,
and entropy scores under 1. These words are readily excluded from concept sets, by
applying previous methods for conceptualization.

5.5.2 Conceptualization

Previous methods employed a bottom-up approach to measure abstractness, where

a word’s score relies on its hyponym set. Leaves without hyponyms are initiated as
the seed set and then inferred for the others. We initialize the core concepts and then
infer other words accordingly.
5.5 Concept Detection 361

Fig. 5.6: Illustration of data distribution of Core WordNet and the graph of PrimeNet,
considering of the level scores and entropy scores of nodes.

Specifically, the initial set of concepts, denoted as C 0 = {c1, c2, c3, . . . }, comprises
commonly used words from Core WordNet that describe the world in human daily
life. In an ideal scenario, the hypernyms of these core words are expected to be
more abstract and should be considered as concepts. However, in practical scenario,
not all of their hypernyms can be unequivocally regarded as concepts due to the
intricate interweaving of commonsense knowledge. For instance, relationships such
as (dog, isA, animal), (dog, isA, pet), (pet, isA, animal), and (dog, isA, species)
are all deemed correct and coexist within the knowledge base. Thus, we need a
more accurate method to measure the abstractness of hypernyms. It is observed that
not all hypernyms have the same weight when working as the concept of a dog.
This problem has been deeply studied and Probase has been constructed to provide
statistical insights of isA relations.
362 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

Fig. 5.7: Examples of top-50 words scored by the designed conceptual score function.
We compare their level scores and entropy scores with our conceptual scores.

It includes “isA” relations for 2.7 million terms, automatically mined from a
corpus of 1.68 billion web pages. That is, each triplet (t, isA, c) is linked to a
frequency score f rec(t, c), providing frequency information computed through a
data-driven method based on large-scale corpus. For example, (dog, isA, animal)
and (dog, isA, species) show that both animal and species are concepts of dog, and
f req(dog, animal) > f req(dog, species) shows animal is a more typical concept
for dog, compared with species.
Given a triplet (t, isA, c), it is associated with a frequency score f req(t, c) in
Probase. The frequency score is an important signal to identify whether this relation
is typical or not. Based on this observation, Wang et al. (2015b) proposed a typicality
score, which is defined based on the frequency information to tell how popular a
concept c is as far as an entity t is concerned, and how popular an entity t is as far
as a concept c is concerned:
Definition (Typicality Score) Given a term t, the conditional probability Pr(c|t) of
a term c is defined as:
f req(t, c)
Pr(c|t) = Õ , (5.3)
ci 2hy per(t) f req(t, ci )

where hyper(t) = {c1, c2, c3, . . . } is the set of hypernyms of t.

5.6 Primitive Discovery 363

Given a concept c, the conditional probability Pr(t|c) of an entity t is defined as:

f req(t, c)
Pr(t|c) = Õ , (5.4)
ti 2hy po(c) f req(ti, c)

where hypo(c) = {t1, t2, t3, . . . } is the set of hyponyms of c. ⇤

It is observed that a terms tends to be abstract when it is strongly connected with
multiple concepts. Continuing the previous example, the term animal, pet, species
link to 98, 435, 22 concepts in C 0 , respectively. To formalize this regularity, an
linking-based metric is designed as follows:
Definition (Conceptual Score) Given a term w and a set of concepts C, the concep-
tual score of w is defined as:
’ f req(ti, w)
abstract(w) = 1(ti 2 C) ⇤ Õ (5.5)
ti 2hy po(w) o j 2hy per(ti ) f req(ti, o j )

where hypo(w) = {t1, t2, . . . , ti, . . . } is the set of hyponyms of w, hyper(ti ) =

{o1, o2, . . . , o j , . . . } is the set of hypernyms of ti , and 1(ti 2 C) is set to 1, otherwise
0. ⇤

This scoring method is designed to quantify the extent to which a term functions as
a universal, abstract link across a diverse array of concepts. Utilizing the initial set C 0 ,
we calculate the abstraction scores of their hypernyms, presenting the top 50 terms
in Fig. 5.7. According to human analysis, all of them are confirmed as conceptual
terms. In addition, we present their level scores and entropy scores, revealing that
these metrics fall short in inferring them as abstract terms. For instance, topic,
song, and adjective exhibit low level scores (i.e., 3, 3, and 28), and author and
classic display low entropy scores (i.e., 0.59 and 1.72), excluding them from being
identified as concepts. We employ an iterative approach to augment the concept set
by systematically incorporating terms with high abstraction scores. In i-th iteration,
we introduce the top-n (e.g., n = 3) hypernyms for each concept in C i 1 . The
constraint imposed is that these hypernyms must surpass a specified threshold Tabs .
This process results in the construction of an updated concept set, denoted as C i .

5.6 Primitive Discovery

The primitive discovery is to identify the most basic and essential element of the
world knowledge, which provides a way to represent and organize knowledge in
a structured and meaningful manner (Schank, 1972; Guarino, 1995). The well-
designed primitive set can help to produce more accurate and reusable knowledge
bases. However, creating a thorough set of primitives is extremely time-consuming
and labor-intensive, hence it is not generally employed in most knowledge bases (Min-
sky, 1974; Jackendoff, 1976; Schank, 1972; Cambria et al., 2024).
364 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

We apply automatically discover a primitive set for commonsense knowledge. The

basic idea entails clustering concepts that share similar functions at the cognitive
level, then labeling the most representative concept in each cluster as a conceptual
primitive. To achieve this goal, initially, we conduct concept clustering to group
together related concepts quickly, filtering out those with highly disparate semantic
meanings. Subsequently, we conduct a more precise primitive detection process,
further refining each cluster to retain only the most consistently coherent concepts
at the cognitive level and selecting the most representative concept to serve as the
primitive for that specific set of concepts.

5.6.1 Concept Clustering

The concept clustering is designed to group cognitively related concepts while

swiftly eliminating highly unrelated ones, thereby simplifying the following task of
accurately conducting primitive detection. To achieve this goal, we employ a lexical
substitution task to conduct concept clustering. Specifically, this task is to replace
a concept in a sentence with a different concept. If the grammatical structure and
overall meaning of the sentence are preserved, these two concepts are considered
to have similar meanings. For example, in the sentence “the landlord tried to eject
the tenants for not paying rent on time”, one could substitute the word “eject” with
“dispossess”, “remove”, “oust”, or “evict” without changing the overall meaning of
the sentence. Inspired by Cambria et al. (2024), we fine-tune PLMs10 for lexical
substitution. More specifically,

1) Training Data. We extract all the verb-noun and adjective-noun concepts from
ConceptNet 5.5 (Speer et al., 2017) together with a sample sentence for each
concept. The collection of concepts is denoted as E = {e1, e2, e3, . . . , en }, where
each concept ei 2 E is assigned with a sample sentence si . For each concept ei ,
we remove it from the sentence si and the remaining sentence is denoted as its
context ci . We employ PLMs to represent the concept ei and its context ci as
fixed-dimensional embeddings, i.e., ei and ci , respectively.

2) Training Objective. Then, we fine-tune the PLM with a lexical substitution task.
The assumption is that a relevant lexical substitute should be both semanti-
cally similar to the target word and have a similar contextual background.
Given a concept ei , its context ci is regarded as the positive example. We
create negative examples by sampling random concepts, which are denoted as
⇤ , e⇤ , . . . , e⇤ }.
N (ei ) = {ei,1 i,2 i,z

10 In our experiment, the used pretrained model is all-mpnet-base-v2. Having undergone pretraining
on over 1 billion sentence pairs, this model is capable of mapping input text to a 768-dimensional
vector space, ideal for tasks such as clustering or semantic search. Further details can be found at:
[Link]
5.6 Primitive Discovery 365

The training objective function is defined as:

’
n ’
O= (log( (ei, ci )) + log( ( e⇤i, j , ci ))), (5.6)
i=1 ⇤ 2N(e )
ei, j i

where n is the number of training examples, z is the number of negative words

for each example, and ei denotes the representation of a negative concept. After
j

fine-tuning, the representation model is expected to map concepts and context

into a embedding space, where concepts that are appropriate for a given context
are located close to one another.

3) Semantic Measure. We design a semantic measure to find the replacement of the

concept in the embedding space. Given a concept ei and its context ci , we calculate
the cosine distance of all the other concepts, e.g., w 2 E in the embedding space
as:
Sim(w, (ei, ci )) = cos(w, ei ) · cos(w, ci ) · cos(si, siw ), (5.7)
where si is the original sentence, and siw is a sentence by replacing ci in si with
w.
Using pretrained models, we conduct concept clustering through a fast clustering
algorithm11 developed by Sentence-BERT (Reimers and Gurevych, 2019). This al-
gorithm is more efficient than previous hierarchical clustering methods like agglom-
erative clustering, making it better suited for large-scale, high-dimensional clustering
tasks. The clustering process involves two thresholds: the similarity threshold, which
determines when two sentences are considered similar, and the min_community_size
threshold, specifying the minimum size for a local community. These thresholds al-
low us to obtain either large, coarse-grained clusters or small, fine-grained ones. In
our implementation, based on our experimental observations, we set the similarity
threshold to 0.6 and the min_community_size to 10.

LLM1 as Examinee LLM2 as Examiner

Primitive
Clustering Primitive Detection via Context Generation
A set of Concepts
Concepts In-context Generation for Verification
An example sentence

adventure, The [MASK] into the unknown brings a

discovery, sense of excitement and anticipation,
EXPLORATION as it unfolds new opportunities for
journey,
learning and growth.
expedition,
quest,…

Fig. 5.8: The overall framework for primitive detection. LLM1 is used as an examinee
to generate representative primitive for each concept cluster, and LLM2 is used as
an examiner to verify the primitive and its related concepts.

11 [Link]
366 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

5.6.2 Primitive Detection

The primitive detection involves detecting the errors in each cluster, and associating
a meaningful and generalizable primitive with a cluster of related concepts. For
example, the concepts like ingest, slurp, munch are represented by a primitive EAT.
It is inherent to human nature to try to categorize things, events and people, finding
patterns and forms they have in common. We explore the generative ability of LLMs
for primitive detection. To ensure the accuracy, as illustrated in Fig. 5.8, we design a
detection-verification framework, where the first LLM works as examinee to generate
primitive for the a concept cluster, and another LLM works as examiner to check
whether the generated primitive is correct. Specifically,
Step-1: Primitive Detection by Examinee LLM The input of examinee (denoted
as LLM1) is a cluster of concepts. The designed prompt is “Please generate a
primitive for the following concepts: C.”, where C is a list of concepts in a cluster.
Step-2: Primitive Verification by Examiner LLM The examiner (denoted as
LLM2) is to verify whether the primitive generated by LLM1 is correct or not. To
setup LLM2, we input the primitive P and the related concepts C into it, concatenated
to the following instructions: Do you think P is representative for the following
concepts: C. Please answer “yes” or “no”.
Step-3: Explainable context by Examiner LLM For the correct primitive and
cluster, we ask the LLM2 to generate a sentence as explainable context. With the
primitive P and the related concepts C into it, concatenated to the following instruc-
tions: Please generate a short sentence to describe the primitive P. In this [MASK]
can be replaced by the concepts in C.

5.7 Experiments

In this section, we compare our PrimeNet with other widely-used knowledge bases
in terms of coverage, accuracy, and efficiency. Then, we conduct experiments on
semantic semantic similarity and commonsense reasoning to verify the accuracy
and efficiency of PrimeNet.

5.7.1 Statistics and Analysis

We first evaluate the coverage and accuracy of commonsense knowledge presented

in PrimeNet and other widely used knowledge bases. In Table 5.5, we summarize the
size of different knowledge bases. Then, we conduct human assessment by utilizing
the evaluation method and criteria established by Hwang et al. (2020). Specifically,
we randomly select 3,000 triplets from PrimeNet and present each triplet in the format
of (head_concept, relation, tail_concept). The evaluation involves three annotators
who hold Ph.D. degrees in computer science.
5.7 Experiments 367

Table 5.5: Accuracy (%) assessed by human annotators. Size denotes the number of
triplets in different knowledge bases.

Knowledge Bases Size Accept Reject No Judgment

TransOMCS 18.5M 41.7 53.4 4.9
ATOMIC 877K 88.5 10.0 1.5
ConceptNet 21M 88.6 7.5 3.9
PrimeNet 6M 92.4 5.2 2.4

The annotators use four labels to assess each triplet:

1) always/often, indicating the triplet is frequently true;
2) sometimes/likely, indicating it is occasionally or probably true;
3) farfetched/never, indicating it is false or extremely unlikely;
4) invalid, indicating it is illogical.

Triplets labeled as always/often or sometimes/likely are categorized as Accept,

while others are categorized as Reject. To ensure impartial evaluation, annotators
are allowed to skip unfamiliar triplets by labeling No Judgment. The final results are
determined by the majority vote among three annotators.
This experiment assesses PrimeNet’s quality and compares it to other common-
sense knowledge bases, including:
• TransOMCS (Zhang et al., 2020b): This is a knowledge base containing 18.5M
triplets that were automatically extracted from syntactic parses of sentences from
various web sources, including Wikipedia, Yelp, and Reddit.

• ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019a): It contains 877K textual descriptions of inferential

knowledge. It is organized as typed if-then relations with variables, such as “if X
pays Y a compliment, then Y will likely return the compliment”.

• ConceptNet (Speer et al., 2017): This is a large-scale knowledge base that contains
relational knowledge collected from resources created by experts, crowdsourcing,
and games with a purpose (Von Ahn, 2006).
As shown in Table 5.512, it is observed that PrimeNet stands out as the highest
quality knowledge base with an acceptance rate of 92.4%, showing that PrimeNet
is highly reliable and contains commonsense knowledge that is consistent with hu-
man understanding. ConceptNet, ATOMIC20 20 , and ATOMIC also demonstrate high
quality, with acceptance rates of 88.6%, 91.3%, and 88.5%, respectively. Although
TransOMCS has a vast number of triplets (i.e., 18.5M), it has a lower accuracy
compared to the other resources, with an acceptance rate of only 41.7%, indicating
it may not be as reliable as the other knowledge bases.

12 Performance of compared knowledge bases is reported by Hwang et al. (2020), evaluated through
crowdsourcing on the AMT platform.
368 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

[Link] Task-1: Semantic Similarity

We evaluate the effectiveness of PrimeNet by examining its impact on improving

distributional representations on the word semantic similarity task. Following pre-
vious works (Faruqui et al., 2015; Speer et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2018c; Hwang et al.,
2020), knowledge bases are used as external knowledge to adjust pretrained word
embeddings. The resulting refined embeddings, molded by insights from various
knowledge bases, undergo systematic evaluation in downstream tasks, such as word
semantic similarity assessments. Enhanced performance serves as an indicator of
the superior quality of knowledge bases in improving distributional representations.
We employ a retrofitting method13 designed by Faruqui et al. (2015) to improve
pretrained word embeddings with different knowledge bases. It is designed to make
words that are known to be related in a given knowledge base have similar represen-
tations in embedding space. The training objective is to make the new embedding of
a word to be both similar to its initial embedding and nearby words in the knowledge
base, by minimizing the following objective function:
’
n ’
L= (↵i ||wi w⇤i || 2 + i, j ||wi w j || 2 ), (5.8)
i=1 (wi ,w j )2R

where ↵ and control the relative strengths of associations, w⇤i is the original
embedding of word wi , and wi is its new embedding, R denotes a set of relations
extracted from the knowledge base, and (wi, w j ) denotes a relation which connects
wi and w j . We test the retrofitted embeddings with different knowledge bases on two
tasks, i.e., semantic similarity and SAT-style analogy.
This task is to measure the degree of similarity between word pairs by calculating
the cosine similarities between their embeddings, and then compare the similarities
to human judgments. A good method should provide similarities that are strongly
correlated with the human judgments evaluated by Spearman correlation coeffi-
cient (Myers and Well, 1995). In our experiment, we conduct experiments on eight
widely-used word similarity datasets, including
• YP-130: A dataset comprising 130 word pairs with similarity ratings provided by
human annotators (Yang and Powers, 2005).
• MenTR-3K: Consists of 3,000 word pairs with similarity judgments collected
from human participants (Bruni et al., 2012).
• RG-65: Contains 65 word pairs with similarity ratings obtained through human
evaluations (Rubenstein and Goodenough, 1965).
• MTurk-771: Comprises 771 word pairs with similarity scores obtained through
crowdsourcing on AMT (Halawi et al., 2012).
• SimLex-999: Includes 999 word pairs with similarity ratings collected from
human subjects, aiming to provide a balanced set for evaluating word similarity
models (Hill et al., 2015).

13 [Link]
5.7 Experiments 369

• SimVerb-3500: Consists of 3,500 verb pairs annotated with similarity judgments

by human raters (Gerz et al., 2016).
• VERB-143: Contains 143 verb pairs with similarity ratings collected from human
annotators (Baker et al., 2014).
• WS-353: Comprises 353 word pairs, including both similarity and relatedness
judgments obtained from human raters (Finkelstein et al., 2001).

Two popular pretrained word embeddings are used in our experiments, including
word2vec (Mikolov et al., 2013b), which is trained on the first 100M of plain text
from Wikipedia14, and GloVe (Pennington et al., 2014), which are trained on 6 billion
words from Wikipedia and English Gigaword15. In this task, we compare PrimeNet
with FrameNet, WordNet, and ConceptNet, which contain synonyms knowledge.
Table 5.6 presents the overall performance on different word similarity datasets.
PrimeNet demonstrated a significant improvement in retrofitting semantic repre-
sentations, with an average increase of 6.73%, 5.49%, and 5.31% for word2vec
(300d), GloVe (50d), and GloVe (300d), respectively. WordNet also achieved no-
table performance gains, with an average improvement of 4.75%, 3.79%, and 3.98%,
benefiting the high-quality synonyms knowledge constructed by experts. While the
crowdsourced ConceptNet only slightly outperformed word2vec (300d) and GloVe
(50d), and slightly worse than GloVe (300d). The solid performance gain achieved
by PrimeNet suggests that it is successful in integrating knowledge from various
sources into PrimeNet and creating a robust knowledge base.

Table 5.6: Overall performance on semantic similarity. d denotes the dimension of

embeddings. The best performance is marked in bold.

Methods YP-130 MenTR-3K RG-65 MTurk-771 SimLex-999 SimVerb-3500 VERB-143 WS-353 Average ( )
word2vec (300d) 0.215 0.600 0.633 0.554 0.287 0.155 0.358 0.705 0.438
+FrameNet 0.334 0.589 0.620 0.571 0.295 0.227 0.321 0.651 0.451 (+1.25%)
+WordNet 0.316 0.620 0.717 0.598 0.377 0.237 0.318 0.705 0.486 (+4.75%)
+ConceptNet 0.386 0.582 0.577 0.533 0.341 0.229 0.302 0.651 0.450 (+1.16%)
+PrimeNet 0.325 0.638 0.680 0.617 0.416 0.271 0.385 0.715 0.506 (+6.73%)
GloVe (50d) 0.377 0.652 0.602 0.554 0.265 0.153 0.250 0.499 0.419
+FrameNet 0.459 0.622 0.617 0.568 0.288 0.217 0.240 0.471 0.435 (+1.61%)
+WordNet 0.510 0.649 0.688 0.540 0.342 0.239 0.188 0.500 0.457 (+3.79%)
+ConceptNet 0.427 0.599 0.558 0.493 0.356 0.234 0.236 0.489 0.424 (+0.50%)
+PrimeNet 0.443 0.674 0.707 0.597 0.376 0.236 0.273 0.485 0.474 (+5.49%)
GloVe (300d) 0.561 0.737 0.766 0.650 0.371 0.227 0.305 0.605 0.528
+FrameNet 0.589 0.701 0.756 0.639 0.361 0.278 0.274 0.558 0.519 (-0.84%)
+WordNet 0.610 0.759 0.841 0.679 0.470 0.313 0.256 0.612 0.568 (+3.98%)
+ConceptNet 0.561 0.700 0.747 0.583 0.420 0.288 0.300 0.595 0.524 (-0.34%)
+PrimeNet 0.593 0.764 0.818 0.684 0.496 0.316 0.350 0.626 0.581 (+5.31%)

14 We use the Text8Corpus which is available in Gensim: [Link]

RaRe-Technologies/gensim-data, and the CBOW model for training: [Link]
[Link]/archive/p/word2vec
15 [Link]
370 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

[Link] Task-2: Neurosymbolic Commonsense Reasoning

Commonsense knowledge is important to NLU through contextual reasoning. An

effective method for assessing this understanding is through commonsense QA tasks,
wherein the ability to answer questions often hinges on possessing commonsense
knowledge (Liu et al., 2024a). In commonsense QA tasks, PLMs like BERT and
RoBERTa have demonstrated their effectiveness in bridging the gap between human
and machine performance. Additionally, the incorporation of external knowledge
bases has proven crucial for enhancing answer accuracy, providing valuable insights
for contextual comprehension and reasoning. Hence, approaches that combine neural
PLMs with symbolic knowledge bases, known as neurosymbolic methods, have
exhibited significant potential for advancing commonsense reasoning.

A. Task Setting

Following previous methods (Ilievski et al., 2021b,a), we use a neurosymbolic

method to evaluate the commonsense QA under a zero-shot setting proposed by Ma
et al. (2021). Formally, given a natural language question q and a set of possible
answers A = {a1, a2, . . . , an }, the task is to select the most probable answer a⇤ from
A. The wrong answers in A are denoted as distractors. PLMs are used as backbone.
RoBERTa-large is used in our experiments. In a zero-shot setting, the model has no
access to the training data. The neurosymbolic solution is to transform knowledge
from different knowledge bases into an artificial QA set for pretraining. For exam-
ple, a triplet (losing weight, usedFor, being healthier) is generated as losing weight
is for being healthier, and several distractors are generated by negative sampling.
After pretraining, the model are tested on different datasets. We follow the parameter
settings in (Ma et al., 2021). Experiments are tested for five rounds, and the average
accuracy of the predicted answers is used as the metric.

B. Baselines

We compare the neurosymbolic methods with the following baselines. Majority

answers each question with the most frequent option in the entire dataset. Self-
Talk (Shwartz et al., 2020) is an unsupervised method. It generates clarification
prompts based on a template prefix, which are leveraged to elicit knowledge from
another language model, which is used jointly with the original context and question
to score each answer candidate. SMLM (Banerjee and Baral, 2020) is designed to
pretrain the LM with three representation learning functions which aim to complete
a knowledge triple given two of its elements. To show the upper bound, we report the
supervised methods on RoBERTa-large model with access to the training data, as
well as the human performance. We also include results of a supervised fine-tuned
RoBERTa system and of human evaluation. To facilitate the neurosymbolic method
for commonsense reasoning, we compare PrimeNet with ATOMIC, ConceptNet,
Wikidata, WordNet, and CSKG.
5.7 Experiments 371

C. Benchmarks

Following the work of Ma et al. (2021), we use five commonsense QA benchmarks

for evaluation, including:
• Abductive Natural Language Inference (aNLI) (Bhagavatula et al., 2020) is a
binary-classification task, which is to apply abductive reasoning and common-
sense to form possible explanations for a given set of observations. Given two
observations from narrative contexts, the goal is to pick the most plausible ex-
planatory hypothesis.
• Commonsense Question Answering (CQA) (Talmor et al., 2019) contains 12,247
examples. Each example includes a question and five answer candidates. The ques-
tions are sourced from a ConceptNet. Answer candidates are formed by combining
ConceptNet nodes with additional distractors gathered through crowdsourcing.
• Physical Interaction Question Answering (PIQA) (Bisk et al., 2020) is a dataset
for reasoning about physical commonsense. Each question is associated with two
possible solutions. The task is to choose the most appropriate solution, of which
exactly one is correct.
• Social Intelligence Question Answering (SIQA) (Sap et al., 2019b) is a dataset
for commonsense reasoning about social situations, with 38,000 multiple choice
questions. Each example comprises a context, a question, and three answer can-
didates. The context is derived from ATOMIC, questions are generated based on
nine templates corresponding to relations in ATOMIC, and answers are obtained
through crowdsourcing.
• WinoGrande (WG) (Sakaguchi et al., 2020) contains 44K problems inspired by
pronoun resolution problems in Winograd Schema Challenge (Levesque, 2011).
Each example includes a context description featuring an emphasized pronoun,
with two options provided as possible references.

D. Performance

The overall performance is shown in Table 5.7. It is observed that pretraining the lan-
guage models with external knowledge is effectiveness to improve the performance
of commonsense QA task. The main reason is that the external knowledge is impor-
tant supplementary information for implicit knowledge embedding in PLMs. Our
PrimeNet achieved the best performance when RoBERTa is used as backbone, with
the average performance gains of 1.74%, 2.88%, 0.82% over ATOMIC, Concept-
Net+Wikidata+WordNet, and CSKG, respectively. This experiment indicates that
PrimeNet has a good quality in organizing commonsense knowledge.
372 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

Table 5.7: Performance of neurosymbolic methods across five commonsense QA

tasks in a zero-shot setting. RoBERTa-large⇤ denotes the performance of RoBERTa-
large under a supervised setting.

Model Knowledge Base aNLI CQA PIQA SIQA WG

Majority - 50.8 20.9 50.5 33.6 50.4
Self-talk - - 32.4 70.2 46.2 54.7
SMLM - 65.3 38.8 - 48.5 -
RoBERTa-large⇤ - 85.6 78.5 79.2 76.6 79.3
Human Performance - 91.4 88.9 94.9 86.9 94.1
- 65.5 45.0 67.6 47.3 57.5
ATOMIC 70.8 64.2 72.1 63.1 59.6
RoBERTa-large ConceptNet, Wikidata, WordNet 70.0 67.9 72.0 54.8 59.4
CSKG 70.5 67.4 72.4 63.2 60.9
PrimeNet 71.2 68.3 72.4 64.5 62.1

5.7.2 Case Studies

In our method, we manually checked the detected primitives. This step is conduct by 5
senior Ph.D. students majors in NLP. We manually code the explainable of primitives.
For example, INCREASE is defined as INCREASE(obj) := obj++, which is the basic
operation that increments the value of an object and provides a foundation for more
complex reasoning. It is observed that some primitives have a hierarchical structure.
We show examples of primitives in Fig. 5.9. At Level-1, the primitive GROW is
defined as GROW(obj) = INCREASE([Link]) := [Link]++ = obj(l++,
h++, w++), which is accomplished by using the INCREASE primitive to increment
the object’s SIZE attribute, such as length (l), height (h), and width (w).

Fig. 5.9: Examples of the hierarchical structure of primitives in PrimeNet.

5.8 Future Directions 373

The Level-2 primitive LENGTHEN is even more specific, adding only length to
an object, and it is defined as LENGTHEN(obj)=INCREASE([Link])
:=[Link]++ = obj(l++, h, w). We have also performed several ex-
periments on affordances by testing how PrimeNet is able to model human-object
interactions in different scenarios, e.g., how to identify and use a liquid container,
and in different modalities, e.g., speech processing and computer vision (Fig. 5.10).
Finally, we have also carried out preliminary experiments on how PrimeNet can
represent and handle different types of domain-specific knowledge, e.g., safety com-
monsense knowledge (Fig. 5.11). We intend to provide a more detailed account of
these experiments and additional ones in our future work.

Fig. 5.10: A sample scenario in which PrimeNet’s capabilities of understanding and

modeling affordances have been tested.

5.8 Future Directions

PrimeNet is grounded in fundamental conceptual principles that are consistent with

human reasoning patterns. It has greater potential than current knowledge bases to
enhance AI’s reasoning capabilities, particularly in response to the growing demand
for more intricate reasoning tasks in the era of LLMs. In this section, we discuss
several applications where PrimeNet can aid in enhancing AI’s reasoning abilities.
374 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

Fig. 5.11: An example of safety commonsense knowledge in PrimeNet.

5.8.1 Logical Reasoning

Logical reasoning is recognized as central to human cognition and intelligence (Goel

et al., 2017). It mainly consists of two reasoning types (Salmon, 1989), which
are deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Previously logical reasoning is
mostly investigated in the classic AI field and used formal language as knowledge
representation. Recently, there is a trend of research on deductive reasoning (Clark
et al., 2020b) and inductive reasoning (Yang et al., 2024) that use natural language as
knowledge representation, which has various advantages over the previous paradigm
of formal language.
We argue that PrimeNet could have a significant impact on the study of logical
reasoning, as LLMs are known to struggle with it. Recently, Xu et al. (2024) demon-
strated this with comprehensive evaluations. They selected fifteen logical reasoning
datasets and categorized them into deductive, inductive, abductive, and mixed-form
reasoning. Then, they evaluated three LLMs across these datasets in zero-shot, one-
shot, and three-shot settings. Unlike previous evaluations that focus solely on simple
metrics like accuracy, the authors introduced fine-grained evaluations that assess both
answers and explanations, covering correctness, completeness, and redundancy.
5.8 Future Directions 375

To identify logical flaws in LLMs, Xu et al. (2024) categorized problematic cases

into five error types across two dimensions: evidence selection and reasoning pro-
cess. Errors in evidence selection include wrong selection and hallucination, while
reasoning errors encompass no reasoning, perspective mistakes, and process mis-
takes. Additionally, they introduce a new dataset with neutral content, consisting
of 3,000 samples across deductive, inductive, and abductive settings, to minimize
knowledge bias and focus solely on logical reasoning capabilities. Based on these
in-depth evaluations, they proposed a general evaluation framework for logical rea-
soning capabilities, covering six dimensions: Correct, Rigorous, Self-aware, Active,
Oriented, and No hallucination (Fig. 5.12). This framework highlights the strengths
and weaknesses of LLMs and offers guidance for future research.

Fig. 5.12: Overall architecture of the LLM evaluation proposed by Xu et al. (2024).

5.8.2 Implicit Reasoning

Implicit reasoning is a challenging task which does not contain explicitly clues for
designing reasoning strategies. For example, “Did Aristotle use a laptop?” is an
implicit question (Geva et al., 2021), and it requires to infer the strategy for answer-
ing the implicit question, i.e., temporal comparison. Recently, AI systems based on
PLMs have achieved impressive performance in answering explicit questions, even
surpassing human performance in some datasets, e.g., SQuAD (Rajpurkar et al.,
2016) and TriviaQA (Joshi et al., 2017). However, their accuracy on implicit ques-
tions is only 66% (Geva et al., 2021).
376 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

A key property of implicit reasoning is the diverse strategies. Humans cannot pre-
define all of the strategies due to the complexity of scenarios. To conduct implicit
reasoning, PrimeNet has the potential to build a finite set of strategies at the primitive
level, and apply the primitive-based strategies on concepts and entities. For example,
the implicit questions, e.g., “Did Aristotle Use a Laptop?”, “Did Shakespeare play
guitar?”, and “Was NATO involved in World War I?”, have the same reasoning
strategies in the primitive level, e.g., COMPARE(TIME(Entity-1), TIME(Entity-2)).
Primitives can be used to conduct implicit reasoning by providing the basic cognitive
processes or mental operations that underlie our ability to reason implicitly.

5.8.3 Neurosymbolic AI

As discussed several times throughout this textbook, the integration of symbolism

and connectionism, known as neurosymbolic AI, is widely recognized as a booster
for the next generation of AI (Lake et al., 2017; Smolensky et al., 2022). The inte-
gration of PrimeNet into a neurosymbolic framework with an LLM can enable better
interpretability, improved generalization, and trustworthiness. For example, the LLM
can be used first to extract relevant information from an input. This extracted infor-
mation is then passed to PrimeNet, which applies logical rules and commonsense
reasoning to provide structured insights or solutions.
Integration occurs at two main points: pre-processing and post-processing. In
pre-processing, the LLM converts the input into a structured format that PrimeNet
can utilize. In post-processing, the structured output from PrimeNet is combined
with the LLM’s capabilities to generate natural language explanations or refine the
results. A feedback loop enhances this integration by enabling the system to learn
from interactions between the LLM and PrimeNet. For instance, when the LLM
identifies ambiguities or gaps in the commonsense knowledge, these can be used to
update and improve PrimeNet. This iterative process ensures that the neurosymbolic
framework leverages both the advanced language understanding of LLMs and the
logical reasoning capabilities of PrimeNet, resulting in a more robust and effective
system for tackling complex problems.

5.9 Conclusion

In this chapter, we discussed the importance of knowledge representation and rea-

soning in the context of NLU and neurosymbolic AI. In particular, we discussed
the development of PrimeNet, a commonsense resource based on conceptual de-
pendency theory. Unlike existing knowledge bases, PrimeNet is constructed based
on a small core of conceptual primitives and relations, linked to an extensive set of
concepts and entities, which is suited for supporting higher-level inference.
5.10 Learning Resources 377

Our studies demonstrate that PrimeNet contains high-quality commonsense

knowledge that can be used for commonsense reasoning in different downstream
tasks thanks to the many intuitive functions developed. In the future, we aim to
broaden the scope of commonsense knowledge using generative AI models and
will continue to develop additional PrimeNet functions to facilitate commonsense
reasoning across a wider range of applications, domains, and languages.

5.10 Learning Resources

A. Reading List
• Qian Liu, Sooji Han, Yang Li, Erik Cambria, and Kenneth Kwok. PrimeNet: A
Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Representation and Reasoning based
on Conceptual Primitives. Cognitive Computation, 2024 (Liu et al., 2024b)

• Zonglin Yang, Xinya Du, Erik Cambria, Claire Cardie. End-to-end Case-based
Reasoning for Commonsense Knowledge Base Completion. Proceedings of
EACL, 3509-3522, 2023 (Yang et al., 2023)

• Weijie Yeo, Ranjan Satapathy, Siow Mong Goh, and Erik Cambria. How in-
terpretable are reasoning explanations from prompting large language models?
Proceedings of NAACL, 2148–2164, 2024 (Yeo et al., 2024c)

B. Relevant Videos
• Labcast about PrimeNet: [Link]/KVkcJfispww

• Labcast about Commonsense KGC: [Link]/8K9TTVj2Woc

• Labcast about Chain of Thought Interpretability: [Link]/1hM7MZokxz8

C. Related Code
• Github repository about PrimeNet [Link]/SenticNet/PrimeNet

• Github repository about Commonsense KGC: [Link]/SenticNet/ECBRF

• Github repo about Chain of Thought: [Link]/SenticNet/CoT_interpretability

378 5 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning

D. Exercises
• Exercise 1. Extracting commonsense knowledge is challenging because it is
often not explicitly mentioned in written documents. List and describe two po-
tential sources from which commonsense knowledge can be acquired. For each
source, explain how it can be used to gather relevant information and what type
of commonsense knowledge might be obtained.

• Exercise 2. Identify two conceptual primitives, one representing a positive sen-

timent and one representing a negative sentiment. For each primitive, provide
a range of related words and MWEs that are associated with it. Explain how
these primitives can be used for enhancing the accuracy and the explainability of
sentiment analysis.

• Exercise 3. Describe how a commonsense knowledge base can be integrated into

an LLM and explain, with examples, why this integration is beneficial. Discuss
the methods and strategies for incorporating everyday, intuitive knowledge into
the model and illustrate how this integration can enhance the LLM’s ability to
interpret and generate responses that are contextually accurate and aligned with
human expectations.

• Exercise 4. Explain with examples how a bottom-up strategy can enable the
discovery of conceptual primitives for a specific domain directly from text data,
and how a top-down strategy can then be applied on the resulting set of primitives
to identify more words and MWEs related to them.

• Exercise 5. Describe the development of an AI assistant that helps users with

daily tasks. Choose a scenario where the AI assistant must use commonsense
knowledge. For example, helping a user decide what to wear based on the weather
forecast. List the pieces of commonsense knowledge the AI needs to handle
the scenario effectively. Explain how the AI system can represent and use this
knowledge to assist the user. Specify whether it would use a rule-based system,
machine learning models, or a combination of both.
Chapter 6
Conclusion

Abstract This final chapter provides a comprehensive summary of the textbook’s

key topics, ranging from the exploration of reliable, responsible, and personalized
AI to the detailed description of the NLU suitcase model. It includes implementa-
tion insights into syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic processing, and discusses the
integration of LLMs within neurosymbolic frameworks. The chapter also provides
a short summary on strengths and limitations of LLMs, stressing the importance of
combining symbolic and subsymbolic methods for improved reasoning. The chapter
concludes with instructions for a group assignment connecting NLU and information
retrieval, followed by a quiz.

Key words: Syntactics Processing, Semantics Processing, Pragmatics Processing,

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

In this textbook, we have explored the multifaceted domain of NLU, delving into
the complexities and advancements that define this critical area of AI. We have in-
vestigated ongoing initiatives aimed at enhancing the reliability, responsibility, and
personalization of AI. We have navigated through the essential components of NLU,
including syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic processing techniques, and examined
the pivotal role of LLMs and their integration into neurosymbolic frameworks.
Our journey began with a foundational understanding of how language operates at
various levels of abstraction, highlighting the importance of both symbolic and sub-
symbolic approaches. We then discussed the emergence of LLMs, showcasing their
impressive capabilities in handling diverse NLP tasks. However, we also addressed
their limitations, particularly in the realm of logical reasoning and commonsense
understanding. The introduction of neurosymbolic methods represents a significant
stride toward bridging these gaps. By combining the learning prowess of subsym-
bolic systems with the reasoning capabilities of symbolic systems, we can create
more robust and versatile NLU frameworks. The integration of knowledge bases like
PrimeNet into these frameworks exemplifies the potential for enhanced reasoning
and understanding.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 379
E. Cambria, Understanding Natural Language Understanding,
[Link]
380 6 Conclusion

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 provide an in-depth explanation of how the NLU suitcase

model operates. They meticulously detail the inner workings and mechanisms of
the model, offering a comprehensive overview of its structure, functionality, and the
processes involved. It explores how the model integrates various components and
techniques to achieve NLU, illustrating its application through practical examples
and case studies. In particular, we studied how microtext normalization converts
informal or abbreviated text into a standard format, making the text more consistent
for further processing. SBD then identifies where sentences begin and end, ensuring
that the text is properly segmented for accurate analysis. Following SBD, POS tagging
assigns grammatical labels to each word, providing essential structural information
that supports text chunking. Text chunking groups words into meaningful phrases,
such as noun phrases, which helps in organizing the text for subsequent tasks.
Lemmatization standardizes words to their base forms, ensuring consistency and
reducing variations that could complicate later stages.
This standardized text aids WSD, which determines the correct meaning of words
based on their context. Once WSD has clarified word meanings, NER identifies
and classifies named entities like people and locations. This identification relies
on the results from WSD and POS tagging, enabling accurate concept extraction.
Concept extraction identifies key concepts within the text, utilizing the structured
information from NER and WSD to provide a deeper understanding of the text?s
content. Anaphora resolution then links pronouns and other referring expressions to
their antecedents, using the context provided by POS tagging and concept extrac-
tion. Subjectivity detection follows, distinguishing between subjective and objective
statements based on the resolved text from previous tasks.
Metaphor understanding interprets metaphorical language, using insights from
subjectivity detection and context established earlier. Sarcasm detection identifies
sarcastic remarks by analyzing the context and subjectivity established previously.
Personality recognition then infers personality traits from the text, leveraging findings
from earlier tasks to understand linguistic features that reflect personality. Aspect
extraction identifies specific features or aspects of entities within the text, relying
on the information from NER and concept extraction to provide detailed sentiment
analysis. Finally, polarity detection assesses the sentiment expressed toward these
aspects, using the comprehensive context and details gathered from all preceding
tasks to determine the overall sentiment.
The remainder of this chapter introduces a group assignment that sits at the inter-
section of NLU and information retrieval. This assignment aims to engage students
in practical applications that combine these two domains, enhancing their compre-
hension and skills in both areas. Following the assignment, the chapter concludes
with a comprehensive quiz consisting of 100 multiple-choice questions covering
the contents of the book. This quiz is designed to test students’ knowledge and un-
derstanding of the key concepts, theories, and methodologies discussed throughout
the textbook. Following this, readers can find a comprehensive list of references
compiled within the remaining 100 pages.
6.1 Learning Resources 381

As we conclude, it is clear that the field of NLU is continuously evolving. The

interplay between symbolic and subsymbolic techniques will likely drive future ad-
vancements, pushing the boundaries of what machines can comprehend and achieve.
Our exploration has underscored the importance of ongoing research and innovation
in developing systems that not only process language but also understand and reason
with it in ways that mirror human intelligence. The future of NLU holds promise
for more intuitive and intelligent interactions between humans and machines. By
addressing current challenges and leveraging the strengths of both symbolic and
subsymbolic approaches, we can look forward to a new era of AI that truly un-
derstands the nuances of human language. This book serves as a testament to the
progress made thus far and a guidepost for the exciting developments yet to come.

6.1 Learning Resources

6.1.1 Assignment

In this group assignment, you will build an opinion search engine. Given a specific
topic of your choice (e.g., cryptocurrencies), your system should enable users to
find relevant opinions about any instance of such topic (e.g., bitcoin) and perform
sentiment analysis on the results (e.g., opinions about bitcoin are 70% positive and
30% negative). Once you have chosen a topic, make sure that a) you can find enough
data about it (e.g., some topics may be too niche to the point that you would only
find a few hundreds data about it) and b) the opinions you get are balanced (e.g., if
the topic you chose only has negative opinions associated with it, then it is probably
not a good topic). For ideas about interesting topics, you can check our project page
at [Link] You are pretty much free to use anything you want in
terms of available tools/libraries. However, your system cannot be just a mashup
of existing services. Your final score will depend not only on how you developed
your system but also on its novelty and your creativity: in other words, to get a high
score you do not only need to implement a system that works, but also a system
that is useful and user-friendly. The main tasks of the assignment are crawling (20
points), indexing (40 points) and classification (40 points). A minimum of 60 points
is required to pass the assignment. Consult with your course coordinator regarding
the procedures and requirements for submitting your assignment.

A. Crawling (20 points)

Crawl text data from any sources which you are interested in and permitted to
access, e.g., X API or Reddit API. The crawled corpus should have at least 10,000
records and at least 100,000 words. It is fine to use available datasets for training
(e.g., popular sentiment benchmarks), but you still have to at least crawl and label
data for testing.
382 6 Conclusion

Also, make sure your dataset does not contain duplicates and try your best to make
it balanced (e.g., equal number of positive and negative entries). Before crawling any
data, carefully consider the questions in this material, e.g., check whether the data
have enough details to answer the questions. You can use any third party libraries
for the crawling task, e.g.:
• Jsoup: [Link]
• Twitter4j: [Link]
• Facebook marketing: [Link]
• Instagram: [Link]
• Amazon: [Link]
• Tinder: [Link]
• Tik Tok: [Link]

Question 1: Explain and provide the following:

1) How you crawled the corpus (e.g., source, keywords, API, library) and stored it
2) What kind of information users might like to retrieve from your crawled corpus
(i.e., applications), with sample queries
3) The numbers of records, words, and types (i.e., unique words) in the corpus

B. Indexing (40 points)

Indexing: You can do this from scratch or use a combination of available tools,
e.g., Solr+Lucene+Jetty. Solr runs as a standalone full-text search server within a
servlet container such as Jetty and it uses the Lucene search library at its core for text
indexing and search. Solr has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it
easy to use from any programming language. Useful documentations include:

• Solr project: [Link]

• Solr wiki: [Link]
• Lucene tutorial: [Link]
• Solr with Jetty: [Link]
• Jetty tutorial: [Link]
You can also choose other inverted-index text search engine open projects, e.g.,
Sphinx, Nutch, and Lemur. However, you should not simply adopt SQL-based solu-
tions for text search (for example, you cannot solve text search simply using Microsoft
Sqlserver or MySql).

Querying: You need to provide a simple but friendly user interface (UI) for querying.
It could be either a web-based or mobile app based UI. You could use JSP in Java or
Django in Python to develop your UI website. Since Solr provides REST-like APIs
to access indexes, one extra JSon or RESTFul library would be enough. Otherwise,
you may use any third party library.
6.1 Learning Resources 383

The UI must be kept simple: a sophisticated UI is not necessary nor encouraged.

Detailed information besides text is allowed to be shown for the query results, e.g.,
product images on Amazon, ratings on Amazon, and pictures on Instagram. The
details should be designed to solve specific problems.

Question 2: Perform the following tasks:

• Design a simple UI (you can design one from scratch or you can tap on an existing
one, e.g., Solr UI) to allow users to access your system in a simple way
• Write five queries, get their results, and measure the speed of the querying

Question 3: Explore some innovations for enhancing the indexing and ranking.
Explain why they are important to solve specific problems, illustrated with examples.
You can list anything that has helped improving your system from the first version
to the last one, plus queries that did not work earlier but now work because of the
improvements you made. Possible innovations include (but are not limited to) the
following:

• Timeline search (e.g., allow user to search within specific time windows)
• Geo-spatial search (e.g., use map information to refine query results)
• Enhanced search (e.g., add histograms, pie charts, word clouds, etc.)
• Interactive search (e.g., refine search results based on users’ relevance feedback)
• Multimodal search (e.g., implement image or video retrieval)
• Multilingual search (e.g., enable information retrieval in multiple languages)
• Multifaceted search (e.g., visualize information according to different categories)

C. Classification (40 points)

Choose two or more subtasks from the NLU suitcase model (Fig. 1.12) to per-
form information extraction on your crawled data. For example, you could choose
subjectivity detection and polarity detection to first categorize your data as neutral
versus opinionated and then classify the resulting opinionated data as positive versus
negative. Different classification approaches can be applied, including:

• knowledge based, e.g., SenticNet

• rule based, e.g., linguistic patterns
• machine learning based, e.g., deep neural networks
• hybrid (a combination of any of the above)

You can tap into any resource or toolkit you like, as long as you motivate your
choices and you are able to critically analyze obtained results. Some possible choices
include:
384 6 Conclusion

• Weka: [Link]
• Hadoop: [Link]
• Pylearn2: [Link]
• SciKit: [Link]
• NLTK: [Link]
• Theano: [Link]
• Keras: [Link]
• Tensorflow: [Link]
• PyTorch: [Link]
• Huggingface: [Link]
• AllenNLP [Link]

Question 4: Perform the following tasks:

• Justify your classification approach choice in relation to the state of the art
• Discuss whether you had to preprocess data and why
• Build an evaluation dataset by manually labeling at least 1,000 records with an
inter-annotator agreement of at least 80%
• Provide metrics such as precision, recall, and F-measure on such dataset
• Perform a random accuracy test on the rest of the data and discuss results
• Discuss performance metrics, e.g., speed, and scalability of the system

Question 5: Explore some innovations for enhancing classification. If you introduce

more than one, perform an ablation study to show the contribution of each innovation.
For example, if you perform WSD and NER to enhance sentiment analysis, show the
increase in accuracy when adding only WSD, the increase in accuracy when adding
only NER, and the increase in accuracy when adding both WSD and NER to your
system. Explain why they are important to solve specific problems, illustrated with
examples. Possible innovations include (but are not limited to) the following:
• Enhanced classification (add another NLU subtask, e.g., sarcasm detection)
• Fine-grained classification (e.g., perform ABSA)
• Hybrid classification (e.g., apply both symbolic and subsymbolic AI)
• Cognitive classification (e.g., use brain-inspired algorithms)
• Multitask classification (e.g., perform two or more NLU tasks jointly)
• Ensemble classification (e.g., use stacked ensemble)

D. Submission

The submission shall consist of one single PDF file. Add some pictures to your
report to make it clearer and easier to read. There is no page limit and no special
formatting is required. The file shall contain the following five key items:
1) The names of the group members in the first page
2) Your answers to all the above questions
6.1 Learning Resources 385

3) A YouTube link to a video presentation of up to 5 minutes: in the video, introduce

your group members and their roles, explain the applications and the impact of
your work and highlight, if any, the creative parts of your work (note that you do
not have to give all the answers in the video presentation)
4) A Dropbox (or similar, e.g., Google Drive or OneDrive) link to a compressed
(e.g., zip) file with crawled text data, queries and their results, evaluation dataset,
automatic classification results, and any other data for Questions 3 and 5
5) A Dropbox (or similar, e.g., Google Drive or OneDrive) link to a compressed
(e.g., zip) file with all your source codes and libraries, with a README file that
explains how to compile and run the source codes

6.1.2 Quiz

1) What is the difference between NLP and NLU?

A) NLP and NLU are synonymous and can be used interchangeably
B) NLP focuses on text meaning, NLU on processing and generating text
C) NLU includes more theoretical tasks, NLP is more focused on applications
D) NLP handles language interaction, NLU focuses on understanding meaning

2) What does task decomposition typically involve?

A) Splitting a complex NLP task into simpler, manageable subtasks
B) Translating text from one language to another
C) Summarizing long documents into shorter versions
D) Evaluating the accuracy of an NLP model

3) What is the meaning of panalogy?

A) Comparing machine learning models using parallel datasets
B) Using parallel processing to speed up computations
C) Comparing different concepts by examining their parallel structures
D) Enhancing natural language processing by using parallel corpora

4) What does symbol grounding refer to in the context of AI?

A) The process of translating symbols into natural language
B) The ability to create new symbols for unknown concepts
C) Relating symbols to real-world objects or concepts to give them meaning
D) The use of symbols to perform logical operations

5) What is a topology-aware similarity measure?

A) A method that considers the geometric arrangement of data points
B) A technique for comparing the colors in images
C) An approach for evaluating the textual similarity between documents
D) A measure that assesses the similarity of time series based on frequency
 386 6 Conclusion

6) What does intention awareness refer to in the context of HCI?

A) The ability of a system to predict user actions based on past behavior
B) The system’s understanding of the user’s goals and purposes
C) The user’s ability to comprehend the system’s functionalities
D) The system’s ability to execute commands accurately

7) What is the primary difference between explainability and interpretability?

A) The former focuses on model accuracy, the latter focuses on model complexity
B) The former is understanding decisions; the latter is explaining model workings
C) The former is about data transparency, the latter about algorithm transparency
D) The former deals with system performance, the latter with prediction outcomes

8) Which approach can be used for microtext normalization?

A) Dictionary-based replacement
B) Machine translation
C) Sentiment analysis
D) Syntax parsing

9) Which of the following techniques is often used in microtext normalization?

A) TF-IDF
B) POS tagging
C) Levenshtein distance
D) NER

10) Why is microtext normalization important in NLU?

A) It makes text shorter and more concise
B) It helps in translating text to other languages
C) It enhances NLU tasks by standardizing informal text
D) It helps in generating text summaries

11) Which of the following is a challenge in microtext normalization?

A) Identifying the language of the text
B) Converting numeric values to words
C) Handling the ambiguity of abbreviations and slang
D) Translating text to multiple languages

12) Which one of these is a popular dataset for microtext normalization?

A) LexNorm
B) SenticNet
C) WordNet
D) LIWC
 6.1 Learning Resources 387

13) What challenge does SBD address?

A) Recognizing the context of idiomatic expressions
B) Differentiating between abbreviations and sentence endings
C) Identifying the main topic of a paragraph
D) Translating text into different dialects

14) Which of the following tools can be used for SBD?

A) Named entity recognizer
B) Tokenizer
C) POS tagger
D) Lemmatizer

15) Which of the following is a common dataset used for evaluating SBD systems?
A) Penn Treebank
B) OntoNote
C) MIMIC
D) SIGMORPHON

16) Why is SBD important in NLU?

A) It helps in translating text accurately
B) It improves the performance of downstream NLU tasks
C) It reduces the size of text data
D) It helps in detecting the language of the text

17) In addition to punctuation, what other feature can help in SBD?

A) Font size
B) Capitalization
C) Word embeddings
D) Lemmatization

18) What is POS tagging about?

A) Identifying the sentiment of a sentence
B) Labeling words in a sentence as noun, verb, adjective, and more
C) Translating text into another language
D) Parsing the grammatical structure of sentences

19) Which sentence could be ambiguous for POS tagging?

A) “The dog barked loudly”
B) “She will can the peaches”
C) “It is a sunny day”
D) “He enjoys reading books”
 388 6 Conclusion

20) Which resource is commonly used for training and evaluating POS taggers?
A) OntoNote
B) Penn Treebank
C) LexNorm
D) LIWC

21) In addition to words, what other feature can be useful in POS tagging?
A) Word length
B) Word frequency
C) Word embeddings
D) Lemmatization

22) Text chunking is often referred to as:

A) Sentence splitting
B) Shallow parsing
C) Deep parsing
D) Text summarization

23) Which machine learning technique is commonly used for text chunking?
A) K-means clustering
B) HMM
C) SVM
D) Decision trees

24) Which of the following is a key application of text chunking?

A) Image recognition
B) Speech synthesis
C) NER
D) OCR

25) Which resource is commonly used for training and evaluating chunking systems?
A) Penn Treebank
B) OntoNote
C) LexNorm
D) MIMIC

26) What challenge does text chunking address in NLU?

A) Translating text into different dialects
B) Assigning correct POS tags to each word
C) Grouping words into meaningful phrases for further analysis
D) Detecting the boundaries between sentences
 6.1 Learning Resources 389

27) Which of the following is the lemma of the word “running”?

A) ran
B) runs
C) run
D) runner

28) How does lemmatization differ from stemming?

A) It removes only suffixes, stemming removes both prefixes and suffixes
B) It uses a dictionary to find the base form, stemming uses rules to strip affixes
C) It is faster than stemming
D) It is used only for verbs, stemming is used for all POS tags

29) Which of the following tools is commonly used for lemmatization in Python?
A) NLTK
B) OpenCV
C) TensorFlow
D) Scikit-learn

30) Which library provides the WordNetLemmatizer in Python?

A) Gensim
B) Scikit-learn
C) NLTK
D) SpaCy

31) Which of the following is the correct lemma for the word “better”?
A) good
B) best
C) well
D) better

32) In lemmatization, what role does the POS tag play?

A) It determines the root form of a word
B) It helps in splitting text into sentences
C) It is used to identify named entities
D) It helps in summarizing text

33) Which of the following words has the same lemma and root form in English?
A) Running
B) Happier
C) Cats
D) Quick
 390 6 Conclusion

34) Which of the following is a common approach to WSD?

A) Bag of words
B) NER
C) Supervised machine learning
D) Text summarization

35) Which of the following resources is commonly used in WSD tasks?

A) WordNet
B) OntoNote
C) SIGMORPHON
D) LexNorm

36) What is the definition of ‘cool’ language?

A) A language where a lot of microtext is used
B) A language with very difficult sentence structure
C) A language where understanding a sentence relies more on context
D) A language that uses a lot of stopwords and redundancies

37) Which machine learning model can be used for WSD?

A) Decision trees
B) CNN
C) RNN
D) K-Means clustering

38) Which of the following is a challenge in WSD?

A) Identifying the boundaries between sentences
B) Handling the ambiguity of words with multiple meanings
C) Translating text to multiple languages
D) Summarizing long texts

39) In WSD, what role does context play?

A) It helps in translating text
B) It is used to identify named entities
C) It determines the correct meaning of a word
D) It helps in text summarization

40) Which evaluation metric is commonly used to assess WSD performance?

A) Accuracy
B) Euclidean distance
C) BLEU score
D) MSE
 6.1 Learning Resources 391

41) Which of the following is an unsupervised method for WSD?

A) Decision trees
B) K-means clustering
C) SVM
D) Naïve Bayes classifier

42) Which of the following categories is commonly used in NER?

A) Sentiment
B) POS
C) Organization
D) Syntax

43) Which machine learning model is commonly used for NER?

A) Decision trees
B) K-means clustering
C) CRF
D) PCA

44) What is the main challenge in NER?

A) Identifying sentence boundaries
B) Disambiguating words with multiple meanings
C) Correctly classifying entities with varying contexts
D) Translating text into different dialects

45) Which resource is commonly used for training and evaluating NER systems?
A) OntoNote
B) Penn Treebank
C) CoNLL-2003 dataset
D) SenticNet

46) What is a common evaluation metric for assessing NER performance?

A) BLEU score
B) F1 Score
C) MSE
D) Euclidean distance

47) Which of the following techniques is most useful for concept extraction?
A) NER
B) POS tagging
C) TF-IDF
D) OCR
 392 6 Conclusion

48) Which of the following functionalities is provided by the Sentic Parser?

A) Text summarization
B) Concept extraction
C) NER
D) Shallow parsing

49) Which NLU task is closely related to concept extraction?

A) Text summarization
B) Machine translation
C) NER
D) POS tagging

50) What is the main challenge in concept extraction?

A) Identifying sentence boundaries
B) Disambiguating words with multiple meanings
C) Extracting relevant concepts from unstructured text
D) Translating text into different dialects

51) Which of the following tools can be used for concept extraction in Python?
A) OpenCV
B) NLTK
C) Scikit-learn
D) SpaCy

52) Which of the following is an example of an anaphoric expression?

A) Quickly
B) It
C) Beautiful
D) Running

53) Which NLU task is most closely related to anaphora resolution?

A) NER
B) Text summarization
C) POS tagging
D) Sentiment analysis

54) What is the primary challenge in anaphora resolution?

A) Translating text into different dialects
B) Correctly identifying the antecedent of an anaphoric expression
C) Extracting key ideas or topics from a text
D) Identifying sentence boundaries
 6.1 Learning Resources 393

55) Which of the following algorithms can be used for anaphora resolution?
A) LDA
B) SVM
C) CRF
D) Neural networks

56) Which resource is often used to help with anaphora resolution in NLU?
A) WordNet
B) OntoNote
C) Penn Treebank
D) SenticNet

57) Which machine learning technique is commonly used for subjectivity detection?
A) K-means clustering
B) Decision trees
C) SVM
D) PCA

58) What is the difference between ambivalence and neutrality in sentiment analysis?
A) Ambivalence means mixed feelings, while neutrality means no sentiment
B) Ambivalence means no sentiment, while neutrality means mixed feelings
C) Ambivalence and neutrality are the same
D) Ambivalence means strong feelings, while neutrality means extreme emotions

59) Which of the following features is most useful for subjectivity detection?
A) Named entities
B) POS Tags
C) TF-IDF
D) OCR

60) Which evaluation metric can be used to assess subjectivity detection?

A) BLEU score
B) F1 score
C) MSE
D) Euclidean distance

61) Which of the following techniques can be used for metaphor detection in NLU?
A) NER
B) Topic modeling
C) POS tagging
D) WSD
 394 6 Conclusion

62) In metaphor understanding, what is the “source domain”?

A) The literal meaning of the metaphorical phrase
B) The figurative context that gives meaning to the metaphor
C) The grammatical structure of the metaphor
D) The direct comparison using “like” or “as”

63) Which of the following is a common challenge in metaphor understanding?

A) Translating text into different languages
B) Detecting metaphors that are culturally specific
C) Summarizing long texts
D) Identifying sentence boundaries

64) Which of the following NLU techniques is often used to understand metaphors?
A) CNN
B) SVM
C) SRL
D) OCR

65) Which resource can be useful for training metaphor understanding models?
A) WordNet
B) OntoNote
C) PropBank
D) Penn Treebank

66) Which of the following sentences is an example of sarcasm?

A) “I absolutely love getting stuck in traffic”
B) “The sky is blue”
C) “I enjoy reading books”
D) “She is very kind”

67) Which feature can be indicative of sarcasm in text?

A) Positive sentiment words in a negative context
B) Frequent use of punctuation
C) Proper noun usage
D) Numerical data

68) Which of the following is a common challenge in sarcasm detection?

A) Identifying sentence boundaries
B) Disambiguating words with multiple meanings
C) Correctly interpreting the intended meaning behind sarcastic statements
D) Translating text into different languages
 6.1 Learning Resources 395

69) Which machine learning model can be used for sarcasm detection?
A) K-means clustering
B) Decision trees
C) RNN
D) Linear regression

70) Which NLU technique can be useful for detecting sarcasm in text?
A) NER
B) Sentiment analysis
C) POS tagging
D) Text summarization

71) Which of the following resources can help improve sarcasm detection models?
A) SenticNet
B) OntoNote
C) Penn Treebank
D) SIGMORPHON

72) Which of the following models is commonly used for personality recognition?
A) CNN
B) RNN
C) SVM
D) Decision trees

73) In personality recognition, what does the “Big Five” model assess?
A) Cognitive abilities
B) Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism
C) Emotional intelligence
D) Linguistic diversity

74) Which feature is often used in text-based personality recognition?

A) NER
B) TF-IDF
C) POS tagging
D) OCR

75) Which approach can assess user personality based on social media activity?
A) Sentiment analysis
B) Text classification
C) Personality prediction models
D) NER
 396 6 Conclusion

76) What is a key advantage of using machine learning for personality recognition?
A) It can provide real-time feedback on personality traits
B) It can translate text into multiple languages
C) It can generate new text automatically
D) It can correct grammatical errors in text

77) Which resource can be useful for evaluating personality recognition models?
A) WordNet
B) Personality-labeled text datasets
C) OntoNote
D) Penn Treebank

78) Which technique is commonly used for aspect extraction in text?

A) NER
B) Sentiment analysis
C) Topic modeling
D) POS tagging

79) Which of the following is a common challenge in aspect extraction?

A) Identifying grammatical errors in text
B) Accurately extracting relevant aspects from text
C) Translating text into different languages
D) Summarizing long texts

80) Which of the following algorithms can be used for aspect extraction?
A) LDA
B) K-means clustering
C) Decision trees
D) PCA

81) Which NLU tool or library can be useful for aspect extraction?
A) OpenCV
B) NLTK
C) TensorFlow
D) Keras

82) What is the role of Sentic GCN in sentiment analysis?

A) It classifies sentiment using word sequences
B) It uses graph-based models to extract aspects from text
C) It applies rule-based approaches to sentiment lexicons
D) It analyzes images to extract sentiment
 6.1 Learning Resources 397

83) What is polarity detection in the context of NLU?

A) Identifying the grammatical structure of a sentence
B) Determining whether the sentiment expressed in text is positive or negative
C) Translating text into another language
D) Splitting text into sentences

84) Which of the following is a common application of polarity detection?

A) Image recognition
B) Spam email filtering
C) Text summarization
D) Speech synthesis

85) Which of the following methods can be used to perform polarity detection?
A) LDA
B) SVM
C) CNN
D) PCA

86) What is a common challenge in polarity detection?

A) Identifying grammatical errors
B) Correctly detecting the sentiment in ambiguous or sarcastic text
C) Summarizing long documents
D) Translating text into multiple languages

87) Which of the following libraries can be used for polarity detection in Python?
A) OpenCV
B) Scikit-learn
C) TensorFlow
D) SpaCy

88) Which evaluation metric is commonly used to assess polarity detection?

A) BLEU score
B) F1 score
C) MSE
D) Euclidean distance

89) In polarity detection, what role do sentiment lexicons play?

A) They provide grammatical rules for text
B) They contain lists of words with predefined sentiment values
C) They translate text into different languages
D) They summarize the content of the text
 398 6 Conclusion

90) Which resource is useful for training a polarity detection model?

A) SenticNet
B) OntoNote
C) Penn Treebank
D) LexNorm

91) Which of the following is a common technique for knowledge representation?

A) Gradient descent
B) Decision trees
C) Semantic networks
D) Reinforcement learning

92) What is an ontology in the context of knowledge representation?

A) A method for reducing dimensionality of data
B) A formal representation of a set of concepts and their relationships
C) A type of neural network
D) A statistical model for predicting outcomes

93) In knowledge representation, what is a frame?

A) A data structure for dividing a program into separate parts
B) A network of connected nodes representing knowledge
C) A collection of attributes and values describing an entity
D) A technique for visualizing data

94) What is the purpose of a semantic network?

A) To train machine learning models
B) To represent knowledge in interconnected nodes and edges
C) To perform clustering of data
D) To improve image processing tasks

95) Which of the following best describes a knowledge graph?

A) A graph used to represent statistical data
B) A structure that represents entities and their interrelationships
C) A method for optimizing algorithms
D) A type of decision tree

96) What is the primary feature of PrimeNet?

A) It uses a flat structure to organize concepts and entities
B) It integrates commonsense knowledge via a hierarchical structure
C) It focuses solely on sentiment analysis without conceptual organization
D) It employs a rule-based system for automatic text summarization
 6.1 Learning Resources 399

97) Which aspect of PrimeNet’s design helps in emulating human-like reasoning?

A) A large collection of unrelated facts
B) A single-layer network with random connections
C) A three-layer architecture with conceptual primitives, concepts, and entities
D) Exclusive use of machine translation techniques

98) What is the function of rules in rule-based systems?

A) To create visualizations from data
B) To apply logical operations to facts to derive conclusions
C) To train deep learning models
D) To perform statistical analysis

99) What is a key limitation of using logic-based knowledge representation?

A) Inability to handle uncertainty
B) High computational cost
C) Lack of interpretability
D) Difficulty in visualizing data

100) What does a concept hierarchy represent in knowledge representation?

A) The order of execution in a program
B) A taxonomy of concepts, from general to specific
C) The performance metrics of an algorithm
D) The architecture of a neural network
References

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed and Lyle Ungar. EmoNet: Fine-grained emotion detec-

tion with gated recurrent neural networks. In ACL, pages 718–728, 2017.
Steven Abney, Robert E Schapire, and Yoram Singer. Boosting applied to tagging
and pp attachment. In 1999 joint SIGDAT conference on empirical methods in
natural language processing and very large corpora, 1999.
Waheed Ahmed Abro, Annalena Aicher, Niklas Rach, Stefan Ultes, Wolfgang
Minker, and Guilin Qi. Natural language understanding for argumentative di-
alogue systems in the opinion building domain. Knowledge-Based Systems, 242:
108318, 2022.
Rod Adams, Gabriel Nicolae, Cristina Nicolae, and Sanda Harabagiu. Textual
entailment through extended lexical overlap and lexico-semantic matching. In
ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing, pages 119–
124, 2007.
Gediminas Adomavicius, Bamshad Mobasher, Francesco Ricci, and Alexander
Tuzhilin. Context-aware recommender systems. AI Magazine, 32(3):67–80, 2011.
Neha Agarwal, Kelley Herndon Ford, and Max Shneider. Sentence boundary detec-
tion using a maxEnt classifier. In MISC, pages 1–6, 2005.
Eugene Agichtein, Walt Askew, and Yandong Liu. Combining lexical, syntactic, and
semantic evidence for textual entailment classification. In TAC, pages 1–6, 2008.
Eneko Agirre and Aitor Soroa. Personalizing pagerank for word sense disambigua-
tion. In 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL, pages 33–41,
2009.
Eneko Agirre, Oier López de Lacalle, and Aitor Soroa. Random walks for knowledge-
based word sense disambiguation. Computational Linguistics, 40(1):57–84, 2014.
Rakesh Agrawal, Ramakrishnan Srikant, et al. Fast algorithms for mining association
rules. In 20th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, volume 1215,
pages 487–499, 1994.
David W Aha, Dennis Kibler, and Marc K Albert. Instance-based learning algo-
rithms. Machine learning, 6(1):37–66, 1991.
Dirk Ahlers. Assessment of the accuracy of GeoNames gazetteer data. In 7th
workshop on geographic information retrieval, pages 74–81, 2013.
Murtadha Ahmed, Shengfeng Pan, Jianlin Su, Xinxin Cao, Wenze Zhang, Bo Wen,
and Yunfeng Liu. BERT-ASC: Implicit aspect representation learning through
auxiliary-sentence construction for sentiment analysis. arXiv e-prints, pages
arXiv–2203, 2022.
Naoyoshi Aikawa, Tetsuya Sakai, and Hayato Yamana. Community qa question
classification: Is the asker looking for subjective answers or not? IPSJ Online
Transactions, 4:160–168, 2011.
Alan Akbik, Duncan Blythe, and Roland Vollgraf. Contextual string embeddings for
sequence labeling. In COLING, pages 1638–1649, 2018.
Iskander Akhmetov, Alexandr Pak, Irina Ualiyeva, and Alexander Gelbukh. Highly
language-independent word lemmatization using a machine-learning classifier.
Computación y Sistemas, 24(3), 2020.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 400
E. Cambria, Understanding Natural Language Understanding,
[Link]
References 401

Cem Akkaya, Janyce Wiebe, and Rada Mihalcea. Subjectivity word sense disam-
biguation. In EMNLP, pages 190–199, 2009.
Ahmed Al Hamoud, Amber Hoenig, and Kaushik Roy. Sentence subjectivity analysis
of a political and ideological debate dataset using LSTM and BiLSTM with
attention and GRU models. Journal of King Saud University-Computer and
Information Sciences, pages 7975–7987, 2022.
Rabah A. Al-Zaidy, Cornelia Caragea, and C. Lee Giles. Bi-lstm-crf sequence
labeling for keyphrase extraction from scholarly documents. In Ling Liu, Ryen W.
White, Amin Mantrach, Fabrizio Silvestri, Julian J. McAuley, Ricardo Baeza-
Yates, and Leila Zia, editors, The World Wide Web Conference, pages 2551–2557.
ACM, 2019.
Firoj Alam, Evgeny A Stepanov, and Giuseppe Riccardi. Personality traits recogni-
tion on social network-facebook. In international AAAI conference on web and
social media, pages 6–9, 2013.
Mehwish Alam, Andreea Iana, Alexander Grote, Katharina Ludwig, Philipp Müller,
and Heiko Paulheim. Towards analyzing the bias of news recommender systems
using sentiment and stance detection. In Web Conference, pages 448–457, 2022.
Zakariae Alami Merrouni, Bouchra Frikh, and Brahim Ouhbi. Automatic keyphrase
extraction: a survey and trends. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 54:
391–424, 2020.
Desislava Aleksandrova, François Lareau, and Pierre André Ménard. Multilingual
sentence-level bias detection in Wikipedia. In RANLP, pages 42–51, 2019.
Badr AlKhamissi, Millicent Li, Asli Celikyilmaz, Mona T. Diab, and Marjan
Ghazvininejad. A review on language models as knowledge bases. CoRR,
abs/2204.06031, 2022.
Abdulrahman Aloraini and Massimo Poesio. Cross-lingual zero pronoun resolution.
In LREC, pages 90–98, 2020.
Abdulrahman Aloraini and Massimo Poesio. Data augmentation methods for
anaphoric zero pronouns. In Fourth Workshop on Computational Models of
Reference, Anaphora and Coreference, pages 82–93, 2021.
Abdulrahman Aloraini, Sameer Pradhan, and Massimo Poesio. Joint coreference
resolution for zeros and non-zeros in Arabic. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.12169,
2022.
Duygu Altinok. An ontology-based dialogue management system for banking and
finance dialogue systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.04838, 2018.
Nabeela Altrabsheh, Mohamed Medhat Gaber, Mihaela Cocea, et al. SA-E: sentiment
analysis for education. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, 255:
353–362, 2013.
Yasemin Altun, Ioannis Tsochantaridis, and Thomas Hofmann. Hidden markov
support vector machines. In ICML, pages 3–10, 2003.
Nouf Alturaief, Hamoud Aljamaan, and Malak Baslyman. Aware: Aspect-based
sentiment analysis dataset of apps reviews for requirements elicitation. In 2021
36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
Workshops (ASEW), pages 211–218, 2021.
402 References

Pooja Alva and Vinay Hegde. Hidden Markov model for POS tagging in word
sense disambiguation. In 2016 International Conference on Computation System
and Information Technology for Sustainable Solutions (CSITSS), pages 279–284,
2016.
Nestor Alvaro, Yusuke Miyao, Nigel Collier, et al. TwiMed: Twitter and PubMed
comparable corpus of drugs, diseases, symptoms, and their relations. JMIR Public
Health and Surveillance, 3(2):e6396, 2017.
Enrique Amigó, Jorge Carrillo de Albornoz, Irina Chugur, Adolfo Corujo, Julio
Gonzalo, Tamara Martín, Edgar Meij, Maarten De Rijke, and Damiano Spina.
Overview of RepLab 2013: Evaluating online reputation monitoring systems. In
International conference of the cross-language evaluation forum for european
languages, pages 333–352, 2013.
Mostafa Amin, Erik Cambria, and Björn Schuller. Will affective computing emerge
from foundation models and General AI? A first evaluation on ChatGPT. IEEE
Intelligent Systems, 38(2):15–23, 2023.
Mostafa M Amin, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria, and Björn W Schuller. A wide evalu-
ation of ChatGPT on affective computing tasks. IEEE Transactions on Affective
Computing, 2024.
Ida Amini, Samane Karimi, and Azadeh Shakery. Cross-lingual subjectivity detec-
tion for resource lean languages. In Tenth Workshop on Computational Approaches
to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 81–90, 2019.
Henry Anaya-Sánchez, Aurora Pons-Porrata, and Rafael Berlanga-Llavori. Word
sense disambiguation based on word sense clustering. In Advances in Artificial
Intelligence-IBERAMIA-SBIA 2006, pages 472–481. Springer, 2006.
Rie Kubota Ando and Tong Zhang. A framework for learning predictive structures
from multiple tasks and unlabeled data. Journal of Machine Learning Research,
6:1817–1853, 2005.
Chinatsu Aone and Scott William Bennett. Automated acquisition of anaphora
resolution strategies. AAAI, 1995.
Ian A Apperly and Stephen A Butterfill. Do humans have two systems to track beliefs
and belief-like states? Psychological Review, 116(4):953, 2009.
Gor Arakelyan, Karen Hambardzumyan, and Hrant Khachatrian. Towards jointud:
Part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization using recurrent neural networks. arXiv
preprint arXiv:1809.03211, 2018.
Rahul Aralikatte, Heather Lent, Ana Valeria Gonzalez, Daniel Herschcovich, Chen
Qiu, Anders Sandholm, Michael Ringaard, and Anders Søgaard. Rewarding
coreference resolvers for being consistent with world knowledge. In EMNLP-
IJCNLP, pages 1229–1235, 2019.
Rahul Aralikatte, Matthew Lamm, Daniel Hardt, and Anders Søgaard. Ellipsis
resolution as question answering: An evaluation. In EACL, pages 810–817, 2021.
Qazi Mohammad Areeb, Mohammad Nadeem, Shahab Saquib Sohail, Raza Imam,
Faiyaz Doctor, Yassine Himeur, Amir Hussain, and Abbes Amira. Filter bubbles
in recommender systems: Fact or fallacy—a systematic review. Wiley Interdisci-
plinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 13(6):e1512, 2023.
References 403

Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni. Gender,
genre, and writing style in formal written texts. Text & talk, 23(3):321–346, 2003.
Shlomo Argamon, Sushant Dhawle, Moshe Koppel, and James W Pennebaker. Lex-
ical predictors of personality type. In 2005 joint annual meeting of the interface
and the classification society of North America, pages 1–16, 2005.
Jennifer E Arnold. Reference form and discourse patterns. Stanford University,
1998.
Ron Artstein and Massimo Poesio. Inter-coder agreement for computational linguis-
tics. Computational linguistics, 34(4):555–596, 2008.
Kai Arulkumaran, Marc Peter Deisenroth, Miles Brundage, and Anil Anthony
Bharath. Deep reinforcement learning: A brief survey. IEEE Signal Process-
ing Magazine, 34(6):26–38, 2017.
Nana Yaw Asabere and Amevi Acakpovi. ROPPSA: TV program recommendation
based on personality and social awareness. Mathematical Problems in Engineer-
ing, 2020:1–15, 2020.
Jens B Asendorpf. Head-to-head comparison of the predictive validity of personality
types and dimensions. European Journal of Personality, 17(5):327–346, 2003.
Muhammad Zubair Asghar, Aurangzeb Khan, Shakeel Ahmad, and Fazal Masud
Kundi. A review of feature extraction in sentiment analysis. Journal of Basic and
Applied Scientific Research, 4(3):181–186, 2014.
Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides. Logics of Conversation. Cambridge University
Press, 2003.
Michael C Ashton, Kibeom Lee, Marco Perugini, Piotr Szarota, Reinout E De Vries,
Lisa Di Blas, Kathleen Boies, and Boele De Raad. A six-factor structure of
personality-descriptive adjectives: solutions from psycholexical studies in seven
languages. Journal of personality and social psychology, 86(2):356, 2004.
Atanas V Atanassov, Dimitar I Pilev, Fani N Tomova, and Vanya D Kuzmanova.
Hybrid system for emotion recognition based on facial expressions and body
gesture recognition. In 2021 International Conference Automatics and Informatics
(ICAI), pages 135–140, 2021.
Beryl TS Atkins. Tools for computer-aided corpus lexicography: the hector project.
Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 41:5–71, 1992.
Sandeep Attree. Gendered ambiguous pronouns shared task: Boosting model con-
fidence by evidence pooling. In First Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural
Language Processing, pages 134–146, 2019.
Anthony Aue and Michael Gamon. Customizing sentiment classifiers to new do-
mains: A case study. In RANLP, 2005.
Sören Auer, Christian Bizer, Georgi Kobilarov, Jens Lehmann, Richard Cyganiak,
and Zachary Ives. DBpedia: A nucleus for a web of open data. In International
Semantic Web Conference, pages 722–735, 2007.
John Langshaw Austin. How to do things with words. Oxford University Press,
1975.
Nastaran Babanejad, Heidar Davoudi, Aijun An, and Manos Papagelis. Affective
and contextual embedding for sarcasm detection. In COLING, pages 225–243,
2020.
404 References

Stefano Baccianella, Andrea Esuli, and Fabrizio Sebastiani. SentiWordNet 3.0: An

enhanced lexical resource for sentiment analysis and opinion mining. In Seventh
International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pages 2200–
2204, 2010.
Sebastian Bader and Pascal Hitzler. Dimensions of neural-symbolic integration-a
structured survey. arXiv preprint cs/0511042, 2005.
Samy Badreddine, Artur d’Avila Garcez, Luciano Serafini, and Michael Spranger.
Logic tensor networks. Artificial Intelligence, 303:103649, 2022.
Kushal Bafna and Durga Toshniwal. Feature based summarization of customers’
reviews of online products. Procedia Computer Science, 22:142–151, 2013.
Amit Bagga and Breck Baldwin. Algorithms for scoring coreference chains. In The
First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation Workshop
on Linguistics Coreference, volume 1, pages 563–566, 1998.
Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyung Hyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio. Neural machine trans-
lation by jointly learning to align and translate. In 3rd International Conference
on Learning Representations, pages 1–15, 2015.
Vaibhav Bajaj, Kartikey Pant, Ishan Upadhyay, Srinath Nair, and Radhika Mamidi.
Teaser: Towards efficient aspect-based sentiment analysis and recognition. In
RANLP, pages 102–110, 2021.
C Lee Baker. Double negatives. Linguistic inquiry, 1(2):169–186, 1970.
Collin F. Baker, Charles J. Fillmore, and John B. Lowe. The berkeley framenet
project. In ACL, pages 86–90, 1998.
Simon Baker, Roi Reichart, and Anna Korhonen. An unsupervised model for instance
level subcategorization acquisition. In EMNLP, pages 278–289, 2014.
Vimala Balakrishnan and Hossein Arabi. Hyperm: A hybrid personality-aware
recommender for movie. Malaysian Journal of Computer Science, 31(1):48–62,
2018.
Vimala Balakrishnan and Ethel Lloyd-Yemoh. Stemming and lemmatization: A
comparison of retrieval performances. Lecture Notes on Software Engineering, 2,
2014.
Breck Baldwin. CogNIAC: high precision coreference with limited knowledge
and linguistic resources. In Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora
Resolution for Unrestricted Texts, pages 38–45, 1997.
Timothy Baldwin, Marie Catherine de Marneffe, Bo Han, Young-Bum Kim, Alan
Ritter, and Wei Xu. Shared tasks of the 2015 workshop on noisy user-generated
text: Twitter lexical normalization and named entity recognition. In Workshop on
Noisy User-generated Text, pages 126–135, 2015.
David Bamman, Olivia Lewke, and Anya Mansoor. An annotated dataset of coref-
erence in English literature. In LREC, pages 44–54, 2020.
Wouter Bancken, Daniele Alfarone, and Jesse Davis. Automatically detecting and
rating product aspects from textual customer reviews. In 1st international work-
shop on interactions between data mining and natural language processing at
ECML/PKDD, volume 1202, pages 1–16, 2014.
Carmen Banea, Rada Mihalcea, and Janyce Wiebe. Multilingual subjectivity: Are
more languages better? In COLING, pages 28–36, 2010.
References 405

Pratyay Banerjee and Chitta Baral. Self-supervised knowledge triplet learning for
zero-shot question answering. In EMNLP, pages 151–162, 2020.
Satanjeev Banerjee, Ted Pedersen, et al. Extended gloss overlaps as a measure of
semantic relatedness. In IJCAI, volume 3, pages 805–810, 2003.
Ann Banfield. Unspeakable Sentences (Routledge Revivals): Narration and Repre-
sentation in the Language of Fiction. Routledge, 2014.
Jeesoo Bang, Hyungjong Noh, Yonghee Kim, and Gary Geunbae Lee. Example-
based chat-oriented dialogue system with personalized long-term memory. In
2015 International Conference on Big Data and Smart Computing (BIGCOMP),
pages 238–243, 2015.
Rainer Banse and Klaus R Scherer. Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(3):614, 1996.
Hui Bao, Kai He, Xuemeng Yin, Xuanyu Li, Xinrui Bao, Haichuan Zhang, Jialun
Wu, and Zeyu Gao. Bert-based meta-learning approach with looking back for
sentiment analysis of literary book reviews. In NLPCC, pages 235–247, 2021.
Xiaoyi Bao, Z Wang, Xiaotong Jiang, Rong Xiao, and Shoushan Li. Aspect-based
sentiment analysis with opinion tree generation. IJCAI 2022, pages 4044–4050,
2022.
Roy Bar-Haim, Ido Dagan, Shachar Mirkin, Eyal Shnarch, Idan Szpektor, Jonathan
Berant, and Iddo Greental. Efficient semantic deduction and approximate matching
over compact parse forests. In TAC, pages 1–10, 2008.
Edoardo Barba, Tommaso Pasini, and Roberto Navigli. ESC: Redesigning WSD
with extractive sense comprehension. In NAACL-HLT, pages 4661–4672, 2021a.
Edoardo Barba, Luigi Procopio, Caterina Lacerra, Tommaso Pasini, and Roberto
Navigli. Exemplification modeling: Can you give me an example, please? In
IJCAI, pages 3779–3785, 2021b.
Luciano Barbosa and Junlan Feng. Robust sentiment detection on twitter from biased
and noisy data. In COLING, pages 36–44, 2010.
Valentina Bartalesi Lenzi, Giovanni Moretti, and Rachele Sprugnoli. CAT: the
CELCT annotation tool. In Eighth International Conference on Language Re-
sources and Evaluation (LREC’12), pages 333–338, 2012.
Fabian Barteld, Ingrid Schröder, and Heike Zinsmeister. Dealing with word-
internal modification and spelling variation in data-driven lemmatization. In
10th SIGHUM workshop on language technology for cultural heritage, social
sciences, and humanities, pages 52–62, 2016.
Susan Bartlett, Grzegorz Kondrak, and Colin Cherry. Automatic syllabification
with structured SVMs for letter-to-phoneme conversion. In ACL-08: HLT, pages
568–576, 2008.
Jon Barwise and John Perry. Situations and attitudes. The Journal of Philosophy,
78(11):668–691, 1981.
Pierpaolo Basile, Annalina Caputo, and Giovanni Semeraro. An enhanced lesk
word sense disambiguation algorithm through a distributional semantic model. In
COLING, pages 1591–1600, 2014.
406 References

Mohammad Ehsan Basiri, Shahla Nemati, Moloud Abdar, Erik Cambria, and U Ra-
jendra Acharya. Abcdm: An attention-based bidirectional CNN-RNN deep model
for sentiment analysis. Future Generation Computer Systems, 115:279–294, 2021.
Gourav Bathla, Pardeep Singh, Rahul Kumar Singh, Erik Cambria, and Rajeev
Tiwari. Intelligent fake reviews detection based on aspect extraction and analysis
using deep learning. Neural Computing and Applications, 34:20213–20229, 2022.
Zeynep Batmaz, Ali Yurekli, Alper Bilge, and Cihan Kaleli. A review on deep
learning for recommender systems: challenges and remedies. Artificial Intelligence
Review, 52(1):1–37, 2019.
David I Beaver. The optimization of discourse anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy,
27:3–56, 2004.
Manjot Bedi, Shivani Kumar, Md Shad Akhtar, and Tanmoy Chakraborty. Multi-
modal sarcasm detection and humor classification in code-mixed conversations.
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2021.
Salima Behdenna, Barigou Fatiha, and Ghalem Belalem. Ontology-based approach
to enhance explicit aspect extraction in standard arabic reviews. International
Journal of Computing and Digital Systems, 11(1):277–287, 2022.
Alexander Beider. Beider-morse phonetic matching: An alternative to soundex with
fewer false hits. Avotaynu: the International Review of Jewish Genealogy, 24(2):
12, 2008.
Ioannis Bekoulis, Johannes Deleu, Thomas Demeester, and Chris Develder. Joint
entity recognition and relation extraction as a multi-head selection problem. Expert
Systems With Applications, 114:34–45, 2018.
Yonatan Belinkov, Lluís Màrquez, Hassan Sajjad, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, and
James Glass. Evaluating layers of representation in neural machine translation on
part-of-speech and semantic tagging tasks. In IJCNLP, pages 1–10, 2017.
Farah Benamara, Baptiste Chardon, Yannick Mathieu, and Vladimir Popescu. To-
wards context-based subjectivity analysis. In IJCNLP, pages 1180–1188, 2011.
Emily M Bender and Alexander Koller. Climbing towards nlu: On meaning, form,
& understanding in the age of data. In ACL, pages 5185–5198, 2020.
Eric Bengtson and Dan Roth. Understanding the value of features for coreference
resolution. In EMNLP, pages 294–303, 2008.
Luisa Bentivogli and Emanuele Pianta. Exploiting parallel texts in the creation of
multilingual semantically annotated resources: the multisemcor corpus. Natural
Language Engineering, 11(3):247–261, 2005.
Luisa Bentivogli, Peter Clark, Ido Dagan, and Danilo Giampiccolo. The fifth PAS-
CAL recognizing textual entailment challenge. In TAC, pages 1–18, 2009.
Gábor Berend. Sparsity makes sense: Word sense disambiguation using sparse
contextualized word representations. In EMNLP, pages 8498–8508, 2020.
Adam L. Berger, Stephen A. Della Pietra, and Vincent J. Della Pietra. A maximum
entropy approach to natural language processing. Computational Linguistics, 22
(1):39–71, 1996.
Sabine Bergler, René Witte, Michelle Khalife, Zhuoyan Li, and Frank Rudzicz. Using
knowledge-poor coreference resolution for text summarization. In Workshop on
Text Summarization, pages 1–8, 2003.
References 407

Toms Bergmanis and Sharon Goldwater. Context sensitive neural lemmatization

with Lematus. In ACL-HLT, pages 1391–1400, 2018.
Toms Bergmanis and Sharon Goldwater. Training data augmentation for context-
sensitive neural lemmatization using inflection tables and raw text. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1904.01464, 2019.
José M Bernardo and Adrian FM Smith. Bayesian theory. Measurement Science
and Technology, 12(2):221–222, 2001.
Steven Bethard, Guergana Savova, Wei-Te Chen, Leon Derczynski, James Puste-
jovsky, and Marc Verhagen. SemEval-2016 Task 12: Clinical TempEval. In 10th
international workshop on semantic evaluation (SemEval-2016), pages 1052–
1062, 2016.
Michele Bevilacqua and Roberto Navigli. Quasi bidirectional encoder representa-
tions from transformers for word sense disambiguation. In RANLP, pages 122–
131, 2019.
Michele Bevilacqua and Roberto Navigli. Breaking through the 80% glass ceil-
ing: Raising the state of the art in word sense disambiguation by incorporating
knowledge graph information. In ACL, pages 2854–2864, 2020.
Michele Bevilacqua, Tommaso Pasini, Alessandro Raganato, Roberto Navigli, et al.
Recent trends in word sense disambiguation: A survey. In IJCAI, pages 4330–
4338, 2021.
Chandra Bhagavatula, Ronan Le Bras, Chaitanya Malaviya, Keisuke Sakaguchi,
Ari Holtzman, Hannah Rashkin, Doug Downey, Wen-tau Yih, and Yejin Choi.
Abductive commonsense reasoning. In International Conference on Learning
Representations, ICLR, 2020.
Prajjwal Bhargava and Vincent Ng. Commonsense knowledge reasoning and gener-
ation with pre-trained language models: A survey. In AAAI, pages 12317–12325,
2022.
Joan-Isaac Biel, Vagia Tsiminaki, John Dines, and Daniel Gatica-Perez. Hi YouTube!
personality impressions and verbal content in social video. In 15th ACM on
International conference on multimodal interaction, pages 119–126, 2013.
Chris Biemann. Unsupervised part-of-speech tagging employing efficient graph
clustering. In COLING-ACL, pages 7–12, 2006.
Yonatan Bisk, Rowan Zellers, Ronan Le Bras, Jianfeng Gao, and Yejin Choi. PIQA:
reasoning about physical commonsense in natural language. In AAAI, pages
7432–7439, 2020.
Prakhar Biyani, Sumit Bhatia, Cornelia Caragea, and Prasenjit Mitra. Using non-
lexical features for identifying factual and opinionative threads in online forums.
Knowledge-Based Systems, 69:170–178, 2014.
Yuri Bizzoni and Shalom Lappin. Predicting human metaphor paraphrase judgments
with deep neural networks. In Workshop on Figurative Language Processing,
pages 45–55, 2018.
William Black, Sabri Elkateb, Horacio Rodriguez, Musa Alkhalifa, Piek Vossen,
Adam Pease, Christiane Fellbaum, et al. Introducing the Arabic WordNet project.
In Third International WordNet Conference, pages 295–300, 2006.
408 References

David M Blei, Andrew Y Ng, and Michael I Jordan. Latent Dirichlet allocation.
Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3:993–1022, 2003.
Terra Blevins and Luke Zettlemoyer. Moving down the long tail of word sense
disambiguation with gloss informed bi-encoders. In ACL, pages 1006–1017,
2020.
John Blitzer, Mark Dredze, and Fernando Pereira. Biographies, bollywood, boom-
boxes and blenders: Domain adaptation for sentiment classification. In 45th annual
meeting of the association of computational linguistics, pages 440–447, 2007.
Rexhina Blloshmi, Tommaso Pasini, Niccolò Campolungo, Somnath Banerjee,
Roberto Navigli, and Gabriella Pasi. IR like a SIR: Sense-enhanced informa-
tion retrieval for multiple languages. In EMNLP, pages 1030–1041, 2021.
Kenneth Bloom, Navendu Garg, and Shlomo Argamon. Extracting appraisal expres-
sions. In NAACL-HLT, pages 308–315, 2007.
Daniel G Bobrow and Donald A Norman. Some principles of memory schemata.
In Representation and understanding, pages 131–149. Morgan Kaufmann, San
Diego, 1975.
Olivier Bodenreider. The unified medical language system (umls): integrating
biomedical terminology. Nucleic acids research, 32(suppl_1):D267–D270, 2004.
Paul Boersma. Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot. Int., 5(9):
341–345, 2001.
Gergo Bogacsovics, Janos Toth, Andras Hajdu, and Balazs Harangi. Enhancing
CNNs through the use of hand-crafted features in automated fundus image clas-
sification. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 76:103685, 2022.
Alena Böhmová, Jan Hajic, Eva Hajicová, Barbora Hladká, and Anne Abeillé. The
prague dependency treebank: Three-level annotation scenario. Treebanks: build-
ing and using parsed corpora, 20:103–127, 2003.
Piotr Bojanowski, Edouard Grave, Armand Joulin, and Tomas Mikolov. Enriching
word vectors with subword information. Transactions of the Association for
Computational Linguistics, 5, 2016.
Kurt Bollacker, Colin Evans, Praveen Paritosh, Tim Sturge, and Jamie Taylor. Free-
base: A collaboratively created graph database for structuring human knowledge.
In SIGMOD, pages 1247–1250, 2008.
Rishi Bommasani, Drew A Hudson, Ehsan Adeli, Russ Altman, Simran Arora,
Sydney von Arx, Michael S Bernstein, Jeannette Bohg, Antoine Bosselut, Emma
Brunskill, et al. On the Opportunities & Risks of Foundation Models. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2108.07258, 2021.
Francis Bond, Timothy Baldwin, Richard Fothergill, and Kiyotaka Uchimoto.
Japanese semcor: A sense-tagged corpus of japanese. In 6th Global WordNet
Conference, pages 56–63, 2012.
Sofia Bonicalzi, Mario De Caro, and Benedetta Giovanola. Artificial intelligence
and autonomy: On the ethical dimension of recommender systems. Topoi, 2023.
Kalina Bontcheva, Hamish Cunningham, Ian Roberts, Angus Roberts, Valentin
Tablan, Niraj Aswani, and Genevieve Gorrell. GATE Teamware: a web-based,
collaborative text annotation framework. Language Resources and Evaluation, 47
(4):1007–1029, 2013a.
References 409

Kalina Bontcheva, Leon Derczynski, Adam Funk, Mark A Greenwood, Diana May-
nard, and Niraj Aswani. Twitie: An open-source information extraction pipeline
for microblog text. In RANLP, pages 83–90, 2013b.
Marco Bonzanini, Miguel Martinez-Alvarez, and Thomas Roelleke. Opinion sum-
marisation through sentence extraction: An investigation with movie reviews.
In 35th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in
Information Retrieval, pages 1121–1122, 2012.
Ari Bornstein, Arie Cattan, and Ido Dagan. CoRefi: A crowd sourcing suite for
coreference annotation. In EMNLP, pages 205–215, 2020.
Lera Boroditsky. How language shapes thought. Scientific American, 304(2):62–65,
2011.
Oriol Borrega, Mariona Taulé, and M Antø’nia Martı. What do we mean when we
speak about named entities. In Corpus Linguistics, pages 1–27, 2007.
Denny Borsboom, Gideon J Mellenbergh, and Jaap Van Heerden. The theoretical
status of latent variables. Psychological review, 110(2):203, 2003.
Johan Bos. Implementing the binding and accommodation theory for anaphora
resolution and presupposition projection. Computational Linguistics, 29(2):179–
210, 2003.
Antoine Bosselut, Hannah Rashkin, Maarten Sap, Chaitanya Malaviya, Asli Ce-
likyilmaz, and Yejin Choi. COMET: commonsense transformers for automatic
knowledge graph construction. In ACL, pages 4762–4779, 2019.
Mondher Bouazizi and Tomoaki Ohtsuki. Opinion mining in Twitter how to make
use of sarcasm to enhance sentiment analysis. In 2015 IEEE/ACM International
Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2015, pages
1594–1597, 2015.
Florian Boudin, Stéphane Huet, and Juan-Manuel Torres-Moreno. A graph-based
approach to cross-language multi-document summarization. Polibits, pages 113–
118, 2011.
Gosse Bouma. Finite state methods for hyphenation. Natural Language Engineering,
9:5 – 20, 03 2003. doi: 10.1017/S1351324903003073.
Zied Bouraoui, Sébastien Konieczny, Thanh Ma, Nicolas Schwind, and Ivan Varz-
inczak. Region-based merging of open-domain terminological knowledge. In
International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Rea-
soning, KR, pages 81–90, 2022.
Gordon H Bower. Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36(2):129, 1981.
Sven Branahl. Das EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval)
System der SEC und seine Bedeutung für die Bereitstellung von Rechnungsle-
gungsinformationen. diplom. de, 1998.
Thorsten Brants. TnT-a statistical part-of-speech tagger. arXiv preprint cs/0003055,
2000.
Susan E Brennan. Centering attention in discourse. Language and Cognitive pro-
cesses, 10(2):137–167, 1995.
Susan E. Brennan, Marilyn W. Friedman, and Carl J. Pollard. A centering approach
to pronouns. In ACL, pages 155–162, 1987.
410 References

Eric Brill. Transformation-based error-driven learning and natural language pro-

cessing: A case study in part-of-speech tagging. Computational Linguistics, 21
(4):543–565, 1995.
Eric Brill and Jun Wu. Classifier combination for improved lexical disambiguation.
In ACL, pages 191–195, 1998.
Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web
search engine. Computer networks and ISDN systems, 30(1-7):107–117, 1998.
Samuel Brody and Nicholas Diakopoulos. Cooooooooooooooolllllllllll-
lll!!!!!!!!!!!!!! using word lengthening to detect sentiment in microblogs. In
EMNLP, pages 562–570, 2011.
Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan,
Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda
Askell, et al. Language models are few-shot learners. NeurIPS, 33:1877–1901,
2020.
Rebecca Bruce and Janyce Wiebe. Decomposable modeling in natural language
processing. Computational Linguistics, 25(2):195–207, 1999.
Elia Bruni, Gemma Boleda, Marco Baroni, and Nam-Khanh Tran. Distributional
semantics in technicolor. In ACL, pages 136–145, 2012.
Fan Bu, Xiaoyan Zhu, and Ming Li. Measuring the non-compositionality of multi-
word expressions. In COLING, pages 116–124, 2010.
Sébastien Bubeck, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan, Johannes Gehrke, Eric
Horvitz, Ece Kamar, Peter Lee, Yin Tat Lee, Yuanzhi Li, Scott Lundberg,
Harsha Nori, Hamid Palangi, Marco Tulio Ribeiro, and Yi Zhang. Sparks of
artificial general intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4. arXiv preprint
arXiv:2303.12712, 2023.
Daniel Büring. Binding theory. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Christopher T Burris, Eddie Harmon-Jones, and W Ryan Tarpley. “by faith alone”:
Religious agitation and cognitive dissonance. Basic and Applied Social Psychol-
ogy, 19(1):17–31, 1997.
Donna K Byron, Whitney Gegg-Harrison, and Sun-Hee Lee. Resolving zero
anaphors and pronouns in korean. Traitement Automatique des Langues, 46(1):
91–114, 2006.
Hongjie Cai, Yaofeng Tu, Xiangsheng Zhou, Jianfei Yu, and Rui Xia. Aspect-
category based sentiment analysis with hierarchical graph convolutional network.
In COLING, pages 833–843, 2020.
Hongjie Cai, Rui Xia, and Jianfei Yu. Aspect-category-opinion-sentiment quadruple
extraction with implicit aspects and opinions. In IJCNLP, pages 340–350, 2021.
Yitao Cai, Huiyu Cai, and Xiaojun Wan. Multi-modal sarcasm detection in Twitter
with hierarchical fusion model. In ACL, pages 2506–2515, 2019.
Josep Call and Michael Tomasello. Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30
years later. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(5):187–192, 2008.
Francesco Camastra and Gennaro Razi. Italian text categorization with lemmatiza-
tion and support vector machines. In Neural approaches to dynamics of signal
exchanges, pages 47–54. Springer, 2020.
References 411

Erik Cambria and Bebo White. Jumping NLP curves: A review of natural language
processing research. IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, 9(2):48–57,
2014.
Erik Cambria, Amir Hussain, Catherine Havasi, and Chris Eckl. Common sense
computing: From the society of mind to digital intuition and beyond. In Julian
Fierrez, Javier Ortega, Anna Esposito, Andrzej Drygajlo, and Marcos Faundez-
Zanuy, editors, Biometric ID Management and Multimodal Communication, vol-
ume 5707 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 252–259. Springer, Berlin
Heidelberg, 2009.
Erik Cambria, Daniel Olsher, and Kenneth Kwok. Sentic activation: A two-level
affective common sense reasoning framework. In AAAI, pages 186–192, Toronto,
2012.
Erik Cambria, Soujanya Poria, Alexander Gelbukh, and Mike Thelwall. Sentiment
analysis is a big suitcase. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 32(6):74–80, 2017.
Erik Cambria, Rui Mao, Sooji Han, and Qian Liu. Sentic parser: A graph-based
approach to concept extraction for sentiment analysis. In ICDM Workshops, pages
413–420, 2022.
Erik Cambria, Rui Mao, Melvin Chen, Zhaoxia Wang, and Seng-Beng Ho. Seven
pillars for the future of artificial intelligence. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 38(6):
62–69, 2023.
Erik Cambria, Xulang Zhang, Rui Mao, Melvin Chen, and Kenneth Kwok. SenticNet
8: Fusing emotion AI and commonsense AI for interpretable, trustworthy, and ex-
plainable affective computing. In International Conference on Human-Computer
Interaction (HCII), 2024.
Niccolò Campolungo, Federico Martelli, Francesco Saina, and Roberto Navigli.
DiBiMT: A novel benchmark for measuring word sense disambiguation biases in
machine translation. In ACL, pages 4331–4352, 2022.
Olivier Cappé, Simon J Godsill, and Eric Moulines. An overview of existing methods
and recent advances in sequential monte carlo. IEEE, 95(5):899–924, 2007.
Claire Cardie and Kiri Wagstaff. Noun phrase coreference as clustering. In 1999
Joint SIGDAT Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
and Very Large Corpora, pages 82–89, 1999.
David Carter. Interpreting Anaphors in Natural Language Texts. Halsted Press,
1987.
Avshalom Caspi, Brent W Roberts, and Rebecca L Shiner. Personality development:
Stability and change. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 56:453–484, 2005.
Giovanni Castiglia, Ayoub El Majjodi, Alain Dominique Starke, Fedelucio Narducci,
Yashar Deldjoo, and Federica Calò. Nudging towards health in a conversational
food recommender system using multi-modal interactions and nutrition labels. In
Fourth Knowledge-aware and Conversational Recommender Systems Workshop
(KaRS), volume 3294, pages 29–35, 2022.
Santiago Castro, Devamanyu Hazarika, Verónica Pérez-Rosas, Roger Zimmermann,
Rada Mihalcea, and Soujanya Poria. Towards multimodal sarcasm detection (an
obviously perfect paper). In ACL, pages 4619–4629, Florence, Italy, July 2019.
412 References

Rosario Catelli, Hamido Fujita, Giuseppe De Pietro, and Massimo Esposito. Decep-
tive reviews and sentiment polarity: Effective link by exploiting BERT. Expert
Systems with Applications, 209:118290, 2022.
Nicolas Cebron and Michael R Berthold. Active learning for object classification:
from exploration to exploitation. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 18(2):
283–299, 2009.
Giuseppe GA Celano. A gradient boosting-Seq2Seq system for Latin POS tagging
and lemmatization. In LT4HALA 2020-1st Workshop on Language Technologies
for Historical and Ancient Languages, pages 119–123, 2020.
Fabio Celli and Bruno Lepri. Is big five better than MBTI? A personality computing
challenge using twitter data. Computational Linguistics CLiC-it, 2018:93, 2018.
Daniel Cervone. Personality architecture: Within-person structures and processes.
Annual review of psychology, 56:423, 2005.
Wallace Chafe. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point
of view. Subject and topic, 1976.
Haixia Chai and Michael Strube. Incorporating centering theory into neural coref-
erence resolution. In NAACL-HLT, pages 2996–3002, 2022.
Abhisek Chakrabarty, Onkar Arun Pandit, and Utpal Garain. Context sensitive
lemmatization using two successive bidirectional gated recurrent networks. In
ACL, pages 1481–1491, 2017.
Abhisek Chakrabarty, Akshay Chaturvedi, and Utpal Garain. CNN-based context
sensitive lemmatization. In ACM India Joint International Conference on Data
Science and Management of Data, pages 334–337, 2019.
Navoneel Chakrabarty, Siddhartha Chowdhury, Sangita D Kanni, and Swarnakeshar
Mukherjee. FAFinder: Friend suggestion system for social networking. In In-
telligent Data Communication Technologies and Internet of Things: ICICI 2019,
pages 51–58, 2020.
Craig G. Chambers and Ron Smyth. Structural parallelism and discourse coherence:
A test of centering theory. Journal of Memory and Language, 39(4):593–608,
1998.
Nathanael Chambers, Daniel Cer, Trond Grenager, David Hall, Chloe Kiddon,
Bill MacCartney, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Daniel Ramage, Eric Yeh, and
Christopher D. Manning. Learning alignments and leveraging natural logic. In
ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing, pages 165–
170, 2007.
Jonathan Charteris-Black. Metaphor and political communication. In Metaphor and
Discourse, pages 97–115. Springer, 2009.
Iti Chaturvedi, Erik Cambria, Soujanya Poria, and Rajiv Bajpai. Bayesian deep
convolution belief networks for subjectivity detection. In ICDM workshops, pages
916–923, 2016a.
Iti Chaturvedi, Erik Cambria, and David Vilares. Lyapunov filtering of objectivity
for spanish sentiment model. In IJCNN, pages 4474–4481, 2016b.
Iti Chaturvedi, Edoardo Ragusa, Paolo Gastaldo, Rodolfo Zunino, and Erik Cambria.
Bayesian network based extreme learning machine for subjectivity detection.
Journal of The Franklin Institute, 355(4):1780–1797, 2018.
References 413

Iti Chaturvedi, Tim Noel, and Ranjan Satapathy. Speech emotion recognition using
audio matching. Electronics, 11(23):3943, 2022.
Iti Chaturvedi, Ranjan Satapathy, Curtis Lynch, and Erik Cambria. Predicting word
vectors for microtext. Expert Systems, page e13589, 2024.
Dushyant Singh Chauhan, Gopendra Vikram Singh, Aseem Arora, Asif Ekbal, and
Pushpak Bhattacharyya. An emoji-aware multitask framework for multimodal
sarcasm detection. Knowledge-Based Systems, 257:109924, 2022.
Chen Chen and Vincent Ng. Chinese zero pronoun resolution: Some recent advances.
In EMNLP, pages 1360–1365, 2013.
Chen Chen and Vincent Ng. Chinese zero pronoun resolution with deep neural
networks. In ACL, pages 778–788, 2016.
Danqi Chen and Christopher D Manning. A fast and accurate dependency parser
using neural networks. In EMNLP, pages 740–750, 2014.
Guanyi Chen, Kees van Deemter, and Chenghua Lin. Modelling pro-drop with the
rational speech acts model. In 11th International Conference on Natural Language
Generation, pages 57–66, 2018a.
Hong Chen, Zhenhua Fan, Hao Lu, Alan Yuille, and Shu Rong. PreCo: A large-scale
dataset in preschool vocabulary for coreference resolution. In EMNLP, pages
172–181, 2018b.
Jun Chen, Xiaoming Zhang, Yu Wu, Zhao Yan, and Zhoujun Li. Keyphrase gener-
ation with correlation constraints. In Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hocken-
maier, and Jun’ichi Tsujii, editors, EMNLP, pages 4057–4066, 2018c.
Li Chen, Luole Qi, and Feng Wang. Comparison of feature-level learning methods
for mining online consumer reviews. Expert Systems with Applications, 39(10):
9588–9601, 2012.
Lingjiao Chen, Matei Zaharia, and James Zou. How is ChatGPT’s behavior changing
over time? arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09009, 2023a.
Melvin Chen. Trust & trust-engineering in artificial intelligence research: Theory &
praxis. Philosophy & Technology, 34(4):1429–1447, 2021.
Nuo Chen, Yan Wang, Haiyun Jiang, Deng Cai, Yuhan Li, Ziyang Chen, Longyue
Wang, and Jia Li. Large language models meet Harry Potter: A dataset for aligning
dialogue agents with characters. In EMNLP Findings, pages 8506–8520, 2023b.
Shaowei Chen, Jie Liu, Yu Wang, Wenzheng Zhang, and Ziming Chi. Synchronous
double-channel recurrent network for aspect-opinion pair extraction. In ACL,
pages 6515–6524, Online, July 2020.
Shaowei Chen, Yu Wang, Jie Liu, and Yuelin Wang. Bidirectional machine reading
comprehension for aspect sentiment triplet extraction. In AAAI, pages 12666–
12674, 2021a.
Shisong Chen, Binbin Gu, Jianfeng Qu, Zhixu Li, An Liu, Lei Zhao, and Zhigang
Chen. Tackling zero pronoun resolution and non-zero coreference resolution
jointly. In 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages
518–527, 2021b.
Tao Chen and Min-Yen Kan. Creating a live, public short message service corpus:
the nus sms corpus. Language Resources and Evaluation, 2012.
414 References

Tianqi Chen and Carlos Guestrin. Xgboost: A scalable tree boosting system. In
22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data
Mining, pages 785–794, 2016.
Wang Chen, Yifan Gao, Jiani Zhang, Irwin King, and Michael R. Lyu. Title-guided
encoding for keyphrase generation. In AAAI, pages 6268–6275, 2019.
Wangqun Chen, Fuqiang Lin, Xuan Zhang, Guowei Li, and Bo Liu. Jointly learning
sentimental clues and context incongruity for sarcasm detection. IEEE Access,
10:48292–48300, 2022.
Zhuang Chen and Tieyun Qian. Relation-aware collaborative learning for unified
aspect-based sentiment analysis. In ACL, pages 3685–3694, 2020.
Yan Cheng, Leibo Yao, Guoxiong Xiang, Guanghe Zhang, Tianwei Tang, and Linhui
Zhong. Text sentiment orientation analysis based on multi-channel CNN and
bidirectional GRU with attention mechanism. IEEE Access, 8:134964–134975,
2020.
Paula Chesley, Bruce Vincent, Li Xu, and Rohini K Srihari. Using verbs and
adjectives to automatically classify blog sentiment. Training, 580(263):233–241,
2006.
Zheng Lin Chia, Michal Ptaszynski, Fumito Masui, Gniewosz Leliwa, and Michal
Wroczynski. Machine learning and feature engineering-based study into sarcasm
and irony classification with application to cyberbullying detection. Information
Processing & Management, 58(4):102600, 2021.
Nancy Chinchor, Lynette Hirschman, and David D Lewis. Evaluating message
understanding systems: an analysis of the third message understanding conference
(MUC-3). Computational Linguistics, 19(3):409–450, 1993.
Nancy A. Chinchor. Overview of MUC-7. In Seventh Message Understanding
Conference (MUC-7), pages 1–4, 1998.
Nancy A Chinchor and Beth Sundheim. Message understanding conference (muc)
tests of discourse processing. In Proc. AAAI Spring Symposium on Empirical
Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation, pages 21–26, 1995.
Jason PC Chiu and Eric Nichols. Named entity recognition with bidirectional LSTM-
CNNs. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 4:357–370,
2016.
Timothy Chklovski. Learner: a system for acquiring commonsense knowledge by
analogy. In John H. Gennari, Bruce W. Porter, and Yolanda Gil, editors, 2nd
International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2003), pages 4–12,
2003.
Timothy Chklovski and Patrick Pantel. Verbocean: Mining the web for fine-grained
semantic verb relations. In EMNLP, pages 33–40, 2004.
Kyunghyun Cho, Bart van Merrienboer, Dzmitry Bahdanau, and Yoshua Bengio.
On the properties of neural machine translation: Encoder-decoder approaches.
In Dekai Wu, Marine Carpuat, Xavier Carreras, and Eva Maria Vecchi, editors,
SSST@EMNLP 2014, Eighth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in
Statistical Translation, pages 103–111, 2014.
Noam Chomsky. Syntactic Structures. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, Boston, 1957.
ISBN 9783112316009.
References 415

Monojit Choudhury, Rahul Saraf, Vijit Jain, Animesh Mukherjee, Sudeshna Sarkar,
and Anupam Basu. Investigation and modeling of the structure of texting language.
International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), 10(3):
157–174, 2007.
Evripides Christodoulou, Andreas Gregoriades, Maria Pampaka, and Herodotos
Herodotou. Personality-informed restaurant recommendation. In Information
Systems and Technologies: WorldCIST 2022, Volume 1, pages 13–21. Springer,
2022.
Grzegorz Chrupa≥a. Simple data-driven context-sensitive lemmatization. Proces.
del Leng. Natural, 37, 2006.
Grzegorz Chrupa≥a. Normalizing tweets with edit scripts and recurrent neural em-
beddings. In ACL, pages 680–686, 2014.
Grzegorz Chrupa≥a, Georgiana Dinu, and Josef Genabith. Learning morphology
with Morfette. Chrupa≥a, Grzegorz and Dinu, Georgiana and van Genabith, Josef
(2008) Learning morphology with Morfette. In: LREC 2008 - Sixth International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 28-30 May 2008, Marrakech,
Morocco., 01 2008.
Sandra Chung, William A Ladusaw, and James McCloskey. Sluicing and logical
form. Natural Language Semantics, 3:239–282, 1995.
Kenneth Church and Patrick Hanks. Word association norms, mutual information,
and lexicography. Computational linguistics, 16(1):22–29, 1990.
Kenneth Ward Church. A stochastic parts program and noun phrase parser for
unrestricted text. In International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal
Processing,, pages 695–698, 1989.
Montserrat Civit and Ma Antònia Martí. Building cast3lb: A Spanish treebank.
Research on Language and Computation, 2(4):549–574, 2004.
Alexander Clark. Combining distributional and morphological information for part
of speech induction. In EACL, pages 59–66, 2003.
Herbert H Clark. Bridging. In Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing,
pages 169–174, 1975.
Kevin Clark and Christopher D. Manning. Entity-centric coreference resolution with
model stacking. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages 1405–1415, 2015.
Kevin Clark and Christopher D. Manning. Deep reinforcement learning for mention-
ranking coreference models. In EMNLP, pages 2256–2262, 2016a.
Kevin Clark and Christopher D. Manning. Improving coreference resolution by
learning entity-level distributed representations. In ACL, pages 643–653, 2016b.
Kevin Clark, Minh-Thang Luong, Quoc V. Le, and Christopher D. Manning. ELEC-
TRA: pre-training text encoders as discriminators rather than generators. In 8th
International Conference on Learning Representations, pages 1–18, 2020a.
Peter Clark, Oyvind Tafjord, and Kyle Richardson. Transformers as soft reasoners
over language. In IJCAI, pages 3882–3890, 2020b.
Stephen Clark, James R Curran, and Miles Osborne. Bootstrapping POS-taggers
using unlabelled data. In HLT-NAACL, pages 49–55, 2003.
Jacob Cohen. A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and
Psychological Measurement, 20(1):37–46, 1960.
416 References

K Bretonnel Cohen, Arrick Lanfranchi, Miji Joo-young Choi, Michael Bada,

William A Baumgartner, Natalya Panteleyeva, Karin Verspoor, Martha Palmer,
and Lawrence E Hunter. Coreference annotation and resolution in the colorado
richly annotated full text (craft) corpus of biomedical journal articles. BMC
Bioinformatics, 18(1):1–14, 2017.
Yuval Cohen, Hana Ornoy, and Baruch Keren. MBTI personality types of project
managers and their success: A field survey. Project Management Journal, 44(3):
78–87, 2013.
Raphael Cohen-Almagor. Fighting hate and bigotry on the internet. Policy &
Internet, 3(3):1–26, 2011.
David A Cohn, Zoubin Ghahramani, and Michael I Jordan. Active learning with
statistical models. Journal of artificial intelligence research, 4:129–145, 1996.
Francesco Colasanto, Luca Grilli, Domenico Santoro, and Giovanni Villani. Al-
BERTino for stock price prediction: a Gibbs sampling approach. Information
Sciences, 597:341–357, 2022.
Michael Collins. Discriminative training methods for hidden markov models: Theory
and experiments with perceptron algorithms. In EMNLP, pages 1–8, 2002.
Ronan Collobert and Jason Weston. A unified architecture for natural language
processing: Deep neural networks with multitask learning. In ICML, pages 160–
167, 2008.
Ronan Collobert, Jason Weston, Léon Bottou, Michael Karlen, Koray Kavukcuoglu,
and Pavel Kuksa. Natural language processing (almost) from scratch. Journal of
Machine Learning Research, 12:2493–2537, 2011.
Herbert L Colston. On necessary conditions for verbal irony comprehension. Prag-
matics & Cognition, 8(2):277–324, 2000.
Max Coltheart. The MRC psycholinguistic database. The Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology Section A, 33(4):497–505, 1981.
Paul Compton, Glenn Edwards, Byeong Kang, Leslie Lazarus, Ron Malor, Phil Pre-
ston, and Ashwin Srinivasan. Ripple down rules: Turning knowledge acquisition
into knowledge maintenance. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 4(6):463–475,
1992.
Simone Conia and Roberto Navigli. Framing word sense disambiguation as a multi-
label problem for model-agnostic knowledge integration. In EACL, pages 3269–
3275, 2021.
BNC Consortium. British national corpus. Oxford Text Archive Core Collection,
2007.
Teresa Correa, Amber Willard Hinsley, and Homero Gil De Zuniga. Who interacts on
the web?: The intersection of users’ personality and social media use. Computers
in human behavior, 26(2):247–253, 2010.
Keith Cortis, André Freitas, Tobias Daudert, Manuela Huerlimann, Manel Zarrouk,
Siegfried Handschuh, and Brian Davis. SemEval-2017 task 5: Fine-grained senti-
ment analysis on financial microblogs and news. In 11th International Workshop
on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017), pages 519–535, 2017.
Paul T Costa Jr. Still stable after all these years: Personality as a key to some issues
in adulthood and old age. Life span development and behavior, 3:65–102, 1980.
References 417

Paul T Costa Jr and Robert R McCrae. Domains and facets: Hierarchical personality
assessment using the revised NEO personality inventory. Journal of Personality
Assessment, 64(1):21–50, 1995.
Juan M Cotelo, Fermín Cruz, F Javier Ortega, and José A Troyano. Explorando
Twitter mediante la integración de información estructurada y no estructurada.
Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, pages 75–82, 2015.
Isaac Councill, Ryan McDonald, and Leonid Velikovich. What’s great and what’s
not: learning to classify the scope of negation for improved sentiment analysis.
In workshop on negation and speculation in natural language processing, pages
51–59, 2010.
Alan S Cowen, Dacher Keltner, Florian Schroff, Brendan Jou, Hartwig Adam, and
Gautam Prasad. Sixteen facial expressions occur in similar contexts worldwide.
Nature, 589(7841):251–257, 2021.
Michael Crawshaw. Multi-task learning with deep neural networks: A survey. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2009.09796, pages 1–43, 2020.
William Croft and D Alan Cruse. Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge University Press,
2004.
Leyang Cui, Yu Wu, Jian Liu, Sen Yang, and Yue Zhang. Template-based named
entity recognition using bart. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages 1835–1845, 2021.
James R Curran and Stephen Clark. Investigating GIS and smoothing for maximum
entropy taggers. In EACL, 2003.
Agata Cybulska and Piek Vossen. Using a sledgehammer to crack a nut? lexical
diversity and event coreference resolution. In Ninth International Conference on
Language Resources and Evaluation, pages 4545–4552, 2014.
W Daelemans, J Zavrel, K van der Sloot, and A van den Bosch. TiMBL: Tilburg
memory based learner, version 5.0, reference guide. Research Group Technical
Report Series, 3, 2003.
Walter Daelemans, Antal Van den Bosch, and Ton Weijters. Igtree: using trees for
compression and classification in lazy learning algorithms. In Lazy learning,
pages 407–423. Springer, 1997.
Walter Daelemans, Sabine Buchholz, and Jorn Veenstra. Memory-based shallow
parsing. arXiv preprint cs/9906005, 1999a.
Walter Daelemans, Jakub Zavrel, Peter Berck, and Steven Gillis. MBT: A memory-
based part of speech tagger-generator. Fourth Workshop on Very Large Corpora:
1996; Copenhagen, Denmark, 11 1999b.
Walter Daelemans, Hendrik Johannes Groenewald, and Gerhard B van Huyssteen.
Prototype-based active learning for lemmatization. In International Conference
RANLP-2009, pages 65–70, 2009.
Debishree Dagar, Abir Hudait, Hrudaya Kumar Tripathy, and MN Das. Automatic
emotion detection model from facial expression. In ICACCCT, pages 77–85, 2016.
Hong-Jie Dai, Po-Ting Lai, Yung-Chun Chang, and Richard Tzong-Han Tsai. En-
hancing of chemical compound and drug name recognition using representative
tag scheme and fine-grained tokenization. Journal of cheminformatics, 7(1):1–10,
2015.
418 References

Zehui Dai, Cheng Peng, Huajie Chen, and Yadong Ding. A multi-task incremental
learning framework with category name embedding for aspect-category sentiment
analysis. In EMNLP, pages 6955–6965, 2020.
Bouras Dalila, Amroune Mohamed, and Hakim Bendjanna. A review of recent aspect
extraction techniques for opinion mining systems. In 2018 2nd International
Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP), pages 1–6,
2018.
Hayk Danielyan. Sarcasm in social and commercial advertising: A pragmalinguistic
perspective. Armenian Folia Anglistika, 18(2 (26)):72–84, 2022.
Kareem Darwish, Hamdy Mubarak, Ahmed Abdelali, Mohamed Eldesouki, Younes
Samih, Randah Alharbi, Mohammed Attia, Walid Magdy, and Laura Kallmeyer.
Multi-dialect Arabic POS tagging: A CRF approach. In Eleventh International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), 2018.
Amitava Das and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay. Theme detection an exploration of opinion
subjectivity. In 2009 3rd International Conference on Affective Computing and
Intelligent Interaction and Workshops, pages 1–6, 2009.
Amitava Das and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay. Subjectivity detection using genetic algo-
rithm. Computational Approaches to Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis, pages
14–21, 2010.
Nilanjana Das and Santwana Sagnika. A subjectivity detection-based approach
to sentiment analysis. In Machine Learning and Information Processing, pages
149–160. Springer, 2020.
Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Arzoo Katiyar, Rebecca Passonneau, and Rui Zhang.
CONTaiNER: Few-shot named entity recognition via contrastive learning. In
ACL, pages 6338–6353, 2022.
Yann N Dauphin, Angela Fan, Michael Auli, and David Grangier. Language model-
ing with gated convolutional networks. In ICML, pages 933–941, 2017.
Ernest Davis, Leora Morgenstern, and Charles L Ortiz. The first Winograd schema
challenge at IJCAI-16. AI Magazine, 38(3):97–98, 2017.
Alvise De Biasio, Nicolò Navarin, and Dietmar Jannach. Economic recommender
systems – a systematic review. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications,
63:101352, 2024.
Matthias De Lange, Rahaf Aljundi, Marc Masana, Sarah Parisot, Xu Jia, Aleö
Leonardis, Gregory Slabaugh, and Tinne Tuytelaars. A continual learning survey:
Defying forgetting in classification tasks. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis
and Machine Intelligence, 44(7):3366–3385, 2021.
Kees van Deemter and Rodger Kibble. On coreferring: Coreference in MUC and
related annotation schemes. Computational Linguistics, 26(4):629–637, 2000.
Dina Demner-Fushman, Kin Wah Fung, Phong Do, Richard D Boyce, and Travis R
Goodwin. Overview of the TAC 2018 Drug-Drug Interaction Extraction from
Drug Labels Track. TAC, November:1–12, 2019.
Yifan Deng, Xinran Xu, Yang Qiu, Jingbo Xia, Wen Zhang, and Shichao Liu. A
multimodal deep learning framework for predicting drug–drug interaction events.
Bioinformatics, 36(15):4316–4322, 2020.
References 419

Pascal Denis and Jason Baldridge. Specialized models and ranking for coreference
resolution. In EMNLP, pages 660–669, 2008.
Pascal Denis and Jason Baldridge. Global joint models for coreference resolution
and named entity classification. Procesamiento del lenguaje natural, 42, 2009.
Ali Derakhshan and Hamid Beigy. Sentiment analysis on stock social media for stock
price movement prediction. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence,
85:569–578, 2019.
Leon Derczynski, Eric Nichols, Marieke van Erp, and Nut Limsopatham. Results
of the wnut2017 shared task on novel and emerging entity recognition. In 3rd
Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text, pages 140–147, 2017.
Oksana Dereza. Lemmatization for ancient languages: Rules or neural networks?
In Dmitry Ustalov, Andrey Filchenkov, Lidia Pivovarova, and Jan éiûka, editors,
Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language, pages 35–47, Cham, 2018. Springer
International Publishing. ISBN 978-3-030-01204-5.
Neelmay Desai and Meera Narvekar. Normalization of noisy text data. Procedia
Computer Science, 45:127–132, 2015.
Tim Dettmers, Pasquale Minervini, Pontus Stenetorp, and Sebastian Riedel. Convo-
lutional 2d knowledge graph embeddings. In AAAI, pages 1811–1818, 2018.
Ann Devitt and Khurshid Ahmad. Sentiment polarity identification in financial
news: A cohesion-based approach. In 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of
Computational Linguistics, pages 984–991, 2007.
Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. BERT: Pre-
training of deep bidirectional Transformers for language understanding. NAACL-
HLT, 2018.
Sahraoui Dhelim, Huansheng Ning, Nyothiri Aung, Runhe Huang, and Jianhua Ma.
Personality-aware product recommendation system based on user interests mining
and metapath discovery. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 8
(1):86–98, 2020.
Sahraoui Dhelim, Nyothiri Aung, Mohammed Amine Bouras, Huansheng Ning, and
Erik Cambria. A survey on personality-aware recommendation systems. Artificial
Intelligence Review, 55:2409–2454, 2022.
Collins English Dictionary. Collins. London & Glasgow, 1982.
Oxford Dictionary. Oxford dictionary of english. Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd
edn. Oxford University Press. China Translation & Printing Services Ltd, China,
2010.
Thomas G Dietterich and Ghulum Bakiri. Solving multiclass learning problems
via error-correcting output codes. Journal of artificial intelligence research, 2:
263–286, 1994.
Eleftherios Dimitrakis, Konstantinos Sgontzos, and Yannis Tzitzikas. A survey on
question answering systems over linked data and documents. Journal of Intelligent
Information Systems, 55(2):233–259, 2020.
Xiaowen Ding and Bing Liu. Resolving object and attribute coreference in opinion
mining. In COLING, pages 268–276, 2010.
420 References

Stefanie Dipper, Anke Lüdeling, and Marc Reznicek. Nosta-d: A corpus of german
non-standard varieties. Non-standard data sources in corpus-based research, 5:
69–76, 2013.
George R Doddington, Alexis Mitchell, Mark Przybocki, Lance Ramshaw, Stephanie
Strassel, and Ralph Weischedel. The automatic content extraction (ACE)
program–tasks, data, and evaluation. In Fourth International Conference on Lan-
guage Resources and Evaluation, pages 1–4, 2004.
Ellen K Dodge, Jisup Hong, and Elise Stickles. MetaNet: Deep semantic automatic
metaphor analysis. In Third Workshop on Metaphor in NLP, pages 40–49, 2015.
Evgenia Dolgova, Woody van Olffen, Frans van den Bosch, and Henk Volberda.
The interaction between personality, social network position and involvement in
innovation process. Technical report, Erasmus Research Institute of Management,
2010.
Xin Dong, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Geremy Heitz, Wilko Horn, Ni Lao, Kevin Murphy,
Thomas Strohmann, Shaohua Sun, and Wei Zhang. Knowledge vault: A web-scale
approach to probabilistic knowledge fusion. In 20th ACM SIGKDD international
conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, pages 601–610, 2014.
Xin Luna Dong and Gerard De Melo. A helping hand: Transfer learning for deep
sentiment analysis. In ACL, pages 2524–2534, 2018.
Kevin Donnelly et al. SNOMED-CT: The advanced terminology and coding system
for ehealth. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 121:279, 2006.
Cicero Dos Santos and Bianca Zadrozny. Learning character-level representations
for part-of-speech tagging. In ICML, pages 1818–1826, 2014.
Alexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Dirk Weissenborn, Xi-
aohua Zhai, Thomas Unterthiner, Mostafa Dehghani, Matthias Minderer, Georg
Heigold, Sylvain Gelly, et al. An image is worth 16x16 words: Transformers for
image recognition at scale. In International Conference on Learning Representa-
tions, pages 1–21, 2021.
Markus Dreyer, Jason Smith, and Jason Eisner. Latent-variable modeling of string
transductions with finite-state methods. In EMNLP, pages 1080–1089, 2008.
Kelvin Du, Frank Xing, and Erik Cambria. Incorporating multiple knowledge sources
for targeted aspect-based financial sentiment analysis. ACM Transactions on
Management Information Systems, 14(3):23, 2023a.
Kelvin Du, Frank Xing, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. FinSenticNet: A concept-
level lexicon for financial sentiment analysis. In 2023 IEEE Symposium Series on
Computational Intelligence (SSCI), pages 109–114, Mexico City, Mexico, 2023b.
Kelvin Du, Rui Mao, Frank Xing, and Erik Cambria. A dynamic dual-graph neural
network for stock price movement prediction. In IJCNN, Yokohama, Japan, 2024a.
Kelvin Du, Frank Xing, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. An evaluation of reasoning
capabilities of large language models in financial sentiment analysis. In IEEE
Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 189–194, Singapore, 2024b.
Kelvin Du, Frank Xing, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. Financial sentiment analysis:
Techniques and applications. ACM Computing Surveys, 56(9):1–42, 2024c.
Mark Dunlop and Andrew Crossan. Predictive text entry methods for mobile phones.
Personal Technologies, 4:2–3, 2000.
References 421

Cuc Duong, Vethavikashini Chithrra Raghuram, Amos Lee, Rui Mao, Gianmarco
Mengaldo, and Erik Cambria. Neurosymbolic AI for mining public opinions
about wildfires. Cognitive Computation, 16(4):1531–1553, 2024.
Chris Dyer, Miguel Ballesteros, Wang Ling, Austin Matthews, and Noah A Smith.
Transition-based dependency parsing with stack long short-term memory. arXiv
preprint arXiv:1505.08075, 2015.
Philip Edmonds and Scott Cotton. SensEval-2: Overview. In SENSEVAL-2 Sec-
ond International Workshop on Evaluating Word Sense Disambiguation Systems,
pages 1–5, 2001.
Maud Ehrmann, Matteo Romanello, Sven Najem-Meyer, Antoine Doucet, and Simon
Clematide. Extended overview of HIPE-2022: Named entity recognition and
linking in multilingual historical documents. In Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro,
Allan Hanbury, and Martin Potthast, editors, Working Notes of CLEF 2022 -
Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, volume 3180, pages 1038–1063,
2022.
Ben Eisner, Tim Rocktäschel, Isabelle Augenstein, Matko Boönjak, and Sebastian
Riedel. emoji2vec: Learning emoji representations from their description. In
Fourth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media,
pages 48–54, 2016.
Christopher Ifeanyi Eke, Azah Anir Norman, Liyana Shuib, and Henry Friday
Nweke. Sarcasm identification in textual data: systematic review, research chal-
lenges and open directions. Artificial Intelligence Review, 53(6):4215–4258, 2020.
Paul Ekman and Wallace V Friesen. Facial action coding system. Environmental
Psychology & Nonverbal Behavior, 1978.
Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Abdellah El Mekki, Kabil Essefar, Nabil El Mamoun,
Ismail Berrada, and Ahmed Khoumsi. Deep multi-task model for sarcasm detec-
tion and sentiment analysis in Arabic language. In Sixth Arabic Natural Language
Processing Workshop, pages 334–339, 2021.
Jeffrey L Elman. Distributed representations, simple recurrent networks, and gram-
matical structure. Machine learning, 7(2):195–225, 1991.
Ali Emami, Adam Trischler, Kaheer Suleman, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung. A
generalized knowledge hunting framework for the Winograd schema challenge.
In NAACL, pages 25–31, 2018.
Tomaz Erjavec. The multext-east Slovene lexicon. In 7th Electrotechnical Confer-
ence ERK, Volume B, pages 189–192, 1998.
Tomaû Erjavec and Sas o Dûeroski. Machine learning of morphosyntactic structure:
Lemmatizing unknown slovene words. Applied artificial intelligence, 18(1):17–
41, 2004.
Md Shah Fahad, Ashish Ranjan, Jainath Yadav, and Akshay Deepak. A survey of
speech emotion recognition in natural environment. Digital signal processing,
110:102951, 2021.
Chunxiao Fan, Jie Lin, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. Fusing pairwise modalities for
emotion recognition in conversations. Information Fusion, 106:102306, 2024.
422 References

Rong-En Fan, Kai-Wei Chang, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Xiang-Rui Wang, and Chih-Jen Lin.
Liblinear: A library for large linear classification. the Journal of machine Learning
research, 9:1871–1874, 2008.
Irving E Fang. The “easy listening formula”. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic
Media, 11(1):63–68, 1966.
Songtao Fang, Zhenya Huang, Ming He, Shiwei Tong, Xiaoqing Huang, Ye Liu, Jie
Huang, and Qi Liu. Guided attention network for concept extraction. In Zhi-Hua
Zhou, editor, IJCAI, pages 1449–1455, 2021a.
Tianqing Fang, Weiqi Wang, Sehyun Choi, Shibo Hao, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu
Song, and Bin He. Benchmarking commonsense knowledge base population with
an effective evaluation dataset. In EMNLP, pages 8949–8964, 2021b.
Tianqing Fang, Quyet V. Do, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Y. Wong,
and Simon See. Pseudoreasoner: Leveraging pseudo labels for commonsense
knowledge base population. In EMNLP, pages 3379–3394, 2022a.
Yanbo Fang and Yongfeng Zhang. Data-efficient concept extraction from pre-trained
language models for commonsense explanation generation. In Yoav Goldberg,
Zornitsa Kozareva, and Yue Zhang, editors, EMNLP, pages 5883–5893, 2022.
Yuwei Fang, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Ruochen Xu, Siqi Sun, Chenguang
Zhu, and Michael Zeng. Leveraging knowledge in multilingual commonsense
reasoning. In ACL, pages 3237–3246, 2022b.
Umar Farooq, Tej Prasad Dhamala, Antoine Nongaillard, Yacine Ouzrout, and
Muhammad Abdul Qadir. A word sense disambiguation method for feature level
sentiment analysis. In 2015 9th International Conference on Software, Knowledge,
Information Management and Applications, pages 1–8, 2015.
Manaal Faruqui, Jesse Dodge, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Chris Dyer, Eduard H. Hovy, and
Noah A. Smith. Retrofitting word vectors to semantic lexicons. In NAACL-HLT,
pages 1606–1615, 2015.
Mehwish Fatima and Mark-Christoph Mueller. HITS-SBD at the FinSBD task:
Machine learning vs. rule-based sentence boundary detection. In First Workshop
on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing, pages 115–121, 2019.
Gilles Fauconnier. Polarity and the scale principle. Chicago, 1975a.
Gilles Fauconnier. Pragmatic scales and logical structure. Linguistic Inquiry, 6(3):
353–375, 1975b.
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and
the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. Basic Books, 2008.
William Fedus, Ian Goodfellow, and Andrew M Dai. MaskGAN: Better text gener-
ation via filling in the _. In ICLR, 2018.
Hao Fei, Donghong Ji, Bobo Li, Yijiang Liu, Yafeng Ren, and Fei Li. Rethink-
ing boundaries: End-to-end recognition of discontinuous mentions with pointer
networks. In AAAI, pages 12785–12793, 2021a.
Hao Fei, Yafeng Ren, Yue Zhang, and Donghong Ji. Nonautoregressive encoder-
decoder neural framework for end-to-end aspect-based sentiment triplet extraction.
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2021b.
References 423

Hao Fei, Han Zhang, Bin Wang, Lizi Liao, Qian Liu, and Erik Cambria. Empathyear:
An open-source avatar multimodal empathetic chatbot. In ACL, pages 61–71,
2024.
Jerome Feldman. From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language. MIT
Press, 2008.
Christiane Fellbaum. WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database (Language, Speech,
and Communication). The MIT Press, 1998.
Jinzhan Feng, Shuqin Cai, and Xiaomeng Ma. Enhanced sentiment labeling and
implicit aspect identification by integration of deep convolution neural network
and sequential algorithm. Cluster Computing, 22:5839–5857, 2019a.
Shi Feng, Lin Wang, Weili Xu, Daling Wang, and Ge Yu. Unsupervised learning
chinese sentiment lexicon from massive microblog data. In Advanced Data Mining
and Applications: 8th International Conference, ADMA 2012, Nanjing, China,
December 15-18, 2012. Proceedings 8, pages 27–38, 2012.
Xiaocheng Feng, Zhangyin Feng, Wanlong Zhao, Nan Zou, Bing Qin, and Ting Liu.
Improved neural machine translation with pos-tagging through joint decoding.
In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Communications and
Networks, pages 159–166, 2019b.
Yifan Feng, Haoxuan You, Zizhao Zhang, Rongrong Ji, and Yue Gao. Hypergraph
neural networks. In AAAI, volume 33, pages 3558–3565, 2019c.
Marco Ferrarotti, Walter Rocchia, and Sergio Decherchi. Finding principal paths in
data space. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 30(8):
2449–2462, 2019.
Kim Ferres, Timo Schloesser, and Peter A Gloor. Predicting dog emotions based on
posture analysis using deeplabcut. Future Internet, 14(4):97, 2022.
David Ferrucci and Adam Lally. UIMA: An architectural approach to unstructured
information processing in the corporate research environment. Natural Language
Engineering, 10(3-4):327–348, 2004.
Leon Festinger. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press, 1957.
ISBN 9780804709118.
Charles J Fillmore, Paul Kay, Mary C O’connor, et al. Regularity and idiomaticity
in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone. Language, 64(3):501–538,
1988.
Charles J Fillmore et al. Frame semantics. Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings,
34:373–400, 2006.
Jenny Rose Finkel and Christopher D Manning. Nested named entity recognition.
In EMNLP, pages 141–150, 2009.
Jenny Rose Finkel, Trond Grenager, and Christopher D Manning. Incorporating
non-local information into information extraction systems by Gibbs sampling. In
ACL, pages 363–370, 2005.
Lev Finkelstein, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Yossi Matias, Ehud Rivlin, Zach Solan, Gadi
Wolfman, and Eytan Ruppin. Placing search in context: the concept revisited. In
International World Wide Web Conference, WWW, pages 406–414, 2001.
John Firth. A synopsis of linguistic theory, 1930-1955. Studies in Linguistic Analysis,
pages 10–32, 1957.
424 References

Steve Fligelstone. Developing a scheme for annotating text to show anaphoric

relations. New Directions in English Language Corpora: Methodology, Results,
Software Developments, pages 153–170, 1992.
Luciano Floridi, Josh Cowls, Monica Beltrametti, Raja Chatila, Patrice Chazerand,
Virginia Dignum, Christoph Luetge, Robert Madelin, Ugo Pagallo, Francesca
Rossi, Burkhard Schafer, Peggy Valcke, and Effy Vayena. Ai4people—an ethical
framework for a good ai society: opportunities, risks, principles, and recommen-
dations. Minds Mach, 28:689–707, 2018.
Eric N Forsyth. Improving automated lexical and discourse analysis of online chat
dialog. Technical report, NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY
CA, 2007.
Davide Fossati and Barbara Di Eugenio. I saw tree trees in the park: How to correct
real-word spelling mistakes. In LREC, page 2008, 2008.
ME Francis and Roger J Booth. Linguistic inquiry and word count. Southern
Methodist University: Dallas, TX, USA, 1993.
W Nelson Francis and Henry Kucera. Brown corpus manual: Manual of information
to accompany a standard corpus of present-day edited american english for use
with digital computers. Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, 1979.
Dayne Freitag and Andrew McCallum. Information extraction with hmm structures
learned by stochastic optimization. AAAI/IAAI, 2000:584–589, 2000.
Benoît Frénay and Michel Verleysen. Reinforced extreme learning machines for fast
robust regression in the presence of outliers. IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics,
46(12):3351–3363, 2015.
Sigmund Freud. The ego and the id (1923). TACD Journal, 17(1):5–22, 1989.
Nir Friedman, Kevin P. Murphy, and Stuart Russell. Learning the structure of
dynamic probabilistic networks. In Gregory F. Cooper and Serafín Moral, editors,
UAI, pages 139–147. Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.
A Fritzler, V Logacheva, and M Kretov. Few-shot classification in named entity
recognition task. In ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pages 993–1000,
2019.
Chengpeng Fu, Jinqiang Wang, Jitao Sang, Jian Yu, and Changsheng Xu. Beyond
literal visual modeling: Understanding image metaphor based on literal-implied
concept mapping. In International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, pages
111–123, 2020a.
Sunyang Fu, David Chen, Huan He, Sijia Liu, Sungrim Moon, Kevin J Peterson,
Feichen Shen, Liwei Wang, Yanshan Wang, Andrew Wen, et al. Clinical con-
cept extraction: a methodology review. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 109:
103526, 2020b.
Zhe Fu, Xi Niu, and Mary Lou Maher. Deep learning models for serendipity
recommendations: a survey and new perspectives. ACM Computing Surveys, 56
(1):1–26, 2023.
Robert Fullér. Neural Fuzzy Systems. Citeseer, 1995.
David C Funder. The Personality Puzzle. WW Norton & Co, 1997.
References 425

Andrea Gagliano, Emily Paul, Kyle Booten, and Marti A Hearst. Intersecting word
vectors to take figurative language to new heights. In Fifth Workshop on Compu-
tational Linguistics for Literature, pages 20–31, 2016.
Ladislav Gallay and Marián äimko. Utilizing vector models for automatic text
lemmatization. In International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and
Practice of Informatics, pages 532–543, 2016.
Michel Galley, Kathleen McKeown, Julia Hirschberg, and Elizabeth Shriberg. Iden-
tifying agreement and disagreement in conversational speech: use of Bayesian
networks to model pragmatic dependencies. In ACL, pages 669–677, 2004.
Ankita Gandhi, Kinjal Adhvaryu, Soujanya Poria, Erik Cambria, and Amir Hussain.
Multimodal sentiment analysis: A systematic review of history, datasets, multi-
modal fusion methods, applications, challenges and future directions. Information
Fusion, 91:424–444, 2023.
Lisa Gandy, Nadji Allan, Mark Atallah, Ophir Frieder, Newton Howard, Sergey
Kanareykin, Moshe Koppel, Mark Last, Yair Neuman, and Shlomo Argamon.
Automatic identification of conceptual metaphors with limited knowledge. In
AAAI, pages 328–334, 2013.
Vaishali Ganganwar and R Rajalakshmi. Implicit aspect extraction for sentiment
analysis: A survey of recent approaches. Procedia Computer Science, 165:485–
491, 2019.
Aldo Gangemi, Nicola Guarino, Claudio Masolo, Alessandro Oltramari, and Luc
Schneider. Sweetening ontologies with DOLCE. In Knowledge Engineering and
Knowledge Management. Ontologies and the Semantic Web, 13th International
Conference, EKAW, volume 2473 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages
166–181, 2002.
Chen Gao, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He, and Yong Li. Graph neural networks for
recommender system. In Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search
and Data Mining, pages 1623–1625, 2022.
Jie Gao, Sooji Han, Xingyi Song, and Fabio Ciravegna. RP-DNN: A tweet level
propagation context based deep neural networks for early rumor detection in social
media. In LREC, pages 6094–6105, Marseille, France, May 2020. European
Language Resources Association. ISBN 979-10-95546-34-4.
Lei Gao, Yulong Wang, Tongcun Liu, Jingyu Wang, Lei Zhang, and Jianxin Liao.
Question-driven span labeling model for aspect–opinion pair extraction. In AAAI,
pages 12875–12883, 2021a.
Tianyu Gao, Adam Fisch, and Danqi Chen. Making pre-trained language models
better few-shot learners. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages 3816–3830, 2021b.
Peter Gardenfors. Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought. MIT Press, 2004.
Alan Garnham. Mental Models and the Interpretation of Anaphora. Psychology
Press, 2001.
Mengshi Ge, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. Explainable metaphor identification
inspired by conceptual metaphor theory. AAAI, 36(10):10681–10689, 2022.
Mengshi Ge, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. A survey on computational metaphor pro-
cessing techniques: From identification, interpretation, generation to application.
Artificial Intelligence Review, 56:1829–1895, 2023.
426 References

Niyu Ge, John Hale, and Eugene Charniak. A statistical approach to anaphora
resolution. In Sixth workshop on very large corpora, pages 161–170, 1998.
Sebastian Gehrmann, Franck Dernoncourt, Yeran Li, Eric T Carlson, Joy T Wu,
Jonathan Welt, John Foote Jr, Edward T Moseley, David W Grant, Patrick D
Tyler, et al. Comparing deep learning and concept extraction based methods for
patient phenotyping from clinical narratives. PloS one, 13(2):e0192360, 2018.
Daniela Gerz, Ivan Vulic, Felix Hill, Roi Reichart, and Anna Korhonen. Simverb-
3500: A large-scale evaluation set of verb similarity. In EMNLP, pages 2173–2182,
2016.
Andrea Gesmundo and Tanja Samardzic. Lemmatisation as a tagging task. In ACL,
pages 368–372, 2012.
Mor Geva, Daniel Khashabi, Elad Segal, Tushar Khot, Dan Roth, and Jonathan
Berant. Did aristotle use a laptop? A question answering benchmark with im-
plicit reasoning strategies. Transactions of the Association for Computational
Linguistics, 9:346–361, 2021.
Abbas Ghaddar and Philippe Langlais. WikiCoref: An English coreference-
annotated corpus of wikipedia articles. In Tenth International Conference on
Language Resources and Evaluation, pages 136–142, 2016.
Deepanway Ghosal, Devamanyu Hazarika, Abhinaba Roy, Navonil Majumder, Rada
Mihalcea, and Soujanya Poria. Kingdom: Knowledge-guided domain adaptation
for sentiment analysis. In ACL, pages 3198–3210, 2020.
Debanjan Ghosh, Alexander Richard Fabbri, and Smaranda Muresan. The role of
conversation context for sarcasm detection in online interactions. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1707.06226, 2017.
Raymond W Gibbs Jr. A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said
and implicated. Journal of pragmatics, 34(4):457–486, 2002.
Edward Gibson. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cogni-
tion, 68(1):1–76, 1998.
Alastair Gill, Scott Nowson, and Jon Oberlander. What are they blogging about?
personality, topic and motivation in blogs. In International AAAI Conference on
Web and Social Media, pages 18–25, 2009.
Dan Gillick. Sentence boundary detection and the problem with the US. In NAACL-
HLT, pages 241–244, 2009.
Jesús Giménez and Lluís Màrquez. SVMTool: A general POS tagger generator based
on support vector machines. In Fourth International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04), 2004.
Jesús Giménez and Lluis Marquez. Fast and accurate part-of-speech tagging: The
SVM approach revisited. RANLP, pages 153–162, 2004.
Kevin Gimpel, Nathan Schneider, Brendan O’Connor, Dipanjan Das, Daniel Mills,
Jacob Eisenstein, Michael Heilman, Dani Yogatama, Jeffrey Flanigan, and Noah A
Smith. Part-of-speech tagging for twitter: Annotation, features, and experiments.
Technical report, Carnegie-Mellon Univ Pittsburgh Pa School of Computer Sci-
ence, 2010.
References 427

Christian Girardi, Manuela Speranza, Rachele Sprugnoli, and Sara Tonelli. Cromer:
A tool for cross-document event and entity coreference. In LREC, pages 3204–
3208, 2014.
Njagi Dennis Gitari, Zhang Zuping, Hanyurwimfura Damien, and Jun Long. A
lexicon-based approach for hate speech detection. International Journal of Mul-
timedia and Ubiquitous Engineering, 10(4):215–230, 2015.
Talmy Givón. Topic continuity in discourse: The functional domain of switch
reference. Switch reference and universal grammar, 51:82, 1983.
Alec Go, Richa Bhayani, and Lei Huang. Twitter sentiment classification using
distant supervision. CS224N project report, Stanford, 1(12):2009, 2009.
Andrew Goatly. Washing the brain: Metaphor and hidden ideology, volume 23.
John Benjamins Publishing, 2007.
Vinod Goel, Gorka Navarrete, Ira A Noveck, and Jérôme Prado. The reasoning
brain: The interplay between cognitive neuroscience and theories of reasoning,
2017.
Adele Goldberg and Laura Suttle. Construction grammar. Wiley Interdisciplinary
Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1(4):468–477, 2010.
Lewis R Goldberg. Language and individual differences: The search for universals in
personality lexicons. Review of personality and social psychology, 2(1):141–165,
1981.
Lewis R Goldberg. Standard markers of the Big-Five factor structure. In First
International Workshop on Personality Language, 1989.
Julio Gonzalo, Felisa Verdejo, Irina Chugur, and Juan Cigarran. Indexing with
WordNet synsets can improve text retrieval. In Usage of WordNet in Natural
Language Processing Systems, pages 38–44, 1998.
Julio Gonzalo, Anselmo Penas, and Felisa Verdejo. Lexical ambiguity and informa-
tion retrieval revisited. In EMNLP-VLC, pages 195–202, 1999.
Samuel D Gosling, Peter J Rentfrow, and William B Swann Jr. A very brief measure
of the big-five personality domains. Journal of Research in personality, 37(6):
504–528, 2003.
Yoshihiko Gotoh and Steve Renals. Sentence boundary detection in broadcast speech
transcripts. In ASR2000-Automatic Speech Recognition, 2000.
Alex Graves and Jürgen Schmidhuber. Framewise phoneme classification with
bidirectional LSTM and other neural network architectures. Neural Networks, 18
(5-6):602–610, 2005.
Alex Graves, Abdel-rahman Mohamed, and Geoffrey Hinton. Speech recognition
with deep recurrent neural networks. In 2013 IEEE international conference on
acoustics, speech and signal processing, pages 6645–6649, 2013.
Gregory Grefenstette and Pasi Tapanainen. What is a word, what is a sentence?:
Problems of tokenisation. Report, Grenoble Laboratory, 1994.
Denis Griffis, Chaitanya Shivade, Eric Fosler-Lussier, and Albert M. Lai. A quan-
titative and qualitative evaluation of sentence boundary detection for the clinical
domain. AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science, pages 88–97, 2016.
Ralph Grishman and Beth M Sundheim. Message understanding conference-6: A
brief history. In COLING, pages 466–471, 1996.
428 References

Barbara J. Grosz, Aravind K. Joshi, and Scott Weinstein. Providing a unified account
of definite noun phrases in discourse. In ACL, pages 44–50, 1983.
Barbara J. Grosz, Aravind K. Joshi, and Scott Weinstein. Centering: A framework
for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21(2):
203–225, 1995.
Barbara Jean Grosz. The Representation and Use of Focus in Dialogue Understand-
ing. University of California, Berkeley, 1977.
Adam J Grove and Dan Roth. Linear concepts and hidden variables. Machine
Learning, 42(1-2):123–141, 2001.
Rosanna E Guadagno, Bradley M Okdie, and Cassie A Eno. Who blogs? Personality
predictors of blogging. Computers in human behavior, 24(5):1993–2004, 2008.
Nicola Guarino. Formal ontology, conceptual analysis and knowledge representation.
International journal of human-computer studies, 43(5-6):625–640, 1995.
Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Haoran Huang, Minlong Peng, and Xuanjing Huang. Part-of-
speech tagging for twitter with adversarial neural networks. In EMNLP, pages
2411–2420, 2017.
Liane Guillou. Improving pronoun translation for statistical machine translation. In
EACL, pages 1–10, 2012.
Jeanette K Gundel, Nancy Hedberg, and Ron Zacharski. Cognitive status and the
form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, pages 274–307, 1993.
Honey Gupta, Aveena Kottwani, Soniya Gogia, and Sheetal Chaudhari. Text analysis
and information retrieval of text data. In WiSPNET, pages 788–792, 2016a.
Pankaj Gupta, Hinrich Schütze, and Bernt Andrassy. Table filling multi-task recur-
rent neural network for joint entity and relation extraction. In COLING, pages
2537–2547, 2016b.
Harsha Gurulingappa, Abdul Mateen Rajput, Angus Roberts, Juliane Fluck, Martin
Hofmann-Apitius, and Luca Toldo. Development of a benchmark corpus to sup-
port the automatic extraction of drug-related adverse effects from medical case
reports. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 45(5):885–892, 2012.
Dario Gutierrez, Ekaterina Shutova, Tyler Marghetis, and Benjamin Bergen. Literal
and metaphorical senses in compositional distributional semantic models. In ACL,
pages 183–193, 2016.
Christian Hadiwinoto, Hwee Tou Ng, and Wee Chung Gan. Improved word sense dis-
ambiguation using pre-trained contextualized word representations. In EMNLP-
IJCNLP, pages 5297–5306, 2019.
Aria Haghighi and Dan Klein. Simple coreference resolution with rich syntactic and
semantic features. In EMNLP, pages 1152–1161, 2009.
Zhen Hai, Kuiyu Chang, and Gao Cong. One seed to find them all: Mining opinion
features via association. In CIKM, pages 255–264, 2012.
Jan Haji , Massimiliano Ciaramita, Richard Johansson, Daisuke Kawahara,
Maria Antònia Martí, Lluís Màrquez, Adam Meyers, Joakim Nivre, Sebastian
Padó, Jan ät pánek, Pavel Stra ák, Mihai Surdeanu, Nianwen Xue, and Yi Zhang.
The CoNLL-2009 shared task: Syntactic and semantic dependencies in multiple
languages. In CoNLL, pages 1–18, 2009.
References 429

Péter Halácsy and V Trón. Benefits of deep NLP-based lemmatization for informa-
tion retrieval. In CLEF (Working Notes), 2006.
Guy Halawi, Gideon Dror, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, and Yehuda Koren. Large-scale
learning of word relatedness with constraints. In ACM SIGKDD International
Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pages 1406–1414, 2012.
Jeffrey A Hall, Jess Dominguez, and Teodora Mihailova. Interpersonal media and
face-to-face communication: Relationship with life satisfaction and loneliness.
Journal of Happiness Studies, 24(1):331–350, 2023.
Bo Han and Timothy Baldwin. Lexical normalisation of short text messages: Makn
sens a# twitter. In ACL-HLT, pages 368–378, 2011.
Na-Rae Han. Korean zero pronouns: analysis and resolution. University of Penn-
sylvania, 2006.
Sooji Han, Jie Gao, and Fabio Ciravegna. Neural language model based training data
augmentation for weakly supervised early rumor detection. In 2019 IEEE/ACM
International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining,
pages 105–112, 2019.
Sooji Han, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. Hierarchical attention network for explain-
able depression detection on Twitter aided by metaphor concept mappings. In
COLING, pages 94–104, 2022a.
Xu Han, Weilin Zhao, Ning Ding, Zhiyuan Liu, and Maosong Sun. PTR: Prompt
tuning with rules for text classification. AI Open, 3:182–192, 2022b.
Sanda M. Harabagiu and Steven J. Maiorano. Knowledge-lean coreference reso-
lution and its relation to textual cohesion and coherence. In The Relation of
Discourse/Dialogue Structure and Reference, pages 29–38, 1999.
Sanda M. Harabagiu, Razvan C. Bunescu, and Steven J. Maiorano. Text and knowl-
edge mining for coreference resolution. In NAACL, pages 1–8, 2001.
Jaron Harambam, Dimitrios Bountouridis, Mykola Makhortykh, and Joris
Van Hoboken. Designing for the better by taking users into account: A quali-
tative evaluation of user control mechanisms in (news) recommender systems. In
13th ACM conference on recommender systems, pages 69–77, 2019.
Christian Hardmeier and Marcello Federico. Modelling pronominal anaphora in
statistical machine translation. In IWSLT (International Workshop on Spoken
Language Translation); Paris, France; December 2nd and 3rd, 2010., pages 283–
289, 2010.
Peter E Hart, Nils J Nilsson, and Bertram Raphael. A formal basis for the heuristic
determination of minimum cost paths. IEEE transactions on Systems Science and
Cybernetics, 4(2):100–107, 1968.
Md Rajibul Hasan, Ashish Kumar Jha, and Yi Liu. Excessive use of online video
streaming services: Impact of recommender system use, psychological factors,
and motives. Computers in Human Behavior, 80:220–228, 2018.
Laura Hasler, Constantin Orǎsan, and Karin Naumann. NPs for events: Experi-
ments in coreference annotation. In Fifth International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), pages 1167–1172, 2006.
Catherine Havasi and Robert Speer. ConceptNet 3: A flexible, multilingual semantic
network for common sense knowledge. In RANLP, pages 27–29, 2007.
430 References

Taher H Haveliwala. Topic-sensitive PageRank. In 11th International Conference

on World Wide Web, pages 517–526, 2002.
Kai He, Na Hong, Samuel Lapalme-Remis, Yangyang Lan, Ming Huang, Chen
Li, and Lixia Yao. Understanding the patient perspective of epilepsy treatment
through text mining of online patient support groups. Epilepsy & Behavior, 94:
65–71, 2019a.
Kai He, Jialun Wu, Xiaoyong Ma, Chong Zhang, Ming Huang, Chen Li, and Lixia
Yao. Extracting kinship from obituary to enhance electronic health records for ge-
netic research. In Fourth social media mining for health applications (# SMM4H)
workshop & shared task, pages 1–10, 2019b.
Kai He, Lixia Yao, JiaWei Zhang, Yufei Li, Chen Li, et al. Construction of genealogi-
cal knowledge graphs from obituaries: Multitask neural network extraction system.
Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(8):e25670, 2021.
Kai He, Bing Mao, Xiangyu Zhou, Yufei Li, Tieliang Gong, Chen Li, and Jialun
Wu. Knowledge enhanced coreference resolution via gated attention. In 2022
IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), pages
2287–2293, 2022a.
Kai He, Rui Mao, Tieliang Gong, Erik Cambria, and Chen Li. JCBIE: a joint
continual learning neural network for biomedical information extraction. BMC
Bioinformatics, 23(1):1–20, 2022b.
Kai He, Yucheng Huang, Rui Mao, Tieliang Gong, Chen Li, and Erik Cambria. Vir-
tual prompt pre-training for prototype-based few-shot relation extraction. Expert
Systems With Applications, 213:118927, 2023a.
Kai He, Rui Mao, Tieliang Gong, Chen Li, and Erik Cambria. Meta-based self-
training and re-weighting for aspect-based sentiment analysis. IEEE Transactions
on Affective Computing, 14(3):1731–1742, 2023b.
Kai He, Rui Mao, Qika Lin, Yucheng Ruan, Xiang Lan, Mengling Feng, and Erik
Cambria. A survey of large language models for healthcare: From data, technology,
and applications to accountability and ethics. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.05694,
2023c.
Kai He, Rui Mao, Yucheng Huang, Tieliang Gong, Chen Li, and Erik Cambria.
Template-free prompting for few-shot named entity recognition via semantic-
enhanced contrastive learning. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learn-
ing Systems, 2024a.
Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun. Deep residual learn-
ing for image recognition. In IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern
recognition, pages 770–778, 2016.
Ruidan He, Wee Sun Lee, Hwee Tou Ng, and Daniel Dahlmeier. An interactive
multi-task learning network for end-to-end aspect-based sentiment analysis. In
ACL, pages 504–515, 2019c.
Xinyue He, Qi Liu, and Sunho Jung. The impact of recommendation system on
user satisfaction: A moderated mediation approach. Journal of Theoretical and
Applied Electronic Commerce Research, 19(1):448–466, 2024b.
Yulan He. Bayesian models for sentence-level subjectivity detection. Technical
report, Knowledge Media Institute, 2010.
References 431

Irene Roswitha Heim. The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Amherst, 1982.
Sigrún Helgadóttir. Icelandic frequency dictionary 2012.11-training/testing sets,
2012.
Mohammad Helmi and Seyed Mohammad T AlModarresi. Human activity recog-
nition using a fuzzy inference system. In 2009 IEEE International Conference on
Fuzzy Systems, pages 1897–1902, 2009.
Iris Hendrickx, Gosse Bouma, Frederik Coppens, Walter Daelemans, Veronique
Hoste, Geert Kloosterman, Anne-Marie Mineur, Joeri Van Der Vloet, and Jean-
Luc Verschelde. A coreference corpus and resolution system for Dutch. In Sixth
International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pages 1–6,
2008.
Sam Henry, Kevin Buchan, Michele Filannino, Amber Stubbs, and Ozlem Uzuner.
2018 n2c2 shared task on adverse drug events and medication extraction in elec-
tronic health records. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association,
27(1):3–12, 2020.
María Herrero-Zazo, Isabel Segura-Bedmar, Paloma Martínez, and Thierry De-
clerck. The DDI corpus: An annotated corpus with pharmacological substances
and drug-drug interactions. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 46(5):914–920,
2013.
Clara E Hill. Helping skills: Facilitating, exploration, insight, and action. American
Psychological Association, 2009.
Felix Hill, Roi Reichart, and Anna Korhonen. Simlex-999: Evaluating semantic
models with (genuine) similarity estimation. Computational Linguistics, 41(4):
665–695, 2015.
Dustin Hillard, Mari Ostendorf, and Elizabeth Shriberg. Detection of agreement vs.
disagreement in meetings: Training with unlabeled data. In HLT-NAACL, pages
34–36, 2003.
Geoffrey E Hinton, Nitish Srivastava, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Ruslan R
Salakhutdinov. Improving neural networks by preventing co-adaptation of feature
detectors. arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.0580, pages 1–18, 2012.
JA Hirsch, G Nicola, G McGinty, RW Liu, RM Barr, MD Chittle, and L Manchikanti.
ICD-10: history and context. American Journal of Neuroradiology, 37(4):596–
599, 2016.
Lynette Hirschman and Nancy Chinchor. Appendix F: MUC-7 coreference task
definition (version 3.0). In Seventh Message Understanding Conference (MUC-
7), pages 1–17, 1998.
Lynette Hirschman, Patricia Robinson, John Burger, and Marc Vilain. Automating
coreference: The role of annotated training data. In AAAI Spring Symposium on
Applying Machine Learning to Discourse Processing, pages 118–121, 1997.
Janet Hitzeman, Alan W Black, Paul Taylor, Chris Mellish, and Jon Oberlander. On
the use of automatically generated discourse-level information in a concept-to-
speech synthesis system. In 5th International Conference on Spoken Language
Processing, pages 2763–2766, 1998.
432 References

Seng-Beng Ho, Zhaoxia Wang, Boon-Kiat Quek, and Erik Cambria. Knowledge
representation for conceptual, motivational, and affective processes in natural
language communication. In BICS, volume 14374, pages 14–30, 2023.
Shuk Ying Ho and Kai H Lim. Nudging moods to induce unplanned purchases in
imperfect mobile personalization contexts. Mis Quarterly, 42(3):757–A13, 2018.
Jerry R Hobbs. Resolving pronoun references. Lingua, 44(4):311–338, 1978.
Jerry R. Hobbs, Mark Stickel, Paul Martin, and Douglas Edwards. Interpretation as
abduction. In ACL, pages 95–103, 1988.
Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber. Long short-term memory. Neural com-
putation, 9(8):1735–1780, 1997.
Jack Hoeksema. On the grammaticalization of negative polarity items. In Annual
Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pages 273–282, 1994.
Patrick Hohenecker, Frank Mtumbuka, Vid Kocijan, and Thomas Lukasiewicz. Sys-
tematic comparison of neural architectures and training approaches for open in-
formation extraction. In EMNLP, pages 8554–8565, 2020.
John H Holland. Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems: An Introductory
Analysis with Applications to Biology, Control, and Artificial Intelligence. MIT
press, 1992.
Janusz A Ho≥yst, Philipp Mayr, Michael Thelwall, Ingo Frommholz, Shlomo Havlin,
Alon Sela, Yoed N Kenett, Denis Helic, Aljoöa Rehar, Sebastijan R Ma ek, Prze-
mys≥aw Kazienko, Tomasz Kajdanowicz, Przemys≥aw Biecek, Boleslaw K. Szy-
manski, and Julian Sienkiewicz. Protect our environment from information over-
load. Nature Human Behaviour, pages 1–2, 2024.
Vincent Homer. Domains of polarity items. Journal of Semantics, 38(1):1–48, 2021.
Albert Sydney Hornby and Anthony P Cowie. Oxford advanced learner’s dictionary
of current english. Paperback,, 1974.
David W. Hosmer and Stanley Lemeshow. Applied Logistic Regression. Wiley, 2
edition, 2000.
Yufang Hou, Katja Markert, and Michael Strube. Unrestricted bridging resolution.
Computational Linguistics, 44(2):237–284, 2018.
Eduard Hovy, Mitch Marcus, Martha Palmer, Lance Ramshaw, and Ralph
Weischedel. Ontonotes: the 90% solution. In human language technology confer-
ence of the NAACL, Companion Volume: Short Papers, pages 57–60, 2006.
Newton Howard and Erik Cambria. Intention awareness: Improving upon situa-
tion awareness in human-centric environments. Human-centric Computing and
Information Sciences, 3(9), 2013.
Jeff Howe. Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of
Business. Random House, 2008.
Pei-Yun Hsueh, Prem Melville, and Vikas Sindhwani. Data quality from crowd-
sourcing: A study of annotation selection criteria. In NAACL HLT 2009 Workshop
on Active Learning for Natural Language Processing, pages 27–35, 2009.
Jiawei Hu, Zheng Li, and Bin Xu. An approach of ontology based knowledge base
construction for chinese k12 education. In 2016 First International Conference
on Multimedia and Image Processing (ICMIP), pages 83–88, 2016.
References 433

Minghao Hu, Yuxing Peng, Zhen Huang, Dongsheng Li, and Yiwei Lv. Open-
domain targeted sentiment analysis via span-based extraction and classification.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.03820, 2019.
Minqing Hu and Bing Liu. Mining and summarizing customer reviews. In tenth
ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining,
pages 168–177, 2004.
Renqing Hu and Xue Wang. A cognitive pragmatic analysis of conceptual metaphor
in political discourse based on text data mining. In 2021 4th International Con-
ference on Information Systems and Computer Aided Education, pages 235–238,
2021.
Hu Huang, Bowen Zhang, Liwen Jing, Xianghua Fu, Xiaojun Chen, and Jianyang
Shi. Logic tensor network with massive learned knowledge for aspect-based
sentiment analysis. Knowledge-Based Systems, 257:109943, 2022a.
James Huang. On the distribution and reference of empty pronouns. Linguistic
Inquiry, pages 531–574, 1984.
Lishan Huang, Zheng Ye, Jinghui Qin, Liang Lin, and Xiaodan Liang. GRADE:
Automatic graph-enhanced coherence metric for evaluating open-domain dialogue
systems. In EMNLP, pages 9230–9240, 2020a.
Luyao Huang, Chi Sun, Xipeng Qiu, and Xuan-Jing Huang. GlossBERT: BERT
for word sense disambiguation with gloss knowledge. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages
3509–3514, 2019a.
Minghui Huang, Haoran Xie, Yanghui Rao, Jingrong Feng, and Fu Lee Wang. Sen-
timent strength detection with a context-dependent lexicon-based convolutional
neural network. Information Sciences, 520:389–399, 2020b.
Xiaoqing Huang, Qi Liu, Chao Wang, Haoyu Han, Jianhui Ma, Enhong Chen,
Yu Su, and Shijin Wang. Constructing educational concept maps with multiple
relationships from multi-source data. In Jianyong Wang, Kyuseok Shim, and
Xindong Wu, editors, ICDM, pages 1108–1113. IEEE, 2019b.
Yucheng Huang, Kai He, Yige Wang, Xianli Zhang, Tieliang Gong, Rui Mao, and
Chen Li. COPNER: Contrastive learning with prompt guiding for few-shot named
entity recognition. In COLING, pages 2515–2527, 2022b.
Zhiheng Huang, Wei Xu, and Kai Yu. Bidirectional LSTM-CRF models for sequence
tagging. arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.01991, 2015.
Christoph Hube and Besnik Fetahu. Detecting biased statements in Wikipedia. In
Web Conference, pages 1779–1786, 2018.
Christoph Hube and Besnik Fetahu. Neural based statement classification for biased
language. In Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data
Mining, pages 195–203, 2019.
Anette Hulth. Improved automatic keyword extraction given more linguistic knowl-
edge. In EMNLP, pages 1–8, 2003.
Chihli Hung and Shiuan-Jeng Chen. Word sense disambiguation based sentiment
lexicons for sentiment classification. Knowledge-Based Systems, 110:224–232,
2016.
434 References

Chihli Hung and Hao-Kai Lin. Using objective words in SentiWordNet to improve
word-of-mouth sentiment classification. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 28(02):47–54,
2013.
Hairong Huo and Mizuho Iwaihara. Utilizing BERT pretrained models with various
fine-tune methods for subjectivity detection. In Asia-Pacific Web (APWeb) and
Web-Age Information Management (WAIM) Joint International Conference on
Web and Big Data, pages 270–284, 2020.
Jena D. Hwang, Chandra Bhagavatula, Ronan Le Bras, Jeff Da, Keisuke Sakaguchi,
Antoine Bosselut, and Yejin Choi. Comet-atomic 2020: On symbolic and neural
commonsense knowledge graphs. In AAAI, 2020.
Ignacio Iacobacci, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, and Roberto Navigli. Embeddings
for word sense disambiguation: An evaluation study. In ACL, pages 897–907,
2016.
Francisco Iacobelli, Alastair J Gill, Scott Nowson, and Jon Oberlander. Large scale
personality classification of bloggers. In Affective Computing and Intelligent
Interaction: Fourth International Conference, ACII 2011, Memphis, TN, USA,
October 9–12, 2011, Proceedings, Part II, pages 568–577, 2011.
Nancy Ide and Jean Véronis. Multext: Multilingual text tools and corpora. In
COLING, 1994.
Ryu Iida and Massimo Poesio. A cross-lingual ilp solution to zero anaphora resolu-
tion. In ACL-HLT, pages 804–813, 2011.
Ryu Iida, Kentaro Inui, and Yuji Matsumoto. Zero-anaphora resolution by learning
rich syntactic pattern features. ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information
Processing, 6(4):1–22, 2007a.
Ryu Iida, Mamoru Komachi, Kentaro Inui, and Yuji Matsumoto. Annotating a
Japanese text corpus with predicate-argument and coreference relations. In Lin-
guistic Annotation Workshop, pages 132–139, 2007b.
Filip Ilievski, Alessandro Oltramari, Kaixin Ma, Bin Zhang, Deborah L. McGuin-
ness, and Pedro A. Szekely. Dimensions of commonsense knowledge. Knowledge-
Based Systems, 229:107347, 2021a.
Filip Ilievski, Pedro A. Szekely, and Bin Zhang. CSKG: the commonsense knowledge
graph. In Semantic Web - 18th International Conference, ESWC, volume 12731
of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 680–696, 2021b.
Ali Shariq Imran, Sher Muhammad Daudpota, Zenun Kastrati, and Rakhi Batra.
Cross-cultural polarity and emotion detection using sentiment analysis and deep
learning on COVID-19 related tweets. Ieee Access, 8:181074–181090, 2020.
Andrea Iovine, Fedelucio Narducci, and Giovanni Semeraro. Conversational recom-
mender systems and natural language:: A study through the converse framework.
Decision Support Systems, 131:113250, 2020.
Hideki Isozaki and Tsutomu Hirao. Japanese zero pronoun resolution based on
ranking rules and machine learning. In EMNLP, pages 184–191, 2003.
Michael Israel. Polarity sensitivity as lexical semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy,
pages 619–666, 1996.
Ray Jackendoff. Toward an explanatory semantic representation. Linguistic inquiry,
7(1):89–150, 1976.
References 435

Ray S Jackendoff et al. Semantics and Cognition. The MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1983.
Vincent Jahjah, Richard Khoury, and Luc Lamontagne. Word normalization using
phonetic signatures. In Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages
180–185, 2016.
Niklas Jakob and Iryna Gurevych. Using anaphora resolution to improve opinion
target identification in movie reviews. In ACL, pages 263–268, 2010a.
Niklas Jakob and Iryna Gurevych. Extracting opinion targets in a single and cross-
domain setting with conditional random fields. In EMNLP, pages 1035–1045,
2010b.
Bernard J Jansen. Understanding user-web interactions via web analytics. Springer
Nature, 2022.
Bernard J Jansen, Soon-Gyo Jung, Lene Nielsen, Kathleen W Guan, and Joni Salmi-
nen. How to create personas: Three persona creation methodologies with im-
plications for practical employment. Pacific Asia Journal of the Association for
Information Systems, 14(3):1, 2022a.
Bernard J Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, and Kathleen Guan. Data-driven
personas. Springer Nature, 2022b.
Bernard J Jansen, Soon-gyo Jung, and Joni Salminen. Employing large language
models in survey research. Natural Language Processing Journal, 4:100020,
2023.
Lei Ji, Yujing Wang, Botian Shi, Dawei Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, and Jun Yan.
Microsoft concept graph: Mining semantic concepts for short text understanding.
Data Intelligence, 1(3):238–270, 2019.
Shaoxiong Ji, Xue Li, Zi Huang, and Erik Cambria. Suicidal ideation and men-
tal disorder detection with attentive relation networks. Neural Computing and
Applications, 34(13):10309–10319, 2022.
Sittichai Jiampojamarn, Grzegorz Kondrak, and Tarek Sherif. Applying many-to-
many alignments and hidden markov models to letter-to-phoneme conversion. In
ACL-HLT, pages 372–379, 2007.
Sittichai Jiampojamarn, Colin Cherry, and Grzegorz Kondrak. Integrating joint
n-gram features into a discriminative training framework. In HLT-ACL, pages
697–700, 2010.
Julie Jiang, Xiang Ren, and Emilio Ferrara. Retweet-BERT: Political leaning detec-
tion using language features and information diffusion on social networks. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2207.08349, 2022.
Qingnan Jiang, Lei Chen, Ruifeng Xu, Xiang Ao, and Min Yang. A challenge dataset
and effective models for aspect-based sentiment analysis. In EMNLP-IJCNLP,
pages 6280–6285, 2019.
Tianwen Jiang, Qingkai Zeng, Tong Zhao, Bing Qin, Ting Liu, Nitesh V Chawla, and
Meng Jiang. Biomedical knowledge graphs construction from conditional state-
ments. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics,
18(3):823–835, 2020.
436 References

Wei Jiang, Hao Pan, and Qing Ye. An improved association rule mining approach
to identification of implicit product aspects. The Open Cybernetics & Systemics
Journal, 8(1), 2014.
Mu Jin, Zhihao Ma, Kebing Jin, Hankz Hankui Zhuo, Chen Chen, and Chao Yu.
Creativity of AI: Automatic symbolic option discovery for facilitating deep rein-
forcement learning. In AAAI, pages 7042–7050, 2022.
Wei Jin, Hung Hay Ho, and Rohini K Srihari. OpinionMiner: A novel machine
learning system for web opinion mining and extraction. In 15th ACM SIGKDD
International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pages 1195–
1204, 2009.
Hongyan Jing, Daniel Lopresti, and Chilin Shih. Summarization of noisy documents:
a pilot study. In HLT-NAACL 03 Text Summarization Workshop, pages 25–32,
2003.
Ni Jinjie, Pandelea Vlad, Young Tom, Zhou Haicang, and Cambria Erik. HiTKG:
Towards goal-oriented conversations via multi-hierarchy learning. In AAAI, pages
11112–11120, 2022.
Yohan Jo and Alice H Oh. Aspect and sentiment unification model for online
review analysis. In fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and
Data Mining, pages 815–824, 2011.
Thorsten Joachims. Optimizing search engines using clickthrough data. In eighth
ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining,
pages 133–142, 2002.
O John, E Donahue, and R Kentle. The Big Five inventory-versions 4a and 54.
Berkeley, CA: University of California. Berkeley, Institute of Personality and
Social Research, 1991.
Alistair Johnson, Tom J Pollard, Lu Shen, H Lehman Li-Wei, Mengling Feng, Mo-
hammad Ghassemi, Benjamin Moody, Peter Szolovits, Leo Anthony Celi, and
Roger G Mark. Mimic-iii, a freely accessible critical care database. Scientific
data, 3(1):1–9, 2016.
Daniel Johnson and John Gardner. Personality, motivation and video games. In
22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of
Australia on Computer-Human Interaction, pages 276–279, 2010.
Kyle Johnson. Gapping. The Blackwell companion to syntax, pages 407–435, 2006.
Mark Johnson. The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination,
and reason. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47(4), 1989.
Rie Johnson and Tong Zhang. A high-performance semi-supervised learning method
for text chunking. In ACL, pages 1–9, 2005.
Karen Sparck Jones. A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application
in retrieval. Journal of documentation, 1972.
Bart Jongejan and Hercules Dalianis. Automatic training of lemmatization rules
that handle morphological changes in pre-, in-and suffixes alike. In ACL-IJCNLP,
pages 145–153, 2009.
Greety Jose and Nisha S Raj. Lexico-syntactic normalization model for noisy
SMS text. In 2014 International Conference on Electronics, Communication and
Computational Engineering (ICECCE), pages 163–168, 2014.
References 437

Aditya Joshi, Vaibhav Tripathi, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, and Mark James Carman.
Harnessing sequence labeling for sarcasm detection in dialogue from TV series
‘friends’. In CoNLL, pages 146–155, 2016.
Aravind K Joshi and Steve Kuhn. Centered logic: The role of entity centered sentence
representation in natural language inferencing. In IJCAI, pages 435–439, 1979.
Mandar Joshi, Eunsol Choi, Daniel Weld, and Luke Zettlemoyer. TriviaQA: A large
scale distantly supervised challenge dataset for reading comprehension. In ACL,
pages 1601–1611, 2017.
Mandar Joshi, Omer Levy, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Daniel Weld. BERT for corefer-
ence resolution: Baselines and analysis. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages 5803–5808,
2019.
Mandar Joshi, Danqi Chen, Yinhan Liu, Daniel S. Weld, Luke Zettlemoyer, and
Omer Levy. SpanBERT: Improving pre-training by representing and predicting
spans. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 8:64–77,
2020.
Armand Joulin, Edouard Grave, Piotr Bojanowski, Matthijs Douze, Hérve Jégou,
and Tomas Mikolov. [Link]: Compressing text classification models. arXiv
preprint arXiv:1612.03651, 2016.
Armand Joulin, Edouard Grave, Piotr Bojanowski, and Tomás Mikolov. Bag of tricks
for efficient text classification. In Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, and Alexander
Koller, editors, EACL, pages 427–431, 2017.
John Judge, Aoife Cahill, and Josef van Genabith. QuestionBank: Creating a corpus
of parse-annotated questions. In ACL, pages 497–504, 2006.
Carl Jung and John Beebe. Psychological types. Routledge, 2016.
Matjaû Juröi , Igor Mozeti , and Nada Lavra . Learning ripple down rules for
efficient lemmatization. In 10th international multiconference information society,
IS, pages 206–209, 2007.
Nirit Kadmon and Fred Landman. Any. Linguistics and Philosophy, pages 353–422,
1993.
Mikael Kågebäck and Hans Salomonsson. Word sense disambiguation using a bidi-
rectional LSTM. In 5th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-
V), pages 51–56, 2016.
Nal Kalchbrenner, Edward Grefenstette, and Phil Blunsom. A convolutional neural
network for modelling sentences. In ACL, pages 655–665, 2014.
Ahmad Kamal. Subjectivity classification using machine learning techniques for
mining feature-opinion pairs from web opinion sources. International Journal of
Computer Science Issues, 10(5):191, 2013.
Ashraf Kamal and Muhammad Abulaish. CAT-BiGRU: Convolution and attention
with bi-directional gated recurrent unit for self-deprecating sarcasm detection.
Cognitive Computation, 14(1):91–109, 2022.
Subbarao Kambhampati, Karthik Valmeekam, Lin Guan, Mudit Verma, Kaya
Stechly, Siddhant Bhambri, Lucas Saldyt, and Anil Murthy. LLMs can’t plan, but
can help planning in LLM-Modulo frameworks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.01817,
2024.
438 References

Megumi Kameyama. Zero Anaphora: The Case of Japanese (Discourse Aanalysis,

Pronouns, Sytax, Computational Llinguistics, Typology). Stanford University,
1985.
Megumi Kameyama. Recognizing referential links: an information extraction pre-
spective. In Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for
Unrestricted Texts, pages 46–53, 1997.
Aida-zade Kamil, Samir Rustamov, Mark A Clements, and Elshan Mustafayev.
Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system for classification of texts. In Recent Devel-
opments and the New Direction in Soft-Computing Foundations and Applications,
pages 63–70. Springer, 2018.
Hans Kamp and Uwe Reyle. From discourse to logic: Introduction to modeltheoretic
semantics of natural language, formal logic and discourse representation theory,
volume 42. Springer Science & Business Media, 2013.
Jaap Kamps, Maarten Marx, Robert J Mokken, Maarten De Rijke, et al. Using
WordNet to measure semantic orientations of adjectives. In Lrec, volume 4, pages
1115–1118, 2004.
Suvarna G Kanakaraddi and Suvarna S Nandyal. Survey on parts of speech tag-
ger techniques. In 2018 International Conference on Current Trends towards
Converging Technologies (ICCTCT), pages 1–6, 2018.
Jakub Kanis and Lud k Müller. Automatic lemmatizer construction with focus on
OOV words lemmatization. In International Conference on Text, Speech and
Dialogue, pages 132–139, 2005.
Jakub Kanis and Lucie Skorkovská. Comparison of different lemmatization ap-
proaches through the means of information retrieval performance. In Petr Sojka,
Aleö Horák, Ivan Kope ek, and Karel Pala, editors, Text, Speech and Dialogue,
pages 93–100, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. ISBN 978-
3-642-15760-8.
Samaneh Karimi and Azadeh Shakery. A language-model-based approach for sub-
jectivity detection. Journal of Information Science, 43(3):356–377, 2017.
Shubhra Kanti Karmaker Santu, Parikshit Sondhi, and ChengXiang Zhai. Generative
feature language models for mining implicit features from customer reviews. In
CIKM, pages 929–938, 2016.
RV Karthik and Sannasi Ganapathy. A fuzzy recommendation system for predicting
the customers interests using sentiment analysis and ontology in e-commerce.
Applied Soft Computing, 108:107396, 2021.
Brijesh S. Bhatt Kartik Detroja, C.K. Bhensdadia. A survey on relation extraction.
Intelligent Systems with Applications, 2023.
Gabriele Kasper and Richard Schmidt. Developmental issues in interlanguage prag-
matics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18(2):149–169, 1996.
Arzoo Katiyar and Claire Cardie. Nested named entity recognition revisited. In
NAACL-HLT, pages 861–871, 2018.
Albert N Katz and Christopher J Lee. The role of authorial intent in determining
verbal irony and metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol, 8(4):257–279, 1993.
References 439

Max Kaufmann and Jugal Kalita. Syntactic normalization of twitter messages.

In International conference on natural language processing, Kharagpur, India,
volume 16, 2010.
Vishal Kaushal and Manasi Patwardhan. Emerging trends in personality identifi-
cation using online social networks—a literature survey. ACM Transactions on
Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), 12(2):1–30, 2018.
Paul Kay. Even. Linguistics and Philosophy, 13:59–111, 1990.
Mahmut Kaya and Hasan akir Bilge. Deep metric learning: A survey. Symmetry,
11(9):1066, 2019.
Amirmohammad Kazemeini, Sudipta Singha Roy, Robert E Mercer, and Erik Cam-
bria. Interpretable representation learning for personality detection. In ICDM
Workshops, pages 158–165, 2021.
Przemys≥aw Kazienko and Erik Cambria. Towards responsible recommender sys-
tems. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 39(3):5–12, 2024.
Guolin Ke, Qi Meng, Thomas Finley, Taifeng Wang, Wei Chen, Weidong Ma, Qiwei
Ye, and Tie-Yan Liu. Lightgbm: A highly efficient gradient boosting decision tree.
NeurIPS, 30:3146–3154, 2017.
Sedrick Scott Keh, I Cheng, et al. Myers-briggs personality classification and
personality-specific language generation using pre-trained language models. arXiv
preprint arXiv:1907.06333, 2019.
Andrew Kehler. Current theories of centering for pronoun interpretation: A critical
evaluation. Computational linguistics, 23(3):467–475, 1997.
Elma Kerz, Yu Qiao, Sourabh Zanwar, and Daniel Wiechmann. SPADE: A Big
Five-mturk dataset of argumentative speech enriched with socio-demographics
for personality detection. In LREC, pages 6405–6419, 2022.
Tanya Keshari and Suja Palaniswamy. Emotion recognition using feature-level
fusion of facial expressions and body gestures. In 2019 International Conference
on Communication and Electronics Systems (ICCES), pages 1184–1189, 2019.
HR Keshavarz and M Saniee Abadeh. MHSubLex: Using metaheuristic methods
for subjectivity classification of microblogs. Journal of AI and data mining, 6(2):
341–353, 2018.
Mike Kestemont, Guy De Pauw, Renske van Nie, and Walter Daelemans. Lemma-
tization for variation-rich languages using deep learning. Digital Scholarship in
the Humanities, 32(4):797–815, 2017.
Mitesh Khapra, Anup Kulkarni, Saurabh Sohoney, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. All
words domain adapted WSD: Finding a middle ground between supervision and
unsupervision. In ACL, pages 1532–1541, 2010.
Aparup Khatua, Erik Cambria, Shirley S Ho, and Jin Cheon Na. Deciphering public
opinion of nuclear energy on Twitter. In IJCNN, pages 1–8, 2020.
Mikhail Khodak, Nikunj Saunshi, and Kiran Vodrahalli. A large self-annotated
corpus for sarcasm. In Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources
and Evaluation (LREC 2018), pages 641–646, 2018.
Richard Khoury. Phonetic normalization of microtext. In 2015 IEEE/ACM Inter-
national Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2015,
pages 1600–1601, 2015.
440 References

Adam Kilgarriff and Martha Palmer. Introduction to the special issue on senseval.
Computers and the Humanities, 34(1):1–13, 2000.
A Kim, Hyun-Je Song, Seong-Bae Park, et al. A two-step neural dialog state tracker
for task-oriented dialog processing. Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience,
2018:1–12, 2018.
J-D Kim, Tomoko Ohta, Yuka Tateisi, and Jun’ichi Tsujii. Genia corpus—a se-
mantically annotated corpus for bio-textmining. Bioinformatics, 19(suppl_1):
i180–i182, 2003.
Jeong-Dong Kim, Jiseong Son, and Doo-Kwon Baik. CA 5W1H onto: ontological
context-aware model based on 5W1H. International Journal of Distributed Sensor
Networks, 8(3):247346, 2012.
Sang-Bum Kim, Hee-Cheol Seo, and Hae-Chang Rim. Information retrieval using
word senses: root sense tagging approach. In 27th Annual International ACM
SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages
258–265, 2004.
Soo-Min Kim and Eduard Hovy. Determining the sentiment of opinions. In COLING,
pages 1367–1373, 2004.
Soo-Min Kim and Eduard Hovy. Automatic detection of opinion bearing words and
sentences. In Companion Volume to the Proceedings of Conference including
Posters/Demos and tutorial abstracts, pages 61–66, 2005.
Soo-Min Kim and Eduard Hovy. Identifying and analyzing judgment opinions. In
NAACL-HLT, pages 200–207, 2006.
Su Nam Kim, Olena Medelyan, Min-Yen Kan, and Timothy Baldwin. Semeval-2010
task 5: Automatic keyphrase extraction from scientific articles. In Katrin Erk and
Carlo Strapparava, editors, 5th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation,
pages 21–26, 2010.
Yoon Kim. Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. In EMNLP,
pages 1746–1751, 2014.
Yoon Kim, Yacine Jernite, David Sontag, and Alexander M Rush. Character-aware
neural language models. In AAAI, 2016.
Barbara Ann Kipfer. Roget’s 21st century thesaurus in dictionary form (Third
Edition). Bantam Dell, New York, NY, 2006.
Christo Kirov, Ryan Cotterell, John Sylak-Glassman, Géraldine Walther, Ekaterina
Vylomova, Patrick Xia, Manaal Faruqui, Sabrina J Mielke, Arya D McCarthy,
Sandra Kübler, et al. Unimorph 2.0: universal morphology. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1810.11101, 2018.
Yuval Kirstain, Ori Ram, and Omer Levy. Coreference resolution without span
representations. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages 14–19, 2021.
Tibor Kiss and Jan Strunk. Viewing sentence boundary detection as collocation
identification. In KONVENS, volume 2002, pages 75–82, 2002.
Tibor Kiss and Jan Strunk. Unsupervised multilingual sentence boundary detection.
Computational Linguistics, 32(4):485–525, 2006.
Günter Klambauer, Thomas Unterthiner, Andreas Mayr, and Sepp Hochreiter. Self-
normalizing neural networks. In 31st international conference on neural infor-
mation processing systems, pages 972–981, 2017.
References 441

Jan-Christoph Klie, Michael Bugert, Beto Boullosa, Richard Eckart de Castilho, and
Iryna Gurevych. The INCEpTION platform: Machine-assisted and knowledge-
oriented interactive annotation. In COLING, pages 5–9, 2018.
Benjamin C. Knoll, Elizabeth A. Lindemann, Arian L. Albert, Genevieve B. Melton,
and Serguei V. S. Pakhomov. Recurrent deep network models for clinical nlp tasks:
Use case with sentence boundary disambiguation. Studies in health technology
and informatics, 264(31437913):198–202, 2019.
Nozomi Kobayashi, Kentaro Inui, and Yuji Matsumoto. Extracting aspect-evaluation
and aspect-of relations in opinion mining. In EMNLP-CoNLL, pages 1065–1074,
2007.
Vid Kocijan, Oana-Maria Camburu, Ana-Maria Cretu, Yordan Yordanov, Phil Blun-
som, and Thomas Lukasiewicz. WikiCREM: A large unsupervised corpus for
coreference resolution. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages 4303–4312, 2019.
Philipp Koehn, Hieu Hoang, Alexandra Birch, Chris Callison-Burch, Marcello Fed-
erico, Nicola Bertoldi, Brooke Cowan, Wade Shen, Christine Moran, Richard
Zens, et al. Moses: Open source toolkit for statistical machine translation. In
ACL, pages 177–180, 2007.
Rob Koeling. Chunking with maximum entropy models. In Fourth Conference on
Computational Natural Language Learning and the Second Learning Language
in Logic Workshop, 2000.
Keshav Kolluru, Vaibhav Adlakha, Samarth Aggarwal, Soumen Chakrabarti, et al.
OpenIE6: Iterative grid labeling and coordination analysis for open information
extraction. In EMNLP, pages 3748–3761, 2020.
Dan Kondratyuk. Cross-lingual lemmatization and morphology tagging with two-
stage multilingual BERT fine-tuning. In 16th Workshop on Computational Re-
search in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 12–18, 2019.
Dan Kondratyuk and Milan Straka. 75 languages, 1 model: Parsing universal depen-
dencies universally. arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.02099, 2019.
Daniel Kondratyuk, Tomáö Gaven iak, Milan Straka, and Jan Haji . Lemmatag:
Jointly tagging and lemmatizing for morphologically-rich languages with BRNNs.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.03703, 2018.
Fang Kong and Guodong Zhou. A tree kernel-based unified framework for Chinese
zero anaphora resolution. In EMNLP, pages 882–891, 2010.
Prahlad Koratamaddi, Karan Wadhwani, Mridul Gupta, and Sriram G Sanjeevi.
Market sentiment-aware deep reinforcement learning approach for stock portfolio
allocation. Engineering Science and Technology, an International Journal, 24(4):
848–859, 2021.
Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel. Private traits and attributes
are predictable from digital records of human behavior. National Academy of
Sciences, 110(15):5802–5805, 2013.
Ronak Kosti, Jose M Alvarez, Adria Recasens, and Agata Lapedriza. Context based
emotion recognition using emotic dataset. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis
and Machine Intelligence, 42(11):2755–2766, 2019.
442 References

Martin Krallinger, Obdulia Rabal, Anália Lourenço, Julen Oyarzabal, and Alfonso
Valencia. Information Retrieval and Text Mining Technologies for Chemistry.
Chemical Reviews, 117(12):7673–7761, 2017.
Mikalai Krapivin, Aliaksandr Autaeu, and Maurizio Marchese. Large dataset for
keyphrases extraction. Technical report, University of Trento, 2009.
Roger J Kreuz and Sam Glucksberg. How to be sarcastic: The echoic reminder
theory of verbal irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118(4):
374, 1989.
Manfred Krifka. Some remarks on polarity items. Semantic Universals and Universal
Semantics, pages 150–189, 1992.
Manfred Krifka. The semantics and pragmatics of weak and strong polarity items in
assertions. In Semantics and Linguistic Theory, volume 4, pages 195–219, 1994.
Saul A Kripke. Naming and necessity. In Semantics of natural language, pages
253–355. Springer, 1972.
Ranjay Krishna, Yuke Zhu, Oliver Groth, Justin Johnson, Kenji Hata, Joshua Kravitz,
Stephanie Chen, Yannis Kalantidis, Li-Jia Li, David A. Shamma, Michael S.
Bernstein, and Li Fei-Fei. Visual genome: Connecting language and vision us-
ing crowdsourced dense image annotations. International Journal of Computer
Vision, 123(1):32–73, 2017.
Paul R Kroeger. Analyzing Meaning: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics.
Language Science Press, 2023.
Joshua Krook and Jan Blockx. Recommender systems, autonomy and user engage-
ment. In First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems,
pages 1–9, 2023.
Robert Krovetz and W Bruce Croft. Lexical ambiguity and information retrieval.
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 10(2):115–141, 1992.
Lun-Wei Ku, Yu-Ting Liang, and Hsin-Hsi Chen. Opinion extraction, summarization
and tracking in news and blog corpora. In AAAI, pages 100–107, 2006.
Sandra Kübler and Desislava Zhekova. Singletons and coreference resolution eval-
uation. In RANLP, pages 261–267, 2011.
Taku Kudo and Yuji Matsumoto. Use of support vector learning for chunk identifi-
cation. In Fourth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning and
the Second Learning Language in Logic Workshop, 2000.
Brian Kulis et al. Metric learning: A survey. Foundations and Trends® in Machine
Learning, 5(4):287–364, 2013.
Akshi Kumar, Shubham Dikshit, and Victor Hugo C Albuquerque. Explainable
artificial intelligence for sarcasm detection in dialogues. Wireless Communications
and Mobile Computing, 2021, 2021.
Sawan Kumar, Sharmistha Jat, Karan Saxena, and Partha Talukdar. Zero-shot word
sense disambiguation using sense definition embeddings. In ACL, pages 5670–
5681, 2019a.
Sudhanshu Kumar, Mahendra Yadava, and Partha Pratim Roy. Fusion of EEG re-
sponse and sentiment analysis of products review to predict customer satisfaction.
Information Fusion, 52:41–52, 2019b.
References 443

Ziva Kunda. The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3):480,
1990.
Florian Kunneman, Christine Liebrecht, Margot Van Mulken, and Antal Van den
Bosch. Signaling sarcasm: From hyperbole to hashtag. Information Processing
& Management, 51(4):500–509, 2015.
Yen-Ling Kuo, Jong-Chuan Lee, Kai-yang Chiang, Rex Wang, Edward Shen, Cheng-
wei Chan, and Jane Yung-jen Hsu. Community-based game design: experiments
on social games for commonsense data collection. In ACM SIGKDD Workshop
on Human Computation, pages 15–22, 2009.
Julian Kupiec. Robust part-of-speech tagging using a hidden markov model. Com-
puter Speech & Language, 6(3):225–242, 1992.
Onur Kuru, Ozan Arkan Can, and Deniz Yuret. CharNER: Character-level named
entity recognition. In COLING, pages 911–921, 2016.
John Lafferty and Chengxiang Zhai. Document language models, query models, and
risk minimization for information retrieval. In 24th Annual International ACM
SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages
111–119, 2001.
John D. Lafferty, Andrew McCallum, and Fernando C. N. Pereira. Conditional
random fields: Probabilistic models for segmenting and labeling sequence data.
In ICML, ICML ’01, pages 282–289, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2001. Morgan
Kaufmann Publishers Inc. ISBN 1558607781.
Brenden M Lake, Tomer D Ullman, Joshua B Tenenbaum, and Samuel J Gershman.
Building machines that learn and think like people. Behavioral and brain sciences,
40:e253, 2017.
George Lakoff. Master Metaphor List. University of California, 1994.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live by. University of Chicago
press, 1980.
Guillaume Lample and François Charton. Deep learning for symbolic mathematics.
In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2019.
Zhenzhong Lan, Mingda Chen, Sebastian Goodman, Kevin Gimpel, Piyush Sharma,
and Radu Soricut. Albert: A lite bert for self-supervised learning of language
representations. In International Conference on Learning Representations, pages
1–17, 2020.
Mark J Landau, Brian P Meier, and Lucas A Keefer. A metaphor-enriched social
cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 136(6):1045, 2010.
Lukas Lange, Heike Adel, and Jannik Strötgen. Closing the gap: Joint de-
identification and concept extraction in the clinical domain. In Dan Jurafsky,
Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, and Joel R. Tetreault, editors, ACL, pages 6945–
6952, 2020.
Joseph LaPorte. Rigid designators for properties. Philosophical Studies, 130(2):
321–336, 2006.
Shalom Lappin and Herbert J Leass. An algorithm for pronominal anaphora resolu-
tion. Computational Linguistics, 20(4):535–561, 1994.
444 References

Christine Largeron, Christophe Moulin, and Mathias Géry. Entropy based feature
selection for text categorization. In 2011 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing,
pages 924–928, 2011.
Ida Unmack Larsen, Tua Vinther-Jensen, Anders Gade, Jørgen Erik Nielsen, and
Asmus Vogel. Do I misconstrue? Sarcasm detection, emotion recognition, and
theory of mind in Huntington disease. Neuropsychology, 30(2):181, 2016.
Siddique Latif, Rajib Rana, Sara Khalifa, Raja Jurdak, Junaid Qadir, and Bjoern W
Schuller. Survey of deep representation learning for speech emotion recognition.
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2021.
Minh Le, Marten Postma, Jacopo Urbani, and Piek Vossen. A deep dive into word
sense disambiguation with lstm. In COLING, pages 354–365, 2018.
Thi Thuy Le, Thanh Hung Vo, Duc Trung Mai, Than Tho Quan, and Tuoi Thi Phan.
Sentiment analysis using anaphoric coreference resolution and ontology inference.
In International Workshop on Multi-disciplinary Trends in Artificial Intelligence,
pages 297–303, 2016.
Ronan Le Nagard and Philipp Koehn. Aiding pronoun translation with co-reference
resolution. In Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and Met-
ricsMATR, pages 252–261, 2010.
Claudia Leacock, Geoffrey Towell, and Ellen M Voorhees. Corpus-based statistical
sense resolution. In HLT, pages 260–265, 1993.
Yann LeCun, Léon Bottou, Yoshua Bengio, and Patrick Haffner. Gradient-based
learning applied to document recognition. IEEE, 86(11):2278–2324, 1998.
Bongseok Lee and Yong Suk Choi. Graph based network with contextualized
representations of turns in dialogue. In EMNLP, pages 443–455, 2021.
Heeyoung Lee, Angel Chang, Yves Peirsman, Nathanael Chambers, Mihai Surdeanu,
and Dan Jurafsky. Deterministic coreference resolution based on entity-centric,
precision-ranked rules. Computational Linguistics, 39(4):885–916, 2013.
Heeyoung Lee, Mihai Surdeanu, and Dan Jurafsky. A scaffolding approach to coref-
erence resolution integrating statistical and rule-based models. Natural Language
Engineering, 23(5):733–762, 2017a.
Joosung Lee and Wooin Lee. CoMPM: Context modeling with speaker’s pre-trained
memory tracking for emotion recognition in conversation. In NAACL-HLT, pages
5669–5679, 2022.
Kenton Lee, Luheng He, Mike Lewis, and Luke Zettlemoyer. End-to-end neural
coreference resolution. In EMNLP, pages 188–197, 2017b.
Kenton Lee, Luheng He, and Luke Zettlemoyer. Higher-order coreference resolution
with coarse-to-fine inference. In NAACL-HLT, pages 687–692, 2018.
Young-Suk Lee and Laurence Horn. Any as indefinite plus even. Manuscript, Yale
University, 1994.
Yue-Shi Lee and Yu-Chieh Wu. A robust multilingual portable phrase chunking
system. Expert Systems with Applications, 33(3):590–599, 2007.
Samuel Leeman-Munk, James Lester, and James Cox. Ncsu_sas_sam: Deep encod-
ing and reconstruction for normalization of noisy text. In Workshop on Noisy
User-generated Text, pages 154–161, 2015.
References 445

Douglas B. Lenat. CYC: A large-scale investment in knowledge infrastructure.

Communications of The ACM, 38(11):32–38, 1995.
Michael Lesk. Automatic sense disambiguation using machine readable dictionaries:
how to tell a pine cone from an ice cream cone. In 5th Annual International
Conference on Systems Documentation, pages 24–26, 1986.
Hector J. Levesque. The winograd schema challenge. In Logical Formalizations
of Commonsense Reasoning, Papers from the 2011 AAAI Spring Symposium,
Technical Report SS-11-06, pages 1–1, 2011.
Hector J Levesque, Ernest Davis, and Leora Morgenstern. The Winograd schema
challenge. In Thirteenth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge
Representation and Reasoning, pages 552–561, 2012.
Mike Lewis, Yinhan Liu, Naman Goyal, Marjan Ghazvininejad, Abdelrahman Mo-
hamed, Omer Levy, Veselin Stoyanov, and Luke Zettlemoyer. BART: Denoising
sequence-to-sequence pre-training for natural language generation, translation,
and comprehension. In ACL, pages 7871–7880, 2020.
Baoli Li, Yandong Liu, and Eugene Agichtein. CoCQA: Co-training over questions
and answers with an application to predicting question subjectivity orientation. In
EMNLP, pages 937–946, 2008a.
Baoli Li, Yandong Liu, Ashwin Ram, Ernest V Garcia, and Eugene Agichtein.
Exploring question subjectivity prediction in community qa. In 31st Annual In-
ternational ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information
Retrieval, pages 735–736, 2008b.
Chen Li and Yang Liu. Normalization of text messages using character-and phone-
based machine translation approaches. In Thirteenth Annual Conference of the
International Speech Communication Association, 2012.
Chen Li, Marco Donizelli, Nicolas Rodriguez, Harish Dharuri, Lukas Endler, Vi-
jayalakshmi Chelliah, Lu Li, Enuo He, Arnaud Henry, Melanie I Stefan, et al.
BioModels database: An enhanced, curated and annotated resource for published
quantitative kinetic models. BMC Systems Biology, 4(1):1–14, 2010.
Chen Li, Xiangdong Xu, Guanghua Zhou, Kai He, Tianliang Qi, Wei Zhang, Feng
Tian, Qinghua Zheng, Jianping Hu, et al. Implementation of national health
informatization in China: Survey about the status quo. JMIR Medical Informatics,
7(1):e12238, 2019a.
Chengxi Li, Feiyu Gao, Jiajun Bu, Lu Xu, Xiang Chen, Yu Gu, Zirui Shao,
Qi Zheng, Ningyu Zhang, Yongpan Wang, et al. Sentiprompt: Sentiment knowl-
edge enhanced prompt-tuning for aspect-based sentiment analysis. arXiv preprint
arXiv:2109.08306, 2021a.
Chuang Li, Hengchang Hu, Yan Zhang, Min-Yen Kan, and Haizhou Li. A conver-
sation is worth a thousand recommendations: A survey of holistic conversational
recommender systems. Knowledge-aware and Conversational Recommender Sys-
tems, 3560:7–20, 2023a.
Fei Li, Meishan Zhang, Guohong Fu, and Donghong Ji. A neural joint model for
entity and relation extraction from biomedical text. BMC Bioinformatics, 18(1):
1–11, 2017a.
446 References

Feng-Lin Li, Hehong Chen, Guohai Xu, Tian Qiu, Feng Ji, Ji Zhang, and Haiqing
Chen. AliMeKG: Domain knowledge graph construction and application in e-
commerce. In 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge
Management, pages 2581–2588, 2020a.
Hongsong Li, Kenny Q Zhu, and Haixun Wang. Data-driven metaphor recognition
and explanation. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
1:379–390, 2013.
Jiangnan Li, Zheng Lin, Peng Fu, and Weiping Wang. Past, present, and future:
Conversational emotion recognition through structural modeling of psychological
knowledge. In EMNLP, pages 1204–1214, 2021b.
Jing Li, Aixin Sun, Jianglei Han, and Chenliang Li. A survey on deep learning for
named entity recognition. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineer-
ing, 34(1):50–70, 2020b.
Keqian Li, Hanwen Zha, Yu Su, and Xifeng Yan. Concept mining via embedding.
In ICDM, pages 267–276, 2018a.
Linfeng Li, Peng Wang, Jun Yan, Yao Wang, Simin Li, Jinpeng Jiang, Zhe Sun,
Buzhou Tang, Tsung-Hui Chang, Shenghui Wang, et al. Real-world data med-
ical knowledge graph: construction and applications. Artificial Intelligence in
Medicine, 103:101817, 2020c.
Ning Li, Chi-Yin Chow, and Jia-Dong Zhang. Emova: A semi-supervised end-
to-end moving-window attentive framework for aspect mining. In Advances in
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 24th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD
2020, Singapore, May 11–14, 2020, Proceedings, Part II 24, pages 811–823,
2020d.
Peng Li and Heng Huang. UTA DLNLP at semeval-2016 task 12: Deep learning
based natural language processing system for clinical information identification
from clinical notes and pathology reports. In Steven Bethard, Daniel M. Cer,
Marine Carpuat, David Jurgens, Preslav Nakov, and Torsten Zesch, editors, 10th
International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 1268–1273, 2016.
Qing Li, Siyuan Huang, Yining Hong, Yixin Chen, Ying Nian Wu, and Song-Chun
Zhu. Closed loop neural-symbolic learning via integrating neural perception,
grammar parsing, and symbolic reasoning. In ICML, pages 5884–5894, 2020e.
Wei Li, Kun Guo, Yong Shi, Luyao Zhu, and Yuanchun Zheng. Dwwp: Domain-
specific new words detection and word propagation system for sentiment analysis
in the tourism domain. Knowledge-Based Systems, 146:203–214, 2018b.
Wei Li, Luyao Zhu, Yong Shi, Kun Guo, and Erik Cambria. User reviews: Senti-
ment analysis using lexicon integrated two-channel CNN-LSTM family models.
Applied Soft Computing, 94:106435, 2020f.
Wei Li, Luyao Zhu, and Erik Cambria. Taylor’s theorem: A new perspective for
neural tensor networks. Knowledge-Based Systems, 228:107258, 2021c.
Wei Li, Wei Shao, Shaoxiong Ji, and Erik Cambria. BiERU: Bidirectional emotional
recurrent unit for conversational sentiment analysis. Neurocomputing, 467:73–82,
2022.
References 447

Wei Li, Luyao Zhu, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. SKIER: A symbolic knowledge
integrated model for conversational emotion recognition. In AAAI, pages 13121–
13129, 2023b.
Xiaoya Li, Jingrong Feng, Yuxian Meng, Qinghong Han, Fei Wu, and Jiwei Li. A
unified MRC framework for named entity recognition. In ACL, pages 5849–5859,
2020g.
Xin Li, Lidong Bing, Piji Li, and Wai Lam. A unified model for opinion target
extraction and target sentiment prediction. In AAAI, pages 6714–6721, 2019b.
Xiujun Li, Yun-Nung Chen, Lihong Li, Jianfeng Gao, and Asli Celikyilmaz. End-
to-end task-completion neural dialogue systems. In IJCNLP, pages 733–743,
2017b.
Yang Li, Kangbo Liu, Ranjan Satapathy, Suhang Wang, and Erik Cambria. Recent
developments in recommender systems: A survey. IEEE Computational Intelli-
gence Magazine, 19(2):78–95, 2024.
Yufei Li, Xiaoyong Ma, Xiangyu Zhou, Pengzhen Cheng, Kai He, and Chen Li.
Knowledge enhanced lstm for coreference resolution on biomedical texts. Bioin-
formatics, 37(17):2699–2705, 2021d.
Zisheng Li, Jun-ichi Imai, and Masahide Kaneko. Facial-component-based bag
of words and phog descriptor for facial expression recognition. In 2009 IEEE
International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, pages 1353–1358,
2009.
Bin Liang, Chenwei Lou, Xiang Li, Min Yang, Lin Gui, Yulan He, Wenjie Pei, and
Ruifeng Xu. Multi-modal sarcasm detection via cross-modal graph convolutional
network. In ACL, pages 1767–1777, 2022a.
Bin Liang, Hang Su, Lin Gui, Erik Cambria, and Ruifeng Xu. Aspect-based sen-
timent analysis via affective knowledge enhanced graph convolutional networks.
Knowledge-Based Systems, 235:107643, 2022b.
Bin Liang, Lin Gui, Yulan He, Erik Cambria, and Ruifeng Xu. Fusion and dis-
crimination: A multimodal graph contrastive learning framework for multimodal
sarcasm detection. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 15, 2024.
Tyne Liang and Dian-Song Wu. Automatic pronominal anaphora resolution in
English texts. In Research on Computational Linguistics Conference, pages 111–
127, 2003.
Yu Liang and Martijn C Willemsen. Promoting music exploration through person-
alized nudging in a genre exploration recommender. International Journal of
Human–Computer Interaction, 39(7):1495–1518, 2023.
Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Jinchao Zhang, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, and Jie
Zhou. An iterative multi-knowledge transfer network for aspect-based sentiment
analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.01935, 2020.
Jian Liao, Suge Wang, and Deyu Li. Identification of fact-implied implicit sentiment
based on multi-level semantic fused representation. Knowledge-Based Systems,
165:197–207, 2019.
Jian Liao, Min Wang, Xin Chen, Suge Wang, and Kai Zhang. Dynamic commonsense
knowledge fused method for Chinese implicit sentiment analysis. Information
Processing & Management, 59(3):102934, 2022.
448 References

Rensis Likert. A technique for the measurement of attitudes. Archives of Psychology,

1932.
Chenghua Lin, Yulan He, and Richard Everson. Sentence subjectivity detection with
weakly-supervised learning. In IJCNLP, pages 1153–1161, 2011.
Jerry Chun-Wei Lin, Yinan Shao, Ji Zhang, and Unil Yun. Enhanced sequence
labeling based on latent variable conditional random fields. Neurocomputing,
403:431–440, 2020.
Wang Ling, Chris Dyer, Alan W Black, and Isabel Trancoso. Two/too simple
adaptations of word2vec for syntax problems. In ACL-HLT, pages 1299–1304,
2015a.
Wang Ling, Tiago Luís, Luís Marujo, Ramón Fernandez Astudillo, Silvio Amir,
Chris Dyer, Alan W Black, and Isabel Trancoso. Finding function in form:
Compositional character models for open vocabulary word representation. arXiv
preprint arXiv:1508.02096, 2015b.
Yan Ling, Jianfei Yu, and Rui Xia. Vision-language pre-training for multimodal
aspect-based sentiment analysis. In ACL, pages 2149–2159, 2022.
Carolyn E Lipscomb. Medical subject headings (MeSH). Bulletin of the Medical
Library Association, 88(3):265, 2000.
Seymour Martin Lipset. The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in
the Public Mind. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Ken Litkowski. SensEval-3 task: Word sense disambiguation of wordnet glosses. In
SENSEVAL-3, the Third International Workshop on the Evaluation of Systems for
the Semantic Analysis of Text, pages 13–16, 2004.
Nick Littlestone. Learning quickly when irrelevant attributes abound: A new linear-
threshold algorithm. Machine learning, 2(4):285–318, 1988.
Bing Liu et al. Sentiment analysis and subjectivity. Handbook of Natural Language
Processing, 2(2010):627–666, 2010.
Chia-Wei Liu, Ryan Lowe, Iulian Vlad Serban, Mike Noseworthy, Laurent Charlin,
and Joelle Pineau. How not to evaluate your dialogue system: An empirical study
of unsupervised evaluation metrics for dialogue response generation. In PEMNLP,
pages 2122–2132, 2016.
Emmy Liu, Chen Cui, Kenneth Zheng, and Graham Neubig. Testing the ability of
language models to interpret figurative language. arXiv e-prints, pages arXiv–
2204, 2022a.
Fei Liu, Fuliang Weng, Bingqing Wang, and Yang Liu. Insertion, deletion, or sub-
stitution? normalizing text messages without pre-categorization nor supervision.
In ACL-HLT, pages 71–76, 2011.
Fei Liu, Fuliang Weng, and Xiao Jiang. A broad-coverage normalization system for
social media language. In ACL, pages 1035–1044, 2012.
Fei Liu, Julien Perez, and Scott Nowson. A language-independent and compositional
model for personality trait recognition from short texts. In EACL, pages 754–764,
2017a.
Frederick Liu, Han Lu, and Graham Neubig. Handling homographs in neural ma-
chine translation. In NAACL-HLT, pages 1336–1345, 2018a.
References 449

Haochen Liu, Jamell Dacon, Wenqi Fan, Hui Liu, Zitao Liu, and Jiliang Tang.
Does gender matter? towards fairness in dialogue systems. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1910.10486, 2019a.
Jian Liu, Zhiyang Teng, Leyang Cui, Hanmeng Liu, and Yue Zhang. Solving
aspect category sentiment analysis as a text generation task. arXiv preprint
arXiv:2110.07310, 2021a.
Jing Liu, Yue Wang, Lihua Huang, Chenghong Zhang, and Songzheng Zhao. Iden-
tifying adverse drug reaction-related text from social media: A multi-view active
learning approach with various document representations. Information, 13(4):
189, 2022b.
Jingping Liu, Tao Chen, Chao Wang, Jiaqing Liang, Lihan Chen, Yanghua Xiao,
Yunwen Chen, and Ke Jin. Vocsk: Verb-oriented commonsense knowledge mining
with taxonomy-guided induction. Artificial Intelligence, 310:103744, 2022c.
Pan Liu, Yanming Guo, Fenglei Wang, and Guohui Li. Chinese named entity
recognition: The state of the art. Neurocomputing, 473:37–53, 2022d.
Peng Liu, Wei Chen, Gaoyan Ou, Tengjiao Wang, Dongqing Yang, and Kai Lei.
Sarcasm detection in social media based on imbalanced classification. In In-
ternational Conference on Web-Age Information Management, pages 459–471,
2014.
Qi Liu, Zai Huang, Zhenya Huang, Chuanren Liu, Enhong Chen, Yu Su, and Guoping
Hu. Finding similar exercises in online education systems. In Yike Guo and Faisal
Farooq, editors, SIGKDD, pages 1821–1830, 2018b.
Qian Liu, Heyan Huang, Guangquan Zhang, Yang Gao, Junyu Xuan, and Jie Lu.
Semantic structure-based word embedding by incorporating concept convergence
and word divergence. In AAAI, pages 5261–5268, 2018c.
Qian Liu, Rui Mao, Xiubo Geng, and Erik Cambria. Semantic matching in ma-
chine reading comprehension: An empirical study. Information Processing &
Management, 60(2):103145, 2023a.
Qian Liu, Xiubo Geng, Yu Wang, Erik Cambria, and Daxin Jiang. Disentangled
retrieval and reasoning for implicit question answering. IEEE Transactions on
Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 35(6):7804–7815, 2024a.
Qian Liu, Sooji Han, Yang Li, Erik Cambria, and Kenneth Kwok. PrimeNet: A
framework for commonsense knowledge representation and reasoning based on
conceptual primitives. Cognitive Computation, 2024b.
Ruicheng Liu, Guanyi Chen, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. A multi-task learning
model for gold-two-mention co-reference resolution. In IJCNN, pages 1–8, 2023b.
Ruicheng Liu, Rui Mao, Anh Tuan Luu, and Erik Cambria. A brief survey on
advances in coreference resolution. Artificial Intelligence Review, 56:14439–
14481, 2023c.
Siyang Liu, Chujie Zheng, Orianna Demasi, Sahand Sabour, Yu Li, Zhou Yu, Yong
Jiang, and Minlie Huang. Towards emotional support dialog systems. In ACL-
IJCNLP, pages 3469–3483, 2021b.
Ting Liu, Yiming Cui, Qingyu Yin, Wei-Nan Zhang, Shijin Wang, and Guoping
Hu. Generating and exploiting large-scale pseudo training data for zero pronoun
resolution. In ACL, pages 102–111, 2017b.
450 References

Xiao Liu, Yanan Zheng, Zhengxiao Du, Ming Ding, Yujie Qian, Zhilin Yang, and
Jie Tang. GPT understands, too. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.10385, 2021c.
Xiao Liu, Kaixuan Ji, Yicheng Fu, Weng Tam, Zhengxiao Du, Zhilin Yang, and Jie
Tang. P-tuning: Prompt tuning can be comparable to fine-tuning across scales and
tasks. In ACL, pages 61–68, 2022e.
Xiaodong Liu, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, and Jianfeng Gao. Multi-task deep
neural networks for natural language understanding. In ACL, pages 4487–4496,
2019b.
Yang Liu, Andreas Stolcke, Elizabeth Shriberg, and Mary Harper. Comparing
and combining generative and posterior probability models: Some advances in
sentence boundary detection in speech. In EMNLP, pages 64–71, 2004.
Yang Liu, Andreas Stolcke, Elizabeth Shriberg, and Mary Harper. Using conditional
random fields for sentence boundary detection in speech. In ACL, pages 451–458,
2005.
Yang Liu, Nitesh V. Chawla, Mary P. Harper, Elizabeth Shriberg, and Andreas
Stolcke. A study in machine learning from imbalanced data for sentence boundary
detection in speech. Computer Speech & Language, 20(4):468–494, 2006.
Ye Liu, Han Wu, Zhenya Huang, Hao Wang, Jianhui Ma, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen,
Hanqing Tao, and Ke Rui. Technical phrase extraction for patent mining: A
multi-level approach. In ICDM, pages 1142–1147, 2020a.
Yinhan Liu, Myle Ott, Naman Goyal, Jingfei Du, Mandar Joshi, Danqi Chen, Omer
Levy, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Veselin Stoyanov. RoBERTa: A robustly
optimized BERT pretraining approach. arXiv e-prints, pages arXiv–1907, 2019c.
Yupeng Liu, Guodong Li, and Xiaochen Zhang. Semi-Markov CRF model based on
stacked neural Bi-LSTM for sequence labeling. In 2020 IEEE 3rd International
Conference of Safe Production and Informatization (IICSPI), pages 19–23, 2020b.
doi: 10.1109/IICSPI51290.2020.9332321.
Zengjian Liu, Ming Yang, Xiaolong Wang, Qingcai Chen, Buzhou Tang, Zhe Wang,
and Hua Xu. Entity recognition from clinical texts via recurrent neural network.
BMC Medical Informatics Decis. Mak., 17(2):53–61, 2017c.
Zhengyuan Liu, Ke Shi, and Nancy Chen. Coreference-aware dialogue summariza-
tion. In 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and
Dialogue, pages 509–519, 2021d.
Guido Löhr. What are abstract concepts? on lexical ambiguity and concreteness
ratings. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 13(3):549–566, 2022.
Adam Lopez. Statistical machine translation. ACM Computing Surveys, 40(3):1–49,
2008.
Daniel Loureiro and Alipio Jorge. Language modelling makes sense: Propagating
representations through wordnet for full-coverage word sense disambiguation. In
ACL, pages 5682–5691, 2019.
Ismini Lourentzou, Kabir Manghnani, and ChengXiang Zhai. Adapting sequence
to sequence models for text normalization in social media. In International AAAI
Conference on Web and Social Media, volume 13, pages 335–345, 2019.
References 451

Xinyuan Lu and Min-Yen Kan. Improving recommendation systems with user

personality inferred from product reviews. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.05039,
2023.
Zhiyun Lu, Liangliang Cao, Yu Zhang, Chung-Cheng Chiu, and James Fan. Speech
sentiment analysis via pre-trained features from end-to-end ASR models. In
ICASSP, pages 7149–7153, 2020.
Hans Peter Luhn. A statistical approach to mechanized encoding and searching of
literary information. IBM Journal of research and development, 1(4):309–317,
1957.
Edwin Lunando and Ayu Purwarianti. Indonesian social media sentiment analysis
with sarcasm detection. In 2013 International Conference on Advanced Computer
Science and Information Systems (ICACSIS), pages 195–198, 2013.
Hongyin Luo and Jim Glass. Learning word representations with cross-sentence
dependency for end-to-end co-reference resolution. In EMNLP, pages 4829–4833,
2018.
Huaishao Luo, Tianrui Li, Bing Liu, and Junbo Zhang. DOER: Dual cross-shared rnn
for aspect term-polarity co-extraction. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.01794, 2019a.
Huaishao Luo, Lei Ji, Tianrui Li, Nan Duan, and Daxin Jiang. GRACE: Gradient
harmonized and cascaded labeling for aspect-based sentiment analysis. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2009.10557, 2020.
Xiaoqiang Luo. On coreference resolution performance metrics. In EMNLP-HLT,
pages 25–32, 2005.
Xiaoqiang Luo and Sameer Pradhan. Evaluation metrics. In Anaphora Resolution,
pages 141–163. Springer, 2016.
Zhiyi Luo, Shanshan Huang, and Kenny Q Zhu. Knowledge empowered prominent
aspect extraction from product reviews. Information Processing & Management,
56(3):408–423, 2019b.
Minh-Thang Luong, Hieu Pham, and Christopher D Manning. Effective approaches
to attention-based neural machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.04025,
2015.
M. Lusetti, T. Ruzsics, A. Göhring, T. Samardzic, and E. Stark. Encoder-decoder
methods for text normalization. In VarDial@COLING 2018, 2018.
Kim Luyckx and Walter Daelemans. Using syntactic features to predict author
personality from text. Digital Humanities, 2008:146–9, 2008.
Veronica Lynn, Niranjan Balasubramanian, and H Andrew Schwartz. Hierarchical
modeling for user personality prediction: The role of message-level attention. In
ACL, pages 5306–5316, 2020.
Dimitrios P Lyras, Kyriakos N Sgarbas, and Nikolaos D Fakotakis. Using the
Levenshtein edit distance for automatic lemmatization: A case study for modern
Greek and English. In 19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial
Intelligence (ICTAI 2007), volume 2, pages 428–435, 2007.
Ji Ma, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao, and Nan Yang. Easy-first POS tagging and dependency
parsing with beam search. In ACL, pages 110–114, 2013.
452 References

Kaixin Ma, Filip Ilievski, Jonathan Francis, Yonatan Bisk, Eric Nyberg, and Alessan-
dro Oltramari. Knowledge-driven data construction for zero-shot evaluation in
commonsense question answering. In AAAI, pages 13507–13515, 2021.
Ruotian Ma, Xin Zhou, Tao Gui, Yiding Tan, Linyang Li, Qi Zhang, and Xuanjing
Huang. Template-free prompt tuning for few-shot NER. In NAACL-HLT, pages
5721–5732, 2022a.
Xuezhe Ma and Eduard Hovy. End-to-end sequence labeling via bi-directional
LSTM-CNNs-CRF. arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.01354, 2016.
Youmi Ma, Tatsuya Hiraoka, and Naoaki Okazaki. Named entity recognition and
relation extraction using enhanced table filling by contextualized representations.
Journal of Natural Language Processing, 29(1):187–223, 2022b.
Yu Ma, Rui Mao, Qika Lin, Peng Wu, and Erik Cambria. Multi-source aggregated
classification for stock price movement prediction. Information Fusion, 91:515–
528, 2023.
Yu Ma, Rui Mao, Qika Lin, Peng Wu, and Erik Cambria. Quantitative stock portfolio
optimization by multi-task learning risk and return. Information Fusion, 104:
102165, 2024.
Yukun Ma, Haiyun Peng, and Erik Cambria. Targeted aspect-based sentiment anal-
ysis via embedding commonsense knowledge into an attentive LSTM. In AAAI,
pages 5876–5883, 2018.
Mohamed Maamouri, Ann Bies, Tim Buckwalter, and Wigdan Mekki. The Penn
Arabic Treebank: Building a large-scale annotated Arabic corpus. In NEMLAR
conference on Arabic language resources and tools, volume 27, pages 466–467,
2004.
Mohamed Maamouri, Sondos Krouna, Dalila Tabessi, Nadia Hamrouni, and Nizar
Habash. Egyptian Arabic morphological annotation guidelines, 2012.
Andrew Maas, Raymond E Daly, Peter T Pham, Dan Huang, Andrew Y Ng, and
Christopher Potts. Learning word vectors for sentiment analysis. In ACL-HLT,
pages 142–150, 2011.
David Magnusson and Bertil Torestad. A holistic view of personality: A model
revisited. Annual Review of Psychology, 44:427, 1993.
Ahsan Mahmood, Hikmat Ullah Khan, Zahoor ur Rehman, and Wahab Khan. Query
based information retrieval and knowledge extraction using hadith datasets. In
2017 13th International Conference on Emerging Technologies (ICET), pages
1–6, 2017. doi: 10.1109/ICET.2017.8281714.
François Mairesse, Marilyn A Walker, Matthias R Mehl, and Roger K Moore. Using
linguistic cues for the automatic recognition of personality in conversation and
text. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 30:457–500, 2007.
Navonil Majumder, Soujanya Poria, Alexander Gelbukh, and Erik Cambria. Deep
learning-based document modeling for personality detection from text. IEEE
Intelligent Systems, 32(2):74–79, 2017.
Chaitanya Malaviya, Shijie Wu, and Ryan Cotterell. A simple joint model for
improved contextual neural lemmatization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.02306,
2019.
References 453

Pekka Malo, Ankur Sinha, Pekka Korhonen, Jyrki Wallenius, and Pyry Takala. Good
debt or bad debt: Detecting semantic orientations in economic texts. Journal of
the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(4):782–796, 2014.
Suresh Manandhar, Saöo Dûeroski, and Tomaû Erjavec. Learning multilingual mor-
phology with clog. In International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming,
pages 135–144, 1998.
Enrique Manjavacas, Ákos Kádár, and Mike Kestemont. Improving lemmatization
of non-standard languages with joint learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.06939,
2019.
Christopher D. Manning. Part-of-speech tagging from 97% to 100%: Is it time for
some linguistics? In Alexander F. Gelbukh, editor, Computational Linguistics and
Intelligent Text Processing, pages 171–189, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011. Springer
Berlin Heidelberg. ISBN 978-3-642-19400-9.
Christopher D Manning, Mihai Surdeanu, John Bauer, Jenny Rose Finkel, Steven
Bethard, and David McClosky. The Stanford CoreNLP natural language process-
ing toolkit. In ACL, pages 55–60, 2014.
Rui Mao and Xiao Li. Bridging towers of multi-task learning with a gating mecha-
nism for aspect-based sentiment analysis and sequential metaphor identification.
In AAAI, volume 35, pages 13534–13542, 2021.
Rui Mao, Chenghua Lin, and Frank Guerin. Word embedding and WordNet based
metaphor identification and interpretation. In ACL, pages 1222–1231, 2018.
Rui Mao, Chenghua Lin, and Frank Guerin. End-to-end sequential metaphor iden-
tification inspired by linguistic theories. In ACL, pages 3888–3898, 2019.
Rui Mao, Chenghua Lin, and Frank Guerin. Combining pre-trained word embed-
dings and linguistic features for sequential metaphor identification. arXiv preprint
arXiv:2104.03285, 2021a.
Rui Mao, Xiao Li, Mengshi Ge, and Erik Cambria. MetaPro: A computational
metaphor processing model for text pre-processing. Information Fusion, 86-87:
30–43, 2022a.
Rui Mao, Kelvin Du, Yu Ma, Luyao Zhu, and Erik Cambria. Discovering the
cognition behind language: Financial metaphor analysis with MetaPro. In ICDM,
pages 1211–1216, 2023a.
Rui Mao, Xiao Li, Kai He, Mengshi Ge, and Erik Cambria. MetaPro Online:
A computational metaphor processing online system. In ACL, pages 127–135,
2023b.
Rui Mao, Qian Liu, Kai He, Wei Li, and Erik Cambria. The biases of pre-trained
language models: An empirical study on prompt-based sentiment analysis and
emotion detection. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 14(3):1743–1753,
2023c.
Rui Mao, Guanyi Chen, Xulang Zhang, Frank Guerin, and Erik Cambria. GPTEval:
A survey on assessments of ChatGPT and GPT-4. In LREC-COLING, pages
7844–7866, 2024a.
Rui Mao, Kai He, Claudia Beth Ong, Qian Liu, and Erik Cambria. MetaPro 2.0:
Computational metaphor processing on the effectiveness of anomalous language
modeling. In ACL, pages 9891–9908, 2024b.
454 References

Rui Mao, Kai He, Xulang Zhang, Guanyi Chen, Jinjie Ni, Zonglin Yang, and Erik
Cambria. A survey on semantic processing techniques. Information Fusion, 101
(101988), 2024c.
Rui Mao, Qika Lin, Qiawen Liu, Gianmarco Mengaldo, and Erik Cambria. Under-
standing public perception towards weather disasters through the lens of metaphor.
In IJCAI, 2024d.
Rui Mao, Tianwei Zhang, Qian Liu, Amir Hussain, and Erik Cambria. Unveiling
diplomatic narratives: Analyzing United Nations Security Council debates through
metaphorical cognition. In Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
(CogSci), pages 1709–1716, 2024e.
Yue Mao, Yi Shen, Chao Yu, and Longjun Cai. A joint training dual-MRC framework
for aspect based sentiment analysis. In AAAI, pages 13543–13551, 2021b.
Yue Mao, Yi Shen, Jingchao Yang, Xiaoying Zhu, and Longjun Cai. Seq2Path:
Generating sentiment tuples as paths of a tree. In ACL, pages 2215–2225, Dublin,
Ireland, May 2022b.
Vassallo Marco, Gabrieli Giuliano, Valerio Basile, Cristina Bosco, et al. The tenuous-
ness of lemmatization in lexicon-based sentiment analysis. In Italian Conference
on Computational Linguistics, volume 2481, pages 1–6, 2019.
Mitchell P. Marcus, Beatrice Santorini, and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz. Building a
large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank. Computational Linguis-
tics, 19(2):313–330, 1993.
Jose Maria Balmaceda, Silvia Schiaffino, and Daniela Godoy. How do personal-
ity traits affect communication among users in online social networks? Online
Information Review, 38(1):136–153, 2014.
Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama. Culture and the self: Implications for
cognition, emotion, and motivation. In College student development and academic
life, pages 264–293. Routledge, 2014.
Mónica Marrero, Julián Urbano, Sonia Sánchez-Cuadrado, Jorge Morato, and
Juan Miguel Gómez-Berbís. Named entity recognition: fallacies, challenges and
opportunities. Computer Standards & Interfaces, 35(5):482–489, 2013.
Edison Marrese-Taylor, Juan D Velásquez, and Felipe Bravo-Marquez. A novel de-
terministic approach for aspect-based opinion mining in tourism products reviews.
Expert Systems with Applications, 41(17):7764–7775, 2014.
M Antonia Martı, Mariona Taulé, Lluıs Márquez, and Manuel Bertran. CESS-ECE:
A multilingual and multilevel annotated corpus, 2007. URL [Link]
edu/~mbertran/cess-ece.
James H Martin. A Computational Model of Metaphor Interpretation. Academic
Press Professional, Inc., 1990.
James R Martin and Peter R White. The Language of Evaluation, volume 2. Springer,
2003.
Scott Martin. The role of salience ranking in anaphora resolution, 2015.
Sebastian Martschat and Michael Strube. Recall error analysis for coreference
resolution. In EMNLP, pages 2070–2081, 2014.
References 455

Marco Maru, Federico Scozzafava, Federico Martelli, and Roberto Navigli. Syn-
tagnet: Challenging supervised word sense disambiguation with lexical-semantic
combinations. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages 3534–3540, 2019.
Rebecca Marvin and Philipp Koehn. Exploring word sense disambiguation abilities
of neural machine translation systems. In 13th Conference of the Association for
Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 1: Research Track), pages 125–131.
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, 2018.
Zachary J Mason. CorMet: A computational, corpus-based conventional metaphor
extraction system. Computational Linguistics, 30(1):23–44, 2004.
Spyros Matsoukas, Ivan Bulyko, Bing Xiang, Kham Nguyen, Richard Schwartz,
and John Makhoul. Integrating speech recognition and machine translation. In
2007 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing-
ICASSP’07, volume 4, pages IV–1281, 2007.
Tomoko Matsui, Tagiru Nakamura, Akira Utsumi, Akihiro T Sasaki, Takahiko Koike,
Yumiko Yoshida, Tokiko Harada, Hiroki C Tanabe, and Norihiro Sadato. The role
of prosody and context in sarcasm comprehension: Behavioral and fMRI evidence.
Neuropsychologia, 87:74–84, 2016.
Chanda Maurya, T Muhammad, Preeti Dhillon, and Priya Maurya. The effects of
cyberbullying victimization on depression and suicidal ideation among adoles-
cents and young adults: A three year cohort study from India. BMC Psychiatry,
22(1):1–14, 2022.
Diah Hevyka Maylawati, Warih Maharani, and Ibnu Asror. Implicit aspect extraction
in product reviews using FIN algorithm. In 2020 8th International Conference on
Information and Communication Technology (ICoICT), pages 1–5, 2020.
Diana Maynard and Mark A Greenwood. Who cares about sarcastic Tweets? In-
vestigating the impact of sarcasm on sentiment analysis. In Ninth International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pages 4238–4243, 2014.
Michael Mayor. Longman dictionary of contemporary English. Pearson Education
India, 2009.
Andrew McCallum and Ben Wellner. Object consolidation by graph partitioning
with a conditionally-trained distance metric. In KDD Workshop on Data Cleaning,
Record Linkage and Object Consolidation, pages 1–6, 2003.
Andrew McCallum and Ben Wellner. Conditional models of identity uncertainty
with application to noun coreference. NeurIPS, 17:1–8, 2004.
Andrew McCallum, Dayne Freitag, and Fernando CN Pereira. Maximum entropy
markov models for information extraction and segmentation. In Icml, volume 17,
pages 591–598, 2000.
Arya D McCarthy, Ekaterina Vylomova, Shijie Wu, Chaitanya Malaviya, Lawrence
Wolf-Sonkin, Garrett Nicolai, Christo Kirov, Miikka Silfverberg, Sabrina J
Mielke, Jeffrey Heinz, et al. The SIGMORPHON 2019 shared task: Morpho-
logical analysis in context and cross-lingual transfer for inflection. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1910.11493, 2019.
Joseph F McCarthy and Wendy G Lehnert. Using decision trees for conference
resolution. In IJCAI, pages 1050–1055, 1995.
456 References

Michael C McCord. Slot grammar. In Natural language and logic, pages 118–145.
Springer, 1990.
Iain McCowan, Jean Carletta, Wessel Kraaij, Simone Ashby, Sebastien Bourban,
Mike Flynn, Mael Guillemot, Thomas Hain, Jaroslav Kadlec, Vasilis Karaiskos,
et al. The AMI meeting corpus. In 5th International Conference on Methods and
Techniques in Behavioral Research, volume 88, page 100, 2005.
Kathleen E McCoy and Michael Strube. Generating anaphoric expressions: pro-
noun or definite description? The Relation of Discourse/Dialogue Structure and
Reference, 1999.
Robert R McCrae and Paul T Costa. Updating norman’s “adequacy taxonomy”’:
Intelligence and personality dimensions in natural language and in questionnaires.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(3):710, 1985.
Robert R McCrae and Paul T Costa. Validation of the five-factor model of personality
across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
52(1):81, 1987.
Robert R McCrae and Paul T Costa Jr. A contemplated revision of the NEO five-
factor inventory. Personality and Individual Differences, 36(3):587–596, 2004.
Robert R McCrae and Oliver P John. An introduction to the five-factor model and
its applications. Journal of Personality, 60(2):175–215, 1992.
R.R. McCrae and P.T. Costa. Personality in Adulthood. Guilford Publications, 1990.
ISBN 9780898625288.
Ryan McDonald, Koby Crammer, and Fernando Pereira. Flexible text segmentation
with structured multilabel classification. In HLT-EMNLP, pages 987–994, 2005.
Skye McDonald and Samantha Pearce. Clinical insights into pragmatic theory:
Frontal lobe deficits and sarcasm. Brain and Language, 53(1):81–104, 1996.
Skye McDonald, Sharon Flanagan, Jennifer Rollins, and Julianne Kinch. TASIT: A
new clinical tool for assessing social perception after traumatic brain injury. The
Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, 18(3):219–238, 2003.
Brian McFee, Colin Raffel, Dawen Liang, Daniel P Ellis, Matt McVicar, Eric Bat-
tenberg, and Oriol Nieto. librosa: Audio and music signal analysis in Python. In
14th Python in Science Conference, volume 8, pages 18–25, 2015.
Walaa Medhat, Ahmed Hassan, and Hoda Korashy. Sentiment analysis algorithms
and applications: A survey. Ain Shams Engineering Journal, 5(4):1093–1113,
2014.
Douglas L Medin and Marguerite M Schaffer. Context theory of classification
learning. Psychological Review, 85(3):207, 1978.
Raveesh Meena, Gabriel Skantze, and Joakim Gustafson. Data-driven models for
timing feedback responses in a map task dialogue system. Computer Speech &
Language, 28(4):903–922, 2014.
Sara Meftah and Nasredine Semmar. A neural network model for part-of-speech
tagging of social media texts. In Eleventh International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), Miyazaki, Japan, May 2018. European
Language Resources Association (ELRA).
References 457

Yash Mehta, Samin Fatehi, Amirmohammad Kazameini, Clemens Stachl, Erik Cam-
bria, and Sauleh Eetemadi. Bottom-up and top-down: Predicting personality with
psycholinguistic and language model features. In ICDM, pages 1184–1189, 2020.
Rui Meng, Sanqiang Zhao, Shuguang Han, Daqing He, Peter Brusilovsky, and
Yu Chi. Deep keyphrase generation. In Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Kan,
editors, ACL, pages 582–592, 2017.
Xinfan Meng and Houfeng Wang. Mining user reviews: from specification to sum-
marization. In ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers, pages 177–180,
2009.
Amina Ben Meriem, Lobna Hlaoua, and Lotfi Ben Romdhane. A fuzzy approach for
sarcasm detection in social networks. Procedia Computer Science, 192:602–611,
2021.
Andreas Messalas, Yiannis Kanellopoulos, and Christos Makris. Model-agnostic
interpretability with shapley values. In 2019 10th International Conference on
Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA), pages 1–7, 2019.
Mayuri Mhatre, Dakshata Phondekar, Pranali Kadam, Anushka Chawathe, and
Kranti Ghag. Dimensionality reduction for sentiment analysis using pre-
processing techniques. In 2017 International Conference on Computing Method-
ologies and Communication (ICCMC), pages 16–21, 2017.
Lesly Miculicich Miculicich and Andrei Popescu-Belis. Using coreference links to
improve Spanish-to-English machine translation. In 2nd Workshop on Coreference
Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2017), pages 30–40, 2017.
Rada Mihalcea, Carmen Banea, and Janyce Wiebe. Learning multilingual subjective
language via cross-lingual projections. In 45th annual meeting of the association
of computational linguistics, pages 976–983, 2007.
Andrei Mikheev. Tagging sentence boundaries. In NAACL, 2000.
Andrei Mikheev. Periods, capitalized words, etc. Computational Linguistics, 28(3):
289–318, 2002.
Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, G.s Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean. Efficient estimation of
word representations in vector space. Workshop at ICLR, 2013, 01 2013a.
Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S Corrado, and Jeff Dean. Distributed
representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. In NIPS, pages
3111–3119, 2013b.
Kirill Milintsevich and Kairit Sirts. Enhancing sequence-to-sequence neural lemma-
tization with external resources. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.12056, 2021.
George A Miller. WordNet: A lexical database for English. Communications of the
ACM, 38(11):39–41, 1995.
George A Miller, Claudia Leacock, Randee Tengi, and Ross T Bunker. A semantic
concordance. In HLT, pages 303–308, 1993.
Gary Miner, John Elder IV, Andrew Fast, Thomas Hill, Robert Nisbet, and Dursun
Delen. Practical text mining and statistical analysis for non-structured text data
applications. Academic Press, 2012.
Marvin Minsky. A framework for representing knowledge, 1974.
Marvin Minsky. The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelli-
gence, and the Future of the Human Mind. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2006.
458 References

Shachar Mirkin, Ido Dagan, and Sebastian Padó. Assessing the role of discourse
references in entailment inference. In ACL, pages 1209–1219, 2010.
Walter Mischel. Toward an integrative science. Annual Review of Psychology, 55:
1–22, 2004.
Abhijit Mishra, Diptesh Kanojia, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey, and Pushpak Bhat-
tacharyya. Harnessing cognitive features for sarcasm detection. In ACL, pages
1095–1104, Berlin, Germany, 2016.
Rishabh Misra and Prahal Arora. Sarcasm detection using hybrid neural network.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.07414, 2019.
Tom Mitchell and E. Fredkin. Never-ending language learning. In 2014 IEEE
International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), pages 1–1, 2014.
Ruslan Mitkov. Anaphora Resolution. Routledge, 2014.
Ruslan Mitkov. The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2022.
Ruslan Mitkov, Richard Evans, Constantin Or san, Le An Ha, and Viktor Pekar.
Anaphora resolution: To what extent does it help nlp applications? In Anaphora:
Analysis, Algorithms and Applications: 6th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor
Resolution Colloquium, pages 179–190, 2007.
Ankush Mittal, Pooja Bhatt, and Padam Kumar. Phonetic matching and syntactic tree
similarity based QA system for SMS queries. In 2014 International Conference
on Green Computing Communication and Electrical Engineering (ICGCCEE),
pages 1–6, 2014.
Makoto Miwa and Mohit Bansal. End-to-end relation extraction using lstms on
sequences and tree structures. In ACL, pages 1105–1116, 2016.
Makoto Miwa and Yutaka Sasaki. Modeling joint entity and relation extraction with
table representation. In EMNLP, pages 1858–1869, 2014.
Dunja Mladenic. Automatic word lemmatization. In 5th International Multi-
Conference Information Society, IS-2002 B, pages 153–159, 2002.
Aditya Mogadala and Vasudeva Varma. Language independent sentence-level sub-
jectivity analysis with feature selection. In 26th Pacific Asia Conference on
Language, Information, and Computation, pages 171–180, 2012.
Samaneh Moghaddam and Martin Ester. Opinion digger: An unsupervised opinion
miner from unstructured product reviews. In CIKM, pages 1825–1828, 2010.
Saif Mohammad, Ekaterina Shutova, and Peter Turney. Metaphor as a medium for
emotion: An empirical study. In Fifth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computa-
tional Semantics, pages 23–33, 2016.
Michael Mohler, Bryan Rink, David Bracewell, and Marc Tomlinson. A novel distri-
butional approach to multilingual conceptual metaphor recognition. In COLING,
pages 1752–1763, 2014.
Michael Mohler, Mary Brunson, Bryan Rink, and Marc Tomlinson. Introducing
the LCC metaphor datasets. In Tenth International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16), pages 4221–4227, 2016.
Antonio Molina and Ferran Pla. Shallow parsing using specialized HMMs. Journal
of Machine Learning Research, 2(Mar):595–613, 2002.
References 459

Natawut Monaikul, Giuseppe Castellucci, Simone Filice, and Oleg Rokhlenko. Con-
tinual learning for named entity recognition. In AAAI, pages 13570–13577, 2021.
Christine A. Montgomery. Concept extraction. American Journal of Computational
Linguistics, 8(2):70–73, 1982.
Andrés Montoyo, Patricio Martínez-Barco, and Alexandra Balahur. Subjectivity
and sentiment analysis: An overview of the current state of the area and envisaged
developments. Decision Support Systems, 53(4):675–679, 2012.
Nafise Sadat Moosavi and Michael Strube. Which coreference evaluation metric do
you trust? a proposal for a link-based entity aware metric. In ACL, pages 632–642,
2016.
Louis-Philippe Morency, Ariadna Quattoni, and Trevor Darrell. Latent-dynamic
discriminative models for continuous gesture recognition. In 2007 IEEE Con-
ference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages 1–8, 2007. doi:
10.1109/CVPR.2007.383299.
Louis-Philippe Morency, Rada Mihalcea, and Payal Doshi. Towards multimodal
sentiment analysis: Harvesting opinions from the web. In 13th international
conference on multimodal interfaces, pages 169–176, 2011.
Andrea Moro and Roberto Navigli. SemEval-2015 task 13: Multilingual all-words
sense disambiguation and entity linking. In 9th International Workshop on Se-
mantic Evaluation, pages 288–297, 2015.
Andrea Moro, Francesco Cecconi, and Roberto Navigli. Multilingual word sense
disambiguation and entity linking for everybody. In 2014 International Conference
on Posters & Demonstrations Track-Volume 1272, pages 25–28, 2014a.
Andrea Moro, Alessandro Raganato, and Roberto Navigli. Entity linking meets
word sense disambiguation: a unified approach. Transactions of the Association
for Computational Linguistics, 2:231–244, 2014b.
Guanyi Mou and Kyumin Lee. Malicious bot detection in online social networks:
Arming handcrafted features with deep learning. In International Conference on
Social Informatics, pages 220–236, 2020.
Mohamad Syahrul Mubarok, Adiwijaya, and Muhammad Dwi Aldhi. Aspect-based
sentiment analysis to review products using Naïve Bayes. In AIP Conference
Proceedings, volume 1867, page 020060, 2017.
Andrius Mudinas, Dell Zhang, and Mark Levene. Combining lexicon and learning
based approaches for concept-level sentiment analysis. In ISDOMW, 2012.
Aldrian Obaja Muis and Wei Lu. Weak semi-Markov CRFs for noun phrase chunking
in informal text. In NAACL-HLT, pages 714–719, 2016.
Aldrian Obaja Muis and Wei Lu. Labeling gaps between words: Recognizing over-
lapping mentions with mention separators. In EMNLP, pages 2608–2618, 2017.
Arjun Mukherjee and Bing Liu. Aspect extraction through semi-supervised model-
ing. In ACL, pages 339–348, 2012.
Rajdeep Mukherjee, Tapas Nayak, Yash Butala, Sourangshu Bhattacharya, and
Pawan Goyal. Paste: A tagging-free decoding framework using pointer networks
for aspect sentiment triplet extraction. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.04794, 2021.
Thomas Müller, Helmut Schmid, and Hinrich Schütze. Efficient higher-order crfs
for morphological tagging. In EMNLP, pages 322–332, 2013.
460 References

Thomas Müller, Ryan Cotterell, Alexander Fraser, and Hinrich Schütze. Joint lemma-
tization and morphological tagging with Lemming. In EMNLP, pages 2268–2274,
2015.
Gabriel Murray and Giuseppe Carenini. Predicting subjectivity in multimodal con-
versations. In EMNLP, pages 1348–1357, 2009.
Gabriel Murray and Giuseppe Carenini. Subjectivity detection in spoken and written
conversations. Natural Language Engineering, 17(3):397–418, 2011.
Sumiya Mushtaq and Neerendra Kumar. Text-based automatic personality recog-
nition: Recent developments. In Third International Conference on Computing,
Communications, and Cyber-Security, pages 537–549, 2023.
Judith Muzerelle, Anaïs Lefeuvre, Jean-Yves Antoine, Emmanuel Schang, Denis
Maurel, Jeanne Villaneau, and Iris Eshkol. ANCOR, the first large French speaking
corpus of conversational speech annotated in coreference to be freely available.
In TALN, pages 555–563, 2013.
Isabel Briggs Myers, Mary H. McCaulley, Naomi L. Quenk, and Allen L. Hammer.
MBTI Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use of the Myers - Briggs Type
Indicator. Consulting Psychologists Press, third edition, 1998.
Jerome L Myers and Arnold D Well. Research Design & Statistical Analysis.
Routledge, New York, 1995.
Tetsuji Nakagawa, Taku Kudo, and Yuji Matsumoto. Unknown word guessing and
part-of-speech tagging using support vector machines. In NLPRS, pages 325–331,
2001.
Hiromi Nakaiwa and Satoru Ikehara. Zero pronoun resolution in a machine trans-
lation system by using japanese to english verbal semantic attributes. In Third
Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, pages 201–208, 1992.
Hiromi Nakaiwa and Satoshi Shirai. Anaphora resolution of Japanese zero pronouns
with deictic reference. In COLING, pages 812–817, 1996.
Hiromi Nakaiwa, Satoshi Shirai, Satoru Ikehara, and Tsukasa Kawaoka. Extrasen-
tential resolution of Japanese zero pronouns using semantic and pragmatic con-
straints. In AAAI 1995 Spring Symposium Series, pages 99–105, 1995.
Preslav Nakov, Sara Rosenthal, Zornitsa Kozareva, Veselin Stoyanov, Alan Ritter,
and Theresa Wilson. SemEval-2013 task 2: Sentiment analysis in Twitter. In
SemEval, pages 312–320, 2013.
Sri Nandhini and JI Sheeba. Cyberbullying detection and classification using infor-
mation retrieval algorithm. In ICARCSET, 2015.
Zara Nasar, Syed Waqar Jaffry, and Muhammad Kamran Malik. Named entity
recognition and relation extraction: State-of-the-art. ACM Computing Surveys, 54
(1):1–39, 2021.
Arman Khadjeh Nassirtoussi, Saeed Aghabozorgi, Teh Ying Wah, and David
Chek Ling Ngo. Text mining of news-headlines for FOREX market prediction: A
multi-layer dimension reduction algorithm with semantics and sentiment. Expert
Systems with Applications, 42(1):306–324, 2015.
Vivi Nastase, Michael Strube, Benjamin Boerschinger, Caecilia Zirn, and Anas
Elghafari. WikiNet: A very large scale multi-lingual concept network. In LREC,
pages 1015–1022, 2010.
References 461

Roberto Navigli. Word sense disambiguation: A survey. ACM Computing Surveys,

41(2):1–69, 2009.
Roberto Navigli and Mirella Lapata. Graph connectivity measures for unsupervised
word sense disambiguation. In IJCAI, pages 1683–1688, 2007.
Roberto Navigli and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. Babelnet: The automatic construction,
evaluation and application of a wide-coverage multilingual semantic network.
Artificial Intelligence, 193:217–250, 2012a.
Roberto Navigli and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. BabelNet: The automatic construction,
evaluation and application of a wide-coverage multilingual semantic network.
Artificial Intelligence, 193:217–250, 2012b.
Roberto Navigli, David Jurgens, and Daniele Vannella. SemEval-2013 task 12:
Multilingual word sense disambiguation. In SemEval, pages 222–231, 2013.
Steven Neale, Joao Silva, and António Branco. A flexible tool for manual word
sense annotation. In 11th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic
Annotation (ISA-11), pages 1–5, 2015.
A Nedoluzhko, J Mírovskỳ, E Fu íková, and J Pergler. Annotation of coreference in
Prague Czech-English dependency treebank. Technical report, Technical report
2014/57. Prague: ÚFAL MFF UK, 2014.
Anna Nedoluzhko, Michal Novák, Martin Popel, Zden k éabokrtskỳ, Amir Zeldes,
and Daniel Zeman. CorefUD 1.0: Coreference meets universal dependencies. In
LREC, pages 4859–4872, 2022.
Daniel Neiberg, Kjell Elenius, Inger Karlsson, and Kornel Laskowski. Emotion
recognition in spontaneous speech. In Fonetik, pages 101–104, 2006.
Mariana Neves and Jurica äeva. An extensive review of tools for manual annotation
of documents. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 22(1):146–163, 2021.
Hwee Tou Ng. Getting serious about word sense disambiguation. In Tagging Text
with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How?, pages 1–7, 1997.
Hwee Tou Ng and Hian Beng Lee. Integrating multiple knowledge sources to
disambiguate word sense: an exemplar-based approach. In ACL, pages 40–47,
1996.
Vincent Ng. Supervised noun phrase coreference research: The first fifteen years. In
ACL, pages 1396–1411, 2010.
Vincent Ng and Claire Cardie. Combining sample selection and error-driven pruning
for machine learning of coreference rules. In EMNLP, pages 55–62, 2002a.
Vincent Ng and Claire Cardie. Improving machine learning approaches to corefer-
ence resolution. In ACL, pages 104–111, 2002b.
Grace Ngai and Radu Florian. Transformation based learning in the fast lane. In
NAACL, 2001.
Dat Quoc Nguyen, Thanh Vu, Dai Quoc Nguyen, Mark Dras, and Mark John-
son. From word segmentation to POS tagging for Vietnamese. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1711.04951, 2017.
Thuy Dung Nguyen and Min-Yen Kan. Keyphrase extraction in scientific publica-
tions. In Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Tru Hoang Cao, Ingeborg Sølvberg, and Edie M.
Rasmussen, editors, 10th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries,
volume 4822 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 317–326, 2007.
462 References

Jinjie Ni, Tom Young, Vlad Pandelea, Fuzhao Xue, and Erik Cambria. Recent
advances in deep learning based dialogue systems: A systematic survey. Artificial
Intelligence Review, pages 3055–3155, 2022.
Cristina Nicolae and Gabriel Nicolae. BESTCUT: A graph algorithm for coreference
resolution. In EMNLP, pages 275–283, 2006.
Garrett Nicolai and Grzegorz Kondrak. Leveraging inflection tables for stemming
and lemmatization. In ACL, pages 1138–1147, 2016.
Nicolas Nicolov, Franco Salvetti, and Steliana Ivanova. Sentiment analysis: Does
coreference matter. In AISB 2008 Convention Communication, Interaction and
Social Intelligence, volume 1, page 37, 2008.
Jan Niehues and Eunah Cho. Exploiting linguistic resources for neural machine
translation using multi-task learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.00993, 2017.
Finn Årup Nielsen. A new anew: Evaluation of a word list for sentiment analysis in
microblogs. In Workshop on’Making Sense of Microposts: Big Things Come in
Small Packages, pages 93–98, 2011.
Huansheng Ning, Sahraoui Dhelim, and Nyothiri Aung. PersoNet: Friend recom-
mendation system based on big-five personality traits and hybrid filtering. IEEE
Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 6(3):394–402, 2019.
Joakim Nivre, Johan Hall, Sandra Kübler, Ryan McDonald, Jens Nilsson, Sebastian
Riedel, and Deniz Yuret. The CoNLL 2007 shared task on dependency parsing.
In EMNLP-CoNLL, pages 915–932, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007.
Joakim Nivre, Marie-Catherine De Marneffe, Filip Ginter, Yoav Goldberg, Jan Ha-
jic, Christopher D Manning, Ryan McDonald, Slav Petrov, Sampo Pyysalo, Na-
talia Silveira, et al. Universal dependencies v1: A multilingual treebank collec-
tion. In Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
(LREC’16), pages 1659–1666, 2016.
Jorge Nocedal and Stephen Wright. Numerical optimization. Springer Science &
Business Media, 2006.
Warren T Norman. Toward an adequate taxonomy of personality attributes: Repli-
cated factor structure in peer nomination personality ratings. The Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66(6):574, 1963.
Warren T. Norman. “To see ourselves as others see us!": Relations among self-
perceptions, peer-perceptions, and expected peer-perceptions of personality. Mul-
tivariate Behavioral Research, 4(4):417–443, 1969.
Natalya F Noy, Deborah L McGuinness, et al. Ontology development 101: A guide
to creating your first ontology, 2001.
Gertrude E Noyes. The first English dictionary, Cawdrey’s table alphabeticall.
Modern Language Notes, 58(8):600–605, 1943.
Maxwell Nye, Armando Solar-Lezama, Josh Tenenbaum, and Brenden M Lake.
Learning compositional rules via neural program synthesis. NeurIPS, 33:10832–
10842, 2020.
Jon Oberlander and Scott Nowson. Whose thumb is it anyway? Classifying author
personality from weblog text. In COLING-ACL, pages 627–634, 2006.
References 463

Bruno Oberle. SACR: A Drag-and-Drop Based Tool for Coreference Annotation. In

Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pages
389–394, 2018.
Brendan O’Connor, Michel Krieger, and David Ahn. Tweetmotif: Exploratory search
and topic summarization for twitter. In Fourth International AAAI Conference on
Weblogs and Social Media, 2010.
Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Katarzyna G≥owiÒska, Mateusz KopeÊ, Agata Savary, and
Magdalena Zawis≥awska. Polish coreference corpus. In Language and Technology
Conference, pages 215–226, 2013.
Bruno Ohana and Brendan Tierney. Sentiment classification of reviews using Sen-
tiWordNet. IT&T, 8, 2009.
Tom O’Hara, Rebecca Bruce, Jeff Donner, and Janyce Wiebe. Class-based collo-
cations for word sense disambiguation. In SENSEVAL-3, the Third International
Workshop on the Evaluation of Systems for the Semantic Analysis of Text, pages
199–202, 2004.
Manabu Okumura and Kouji Tamura. Zero pronoun resolution in Japanese discourse
based on centering theory. In COLING, pages 871–876, 1996.
Silviu Oprea and Walid Magdy. iSarcasm: A dataset of intended sarcasm. In ACL,
pages 1279–1289, Online, July 2020.
Shereen Oraby, Vrindavan Harrison, Lena Reed, Ernesto Hernandez, Ellen Riloff,
and Marilyn Walker. Creating and characterizing a diverse corpus of sarcasm in
dialogue. In 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and
Dialogue, pages 31–41, Los Angeles, September 2016.
Constantin Orasan. The influence of pronominal anaphora resolution on term-based
summarisation. RANLP, pages 291–300, 2007.
Matan Orbach, Orith Toledo-Ronen, Artem Spector, Ranit Aharonov, Yoav Katz,
and Noam Slonim. YASO: A targeted sentiment analysis evaluation dataset for
open-domain reviews. In EMNLP, pages 9154–9173, 2021.
Naho Orita, Naomi Feldman, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Eliana Vornov. Quantifying
the role of discourse topicality in speakers’ choices of referring expressions. In
Fifth Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages
63–70, 2014.
Naho Orita, Eliana Vornov, Naomi Feldman, and Hal Daumé III. Why discourse
affects speakers’ choice of referring expressions. In ACL-IJCNLP, volume 1,
pages 1639–1649, 2015.
Reynier Ortega, Adrian Fonseca, Yoan Gutiérrez, and Andrés Montoyo. Improving
subjectivity detection using unsupervised subjectivity word sense disambiguation.
Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, 51:179–186, 2013.
Daniel W Otter, Julian R Medina, and Jugal K Kalita. A survey of the usages of deep
learning for natural language processing. IEEE transactions on neural networks
and learning systems, 32(2):604–624, 2020.
Olutobi Owoputi, Brendan O’Connor, Chris Dyer, Kevin Gimpel, Nathan Schneider,
and Noah A Smith. Improved part-of-speech tagging for online conversational
text with word clusters. In NAACL-HLT, pages 380–390, 2013.
464 References

Daniel J Ozer and Veronica Benet-Martinez. Personality and the prediction of

consequential outcomes. Annual Review of Psychology, 57:401, 2006.
Allan Paivio. Abstractness, imagery, and meaningfulness in paired-associate learn-
ing. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 4(1):32–38, 1965.
David D Palmer and Marti A Hearst. Adaptive sentence boundary disambiguation.
arXiv preprint cmp-lg/9411022, 1994.
David D. Palmer and Marti A. Hearst. Adaptive multilingual sentence boundary
disambiguation. Comput. Linguist., 23(2):241–267, June 1997.
Frank Robert Palmer and Palmer Frank Robert. Semantics. Cambridge university
press, 1981.
Martha Palmer, Paul R. Kingsbury, and Daniel Gildea. The proposition bank: An
annotated corpus of semantic roles. Computational Linguistics, 31(1):71–106,
2005.
Georgios Paltoglou and Anastasia Giachanou. Opinion retrieval: Searching for
opinions in social media. In Professional Search in the Modern World, pages
193–214. Springer, 2014.
Hongliang Pan, Zheng Lin, Peng Fu, Yatao Qi, and Weiping Wang. Modeling intra
and inter-modality incongruity for multi-modal sarcasm detection. In EMNLP,
pages 1383–1392, 2020.
Liangming Pan, Xiaochen Wang, Chengjiang Li, Juanzi Li, and Jie Tang. Course
concept extraction in MOOCs via embedding-based graph propagation. In IJC-
NLP, pages 875–884, 2017.
Rajnish Pandey, Abhinav Kumar, Jyoti Prakash Singh, and Sudhakar Tripathi. Hy-
brid attention-based long short-term memory network for sarcasm identification.
Applied Soft Computing, 106:107348, 2021.
Bo Pang and Lillian Lee. A sentimental education: Sentiment analysis using subjec-
tivity summarization based on minimum cuts. In ACL, pages 271–278, 2004.
Bo Pang and Lillian Lee. Seeing stars: exploiting class relationships for sentiment
categorization with respect to rating scales. In ACL, pages 115–124, 2005.
Kartikey Pant, Tanvi Dadu, and Radhika Mamidi. Towards detection of subjective
bias using contextualized word embeddings. In Web Conference, pages 75–76,
2020.
Kishore Papineni, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward, and Wei-Jing Zhu. BLEU: A method
for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In ACL, pages 311–318, 2002.
Tommaso Pasini and Roberto Navigli. Train-o-matic: Large-scale supervised word
sense disambiguation in multiple languages without manual training data. In
EMNLP, pages 78–88, 2017.
Tommaso Pasini, Francesco Elia, and Roberto Navigli. Huge automatically extracted
training-sets for multilingual word sense disambiguation. In Eleventh Interna-
tional Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pages 1694–1698,
2018.
Rebecca Passonneau. Instructions for applying discourse reference annotation for
multiple applications (drama). Unpublished Manuscript, page 46, 1997.
Aneta Pavlenko. Emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon. Bilin-
gualism: Language and cognition, 11(2):147–164, 2008.
References 465

Haiyun Peng, Yukun Ma, Yang Li, and Erik Cambria. Learning multi-grained aspect
target sequence for chinese sentiment analysis. Knowledge-Based Systems, 148:
167–176, 2018.
Haiyun Peng, Lu Xu, Lidong Bing, Fei Huang, Wei Lu, and Luo Si. Knowing what,
how and why: A near complete solution for aspect-based sentiment analysis. In
AAAI, pages 8600–8607, 2020.
Yifan Peng, Shankai Yan, and Zhiyong Lu. Transfer learning in biomedical nat-
ural language processing: An evaluation of bert and elmo on ten benchmarking
datasets. BioNLP 2019, page 58, 2019.
James W Pennebaker. The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us.
Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2013.
James W Pennebaker and Laura A King. Linguistic styles: Language use as an
individual difference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6):1296,
1999.
James W Pennebaker, Martha E Francis, and Roger J Booth. Linguistic inquiry and
word count: Liwc 2001. Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 71(2001):2001,
2001.
James W Pennebaker, Matthias R Mehl, and Kate G Niederhoffer. Psychologi-
cal aspects of natural language use: Our words, our selves. Annual Review of
Psychology, 54(1):547–577, 2003.
James W Pennebaker, Ryan L Boyd, Kayla Jordan, and Kate Blackburn. The de-
velopment and psychometric properties of LIWC2015. Technical report, The
University of Texas at Austin, 2015.
Deana Pennell and Yang Liu. Normalization of text messages for text-to-speech. In
2010 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing,
pages 4842–4845, 2010.
Deana Pennell and Yang Liu. A character-level machine translation approach for
normalization of SMS abbreviations. In IJCNLP, pages 974–982, 2011.
Jeffrey Pennington, Richard Socher, and Christopher D Manning. GloVe: Global
vectors for word representation. In EMNLP, pages 1532–1543, 2014.
Iryna Pentina, Tyler Hancock, and Tianling Xie. Exploring relationship development
with social chatbots: A mixed-method study of replika. Computers in Human
Behavior, 140:107600, 2023.
S Pesina and T Solonchak. Semantic primitives and conceptual focus. Procedia-
Social and Behavioral Sciences, 192:339–345, 2015.
Robert Peters and Norbert Nagel. Das digitale, referenzkorpus mit-
telniederdeutsch/niederrheinisch (ReN)’. Jahrbuch für Germanistische
Sprachgeschichte, 5(1):165–175, 2014.
Fabio Petroni, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel, Patrick Lewis, Anton Bakhtin,
Yuxiang Wu, and Alexander Miller. Language models as knowledge bases? In
EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages 2463–2473, 2019.
Fabio Petroni, Patrick S. H. Lewis, Aleksandra Piktus, Tim Rocktäschel, Yuxiang
Wu, Alexander H. Miller, and Sebastian Riedel. How context affects language
models’ factual predictions. In Conference on Automated Knowledge Base Con-
struction, AKBC, 2020.
466 References

Slav Petrov, Dipanjan Das, and Ryan McDonald. A universal part-of-speech tagset.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1104.2086, 2011.
Saöa PetroviÊ, Miles Osborne, and Victor Lavrenko. The Edinburgh twitter corpus.
In NAACL HLT 2010 workshop on computational linguistics in a world of social
media, pages 25–26, 2010.
Miriam RL Petruck. Frame semantics. Handbook of pragmatics, 2, 1996.
Lawrence Philips. Hanging on the metaphone. Computer Language, 7(12):39–43,
1990.
Lawrence Philips. The double metaphone search algorithm. C/C++ users journal,
18(6):38–43, 2000.
Jean Piaget, Margaret Cook, et al. The origins of intelligence in children, volume 8.
International Universities Press, New York, 1952.
Emanuele Pianta, Luisa Bentivogli, and Christian Girardi. MultiWordNet: develop-
ing an aligned multilingual database. In First International Conference on Global
WordNet, pages 293–302, 2002.
Martin J Pickering and Simon Garrod. An integrated theory of language production
and comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(4):329–347, 2013.
David J Pittenger. The utility of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Review of
educational research, 63(4):467–488, 1993.
Barbara Plank and Dirk Hovy. Personality traits on Twitter—or—how to get 1,500
personality tests in a week. In 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to
Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 92–98, 2015.
John C Platt. Fast training of support vector machines using sequential minimal
optimization, advances in kernel methods. Support Vector Learning, pages 185–
208, 1999.
Joël Plisson, Nada Lavrac, Dunja Mladenic, et al. A rule based approach to word
lemmatization. In IS, volume 3, pages 83–86, 2004.
Massimo Poesio. Annotating a corpus to develop and evaluate discourse entity
realization algorithms: Issues and preliminary results. In Second International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pages 1–8, 2000.
Massimo Poesio. Associative descriptions and salience: A preliminary investigation.
In 2003 EACL Workshop on The Computational Treatment of Anaphora, pages
31–38, 2003.
Massimo Poesio. The MATE/GNOME proposals for anaphoric annotation, revisited.
In HLT-NAACL, pages 154–162, 2004.
Massimo Poesio and M Alexandrov-Kabadjov. A general-purpose, off the shelf
anaphoric resolver. In LREC, pages 653–656, 2004.
Massimo Poesio and Ron Artstein. Anaphoric annotation in the ARRAU corpus.
In Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pages
1–5, 2008.
Massimo Poesio, Florence Bruneseaux, and Laurent Romary. The MATE meta-
scheme for coreference in dialogues in multiple languages. In ACL’99 Workshop
Towards Standards and Tools for Discourse Tagging, pages 65–74, 1999a.
References 467

Massimo Poesio, Renate Henschel, Janet Hitzeman, Rodger Kibble, Shane Mon-
tague, and Kees van Deemter. Towards an annotation scheme for noun phrase
generation. Technical report, EACL, 1999b.
Massimo Poesio, Juntao Yu, Silviu Paun, Abdulrahman Aloraini, Pengcheng Lu,
Janosch Haber, and Derya Cokal. Computational models of anaphora. Annual
Review of Linguistics, 9:561–587, 2023.
Livia Polanyi and Annie Zaenen. Contextual valence shifters. In Computing Attitude
and Affect in Text: Theory and Applications, pages 1–10. Springer, 2006.
Marco Polignano, Pierpaolo Basile, Marco De Gemmis, Giovanni Semeraro, Valerio
Basile, et al. Alberto: Italian BERT language understanding model for NLP
challenging tasks based on tweets. In CEUR Workshop Proceedings, volume
2481, pages 1–6, 2019.
Marco Polignano, Valerio Basile, Pierpaolo Basile, Giuliano Gabrieli, Marco Vas-
sallo, and Cristina Bosco. A hybrid lexicon-based and neural approach for explain-
able polarity detection. Information Processing & Management, 59(5):103058,
2022.
Maria Pontiki, Dimitris Galanis, John Pavlopoulos, Harris Papageorgiou, Ion An-
droutsopoulos, and Suresh Manandhar. SemEval-2014 task 4: Aspect based sen-
timent analysis. In 8th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval
2014), pages 27–35, 2014.
Maria Pontiki, Dimitris Galanis, Haris Papageorgiou, Suresh Manandhar, and Ion
Androutsopoulos. SemEval-2015 task 12: Aspect based sentiment analysis. In 9th
International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015), pages 486–495,
2015.
Maria Pontiki, Dimitris Galanis, Haris Papageorgiou, Ion Androutsopoulos, Suresh
Manandhar, Mohammed AL-Smadi, Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub, Yanyan Zhao, Bing
Qin, Orphée De Clercq, et al. Semeval-2016 task 5: Aspect based sentiment
analysis. In ProWorkshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016), pages 19–30,
2016.
Simone Paolo Ponzetto and Michael Strube. Exploiting semantic role labeling, Word-
Net and Wikipedia for coreference resolution. In Human Language Technology
Conference of the NAACL, Main Conference, pages 192–199, 2006.
Alexander Popov. Word sense disambiguation with recurrent neural networks. In
Student Research Workshop associated with RANLP 2017, pages 25–34, 2017.
Soujanya Poria, Alexandar Gelbukh, Basant Agarwal, Erik Cambria, and Newton
Howard. Common sense knowledge based personality recognition from text.
In Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 484–496,
2013.
Marten Postma, Emiel Van Miltenburg, Roxane Segers, Anneleen Schoen, and Piek
Vossen. Open Dutch WordNet. In 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC), pages
302–310, 2016.
Marco Pota, Mirko Ventura, Rosario Catelli, and Massimo Esposito. An effec-
tive BERT-based pipeline for twitter sentiment analysis: A case study in italian.
Sensors, 21(1):133, 2020.
468 References

Rolandos-Alexandros Potamias, Georgios Siolas, and Andreas Stafylopatis. A robust

deep ensemble classifier for figurative language detection. In Engineering Ap-
plications of Neural Networks, pages 164–175. Springer International Publishing,
2019. ISBN 978-3-030-20257-6.
Rolandos Alexandros Potamias, Georgios Siolas, and Andreas-Georgios Stafy-
lopatis. A transformer-based approach to irony and sarcasm detection. Neural
Computing and Applications, 32(23):17309–17320, 2020.
Sameer Pradhan, Edward Loper, Dmitriy Dligach, and Martha Palmer. SemEval-
2007 task-17: English lexical sample, SRL and all words. In Fourth International
Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2007), pages 87–92, 2007.
Sameer Pradhan, Alessandro Moschitti, Nianwen Xue, Olga Uryupina, and Yuchen
Zhang. CoNLL-2012 shared task: Modeling multilingual unrestricted coreference
in ontonotes. In Joint Conference on EMNLP and CoNLL-Shared Task, pages
1–40, 2012.
Group Pragglejaz. MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in
discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1):1–39, 2007.
Judita Preiss and David Yarowsky. Senseval-2 second international workshop on
evaluating word sense disambiguation systems. In SENSEVAL-2 Second Inter-
national Workshop on Evaluating Word Sense Disambiguation Systems, pages
1–163, 2001.
Erich Prem, Julia Neidhardt, Peter Knees, Stefan Woltran, and Hannes Werthner.
Digital humanism and norms in recommender systems. In First Workshop on
Normative Design and Evaluation of Recommender Systems, volume 3639, 2023.
David Premack and Guy Woodruff. Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(4):515–526, 1978.
Aman Priyanshu, Vedant Rishi Das, Shashank Rajiv Moghe, Harsh Rathod, Sai Sra-
van Medicherla, Mini Shail Chhabra, and Sarthak Shastri. Stance classification
with improved elementary classifiers using lemmatization (grand challenge). In
2020 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Multimedia Big Data (BigMM),
pages 466–470, 2020. doi: 10.1109/BigMM50055.2020.00077.
Sven-Oliver Proksch, Will Lowe, Jens Wäckerle, and Stuart Soroka. Multilingual
sentiment analysis: A new approach to measuring conflict in legislative speeches.
Legislative Studies Quarterly, 44(1):97–131, 2019.
Reid Pryzant, Richard Diehl Martinez, Nathan Dass, Sadao Kurohashi, Dan Jurafsky,
and Diyi Yang. Automatically neutralizing subjective bias in text. In AAAI,
volume 34, pages 480–489, 2020.
Tomáö Ptá ek, Ivan Habernal, and Jun Hong. Sarcasm detection on Czech and
English Twitter. In COLING, pages 213–223, 2014.
Vasin Punyakanok and Dan Roth. The use of classifiers in sequential inference.
NeurIPS, 13:995–1001, 2000.
Tobias Pütz, Daniël De Kok, Sebastian Pütz, and Erhard Hinrichs. Seq2seq or percep-
trons for robust lemmatization. an empirical examination. In 17th International
Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 2018), pages 193–207,
2018.
References 469

Peng Qi, Timothy Dozat, Yuhao Zhang, and Christopher D. Manning. Universal
Dependency parsing from scratch. In CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual
Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, pages 160–170, Brussels,
Belgium, October 2018. doi: 10.18653/v1/K18-2016.
Peng Qi, Yuhao Zhang, Yuhui Zhang, Jason Bolton, and Christopher D Manning.
Stanza: A python natural language processing toolkit for many human languages.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.07082, 2020.
Lin Qiu, Han Lin, Jonathan Ramsay, and Fang Yang. You are what you tweet: Per-
sonality expression and perception on Twitter. Journal of research in personality,
46(6):710–718, 2012.
Stephan Raaijmakers, Khiet P Truong, and Theresa Wilson. Multimodal subjectivity
analysis of multiparty conversation. In EMNLP, pages 466–474, 2008.
Alec Radford, Karthik Narasimhan, Tim Salimans, Ilya Sutskever, et al. Improving
language understanding by generative pre-training. Technical report, OpenAI,
2018.
Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever,
et al. Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI blog, 1(8),
2019.
Colin Raffel, Minh-Thang Luong, Peter J Liu, Ron J Weiss, and Douglas Eck.
Online and linear-time attention by enforcing monotonic alignments. In ICML,
pages 2837–2846, 2017.
Alessandro Raganato, Claudio Delli Bovi, and Roberto Navigli. Neural sequence
learning models for word sense disambiguation. In EMNLP, pages 1156–1167,
2017a.
Alessandro Raganato, Jose Camacho-Collados, and Roberto Navigli. Word sense
disambiguation: A unified evaluation framework and empirical comparison. In
EACL, pages 99–110, 2017b.
Alessandro Raganato, Yves Scherrer, and Jörg Tiedemann. The MuCoW test suite
at WMT 2019: Automatically harvested multilingual contrastive word sense dis-
ambiguation test sets for machine translation. In Fourth Conference on Machine
Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1), pages 470–480, 2019.
Karthik Raghunathan, Heeyoung Lee, Sudarshan Rangarajan, Nathanael Chambers,
Mihai Surdeanu, Dan Jurafsky, and Christopher Manning. A multi-pass sieve for
coreference resolution. In EMNLP, pages 492–501, 2010.
Edoardo Ragusa, Erik Cambria, Rodolfo Zunino, and Paolo Gastaldo. A survey on
deep learning in image polarity detection: Balancing generalization performances
and computational costs. Electronics, 8(7):783, 2019.
Afshin Rahimi, Yuan Li, and Trevor Cohn. Massively multilingual transfer for NER.
In ACL, pages 151–164, 2019.
Altaf Rahman and Vincent Ng. Narrowing the modeling gap: A cluster-ranking
approach to coreference resolution. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research,
40:469–521, 2011.
Altaf Rahman and Vincent Ng. Resolving complex cases of definite pronouns: The
Winograd schema challenge. In EMNLP-CoNLL, pages 777–789, 2012.
470 References

Mohammad Wali Ur Rahman, Sicong Shao, Pratik Satam, Salim Hariri, Chris
Padilla, Zoe Taylor, and Carlos Nevarez. A BERT-based deep learning approach
for reputation analysis in social media. In 2022 IEEE/ACS 19th International
Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA), pages 1–8, 2022.
Sunny Rai and Shampa Chakraverty. Metaphor detection using fuzzy rough sets. In
International Joint Conference on Rough Sets, pages 271–279, 2017.
Sunny Rai, Shampa Chakraverty, Devendra K Tayal, Divyanshu Sharma, and Ayush
Garg. Understanding metaphors using emotions. New Generation Computing, 37
(1):5–27, 2019.
Pranav Rajpurkar, Jian Zhang, Konstantin Lopyrev, and Percy Liang. SQuAD:
100,000+ questions for machine comprehension of text. In EMNLP, pages 2383–
2392, 2016.
Majid Ramezani, Mohammad-Reza Feizi-Derakhshi, and Mohammad-Ali Balafar.
Knowledge graph-enabled text-based automatic personality prediction. Compu-
tational Intelligence and Neuroscience, 2022, 2022.
Lance A Ramshaw and Mitchell P Marcus. Text chunking using transformation-
based learning. In Natural language processing using very large corpora, pages
157–176. Springer, 1999.
Toqir A Rana, Yu-N Cheah, and Tauseef Rana. Multi-level knowledge-based ap-
proach for implicit aspect identification. Applied Intelligence, 50:4616–4630,
2020.
Francisco Rangel, Fabio Celli, Paolo Rosso, Potthast Martin, Benno Stein, Walter
Daelemans, et al. Overview of the 3rd author profiling task at PAN 2015. In
CLEF2015 Working Notes. Working Notes of CLEF 2015-Conference and Labs
of the Evaluation forum., 2015.
Rasika Ransing and Archana Gulati. A survey of different approaches for word sense
disambiguation. In ICT Analysis and Applications, pages 435–445. Springer, 2022.
Delip Rao and Deepak Ravichandran. Semi-supervised polarity lexicon induction.
In EACL, pages 675–682, 2009.
David Rapaport, Merton Gill, and Roy Schafer. Diagnostic psychological testing:
The theory, statistical evaluation, and diagnostic application of a battery of tests:
Volume II. The Year Book, 1946.
Pushpendre Rastogi, Ryan Cotterell, and Jason Eisner. Weighting finite-state trans-
ductions with neural context. In NAACL-HLT, pages 623–633, 2016.
Lev Ratinov and Dan Roth. Design challenges and misconceptions in named entity
recognition. In CoNLL, pages 147–155, 2009.
Adwait Ratnaparkhi. A maximum entropy model for part-of-speech tagging. In
EMNLP, 1996.
Biswarup Ray, Avishek Garain, and Ram Sarkar. An ensemble-based hotel rec-
ommender system using sentiment analysis and aspect categorization of hotel
reviews. Applied Soft Computing, 98:106935, 2021.
Jonathon Read, Rebecca Dridan, Stephan Oepen, and Lars Jørgen Solberg. Sentence
boundary detection: A long solved problem? In COLING 2012: Posters, pages
985–994, 2012.
References 471

Marta Recasens and Eduard Hovy. BLANC: Implementing the rand index for
coreference evaluation. Natural Language Engineering, 17(4):485–510, 2011.
Marta Recasens, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Dan Jurafsky. Linguistic
models for analyzing and detecting biased language. In ACL, pages 1650–1659,
2013.
Marek Rei. Semi-supervised multitask learning for sequence labeling. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1704.07156, 2017.
Nils Reimers and Iryna Gurevych. Sentence-BERT: Sentence embeddings using
siamese BERT-networks. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages 3982–3992, 2019.
Tanya Reinhart. Coreference and bound anaphora: A restatement of the anaphora
questions. Linguistics and Philosophy, pages 47–88, 1983.
Nils Reiter. CorefAnnotator - a new annotation tool for entity references. In Abstracts
of EADH: Data in the Digital Humanities, pages 1–4, 2018.
Ahmed Remaida, Benyoussef Abdellaoui, Aniss Moumen, and Younes El Bouzekri
El Idrissi. Personality traits analysis using artificial neural networks: A literature
survey. In 2020 1st international conference on innovative research in applied
science, engineering and technology (IRASET), pages 1–6, 2020.
Robert Remus. Improving sentence-level subjectivity classification through read-
ability measurement. In 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics,
pages 168–174, 2011.
Feiliang Ren, Longhui Zhang, Shujuan Yin, Xiaofeng Zhao, Shilei Liu, Bochao Li,
and Yaduo Liu. A novel global feature-oriented relational triple extraction model
based on table filling. In EMNLP, pages 2646–2656, 2021a.
Lu Ren, Bo Xu, Hongfei Lin, Xikai Liu, and Liang Yang. Sarcasm detection with
sentiment semantics enhanced multi-level memory network. Neurocomputing,
401:320–326, 2020.
Zhancheng Ren, Qiang Shen, Xiaolei Diao, and Hao Xu. A sentiment-aware deep
learning approach for personality detection from text. Information Processing &
Management, 58(3):102532, 2021b.
Philip Resnik and David Yarowsky. Distinguishing systems and distinguishing
senses: New evaluation methods for word sense disambiguation. Natural Lan-
guage Engineering, 5(2):113–133, 1999.
Jeffrey C Reynar and Adwait Ratnaparkhi. A maximum entropy approach to identi-
fying sentence boundaries. arXiv preprint cmp-lg/9704002, 1997.
Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Sameer Singh, and Carlos Guestrin. “why should I trust you?”
Explaining the predictions of any classifier. In 22nd ACM SIGKDD international
conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pages 1135–1144, 2016.
Michael Riley. Some applications of tree-based modelling to speech and language.
In Proceedings of Speech and Natural Language, 1989.
Ellen Riloff. Automatically generating extraction patterns from untagged text. In
AAAI, pages 1044–1049, 1996.
Ellen Riloff and Janyce Wiebe. Learning extraction patterns for subjective expres-
sions. In EMNLP, pages 105–112, 2003.
472 References

Ellen Riloff, Ashequl Qadir, Prafulla Surve, Lalindra De Silva, Nathan Gilbert, and
Ruihong Huang. Sarcasm as contrast between a positive sentiment and negative
situation. In EMNLP, pages 704–714, 2013.
Kyeongmin Rim. MAE2: Portable annotation tool for general natural language use.
In Proc 12th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation,
pages 75–80, 2016.
Nicky Ringland, Xiang Dai, Ben Hachey, Sarvnaz Karimi, Cecile Paris, and James R.
Curran. NNE: A dataset for nested named entity recognition in english newswire.
In ACL, pages 5176–5181, 2019a.
Nicky Ringland, Xiang Dai, Ben Hachey, Sarvnaz Karimi, Cecile Paris, and James R
Curran. Nne: A dataset for nested named entity recognition in english newswire.
In ACL, pages 5176–5181, 2019b.
Annette Rios Gonzales, Laura Mascarell, and Rico Sennrich. Improving word sense
disambiguation in neural machine translation with sense embeddings. In Second
Conference on Machine Translation, pages 11–19, 2017.
David Ritchie. Metaphors in conversational context: Toward a connectivity theory
of metaphor interpretation. Metaphor and Symbol, 19(4):265–287, 2004.
Alan Ritter, Sam Clark, Oren Etzioni, et al. Named entity recognition in tweets: an
experimental study. In EMNLP, pages 1524–1534, 2011.
Leah Roberts. Syntactic processing, pages 227–247. Cambridge Handbooks in
Language and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, 2016. doi: 10.1017/
CBO9781107425965.011.
Kevin Dela Rosa and Jeffrey Ellen. Text classification methodologies applied to
micro-text in military chat. In ICML, pages 710–714, 2009. doi: 10.1109/ICMLA.
2009.49.
Rudolf Rosa and Zden k éabokrtskỳ. Unsupervised lemmatization as embeddings-
based word clustering. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.08528, 2019.
Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn B Mervis. Family resemblances: Studies in the internal
structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology, 7(4):573–605, 1975.
Eleanor Rosch, Carolyn B Mervis, Wayne D Gray, David M Johnson, and Penny
Boyes-Braem. Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8(3):
382–439, 1976.
Eleanor H Rosch. Natural categories. Cognitive psychology, 4(3):328–350, 1973.
Zachary Rosen. Computationally constructed concepts: A machine learning ap-
proach to metaphor interpretation using usage-based construction grammatical
cues. In Workshop on Figurative Language Processing, pages 102–109, 2018.
Frank Rosenblatt. The perceptron: a probabilistic model for information storage and
organization in the brain. Psychological review, 65(6):386, 1958.
Sascha Rothe and Hinrich Schütze. Autoextend: Extending word embeddings to
embeddings for synsets and lexemes. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages 1793–1803, 2015.
Kathrin Rothermich, Ayotola Ogunlana, and Natalia Jaworska. Change in humor
and sarcasm use based on anxiety and depression symptom severity during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 140:95–100, 2021.
Herbert Rubenstein and John B. Goodenough. Contextual correlates of synonymy.
Communications of the ACM, 8(10):627–633, 1965.
References 473

Rachel Rudinger, Jason Naradowsky, Brian Leonard, and Benjamin Van Durme.
Gender bias in coreference resolution. In NAACL-HLT, pages 8–14, 2018.
Dwijen Rudrapal, Anupam Jamatia, Kunal Chakma, Amitava Das, and Björn Gam-
bäck. Sentence boundary detection for social media text. In 12th International
Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 254–260, Trivandrum, India,
December 2015. NLP Association of India.
Hotze Rullmann. Two types of negative polarity items. In North East Linguistics
Society, 1996.
David E Rumelhart and Andrew Ortony. The representation of knowledge in memory.
Schooling and the acquisition of knowledge, 99:135, 1977.
Josef Ruppenhofer, Michael Ellsworth, Myriam Schwarzer-Petruck, Christopher R
Johnson, and Jan Scheffczyk. FrameNet II: Extended theory and practice. Tech-
nical report, International Computer Science Institute, 2016.
Alexander M Rush, Roi Reichart, Michael Collins, and Amir Globerson. Improved
parsing and POS tagging using inter-sentence consistency constraints. In EMNLP-
CoNLL, pages 1434–1444, 2012.
Samir Rustamov. A hybrid system for subjectivity analysis. Advances in Fuzzy
Systems, 2018, 2018.
Samir Rustamov, Elshan Mustafayev, and Mark A Clements. Sentence-level subjec-
tivity detection using neuro-fuzzy models. In 4th Workshop on Computational
Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 108–114,
2013.
Tatyana Ruzsics and Tanja Samardzic. Neural sequence-to-sequence learning of
internal word structure. In CoNLL, pages 184–194, 2017.
Nipun Sadvilkar and Mark Neumann. PySBD: Pragmatic sentence boundary dis-
ambiguation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.09657, 2020.
Horacio Saggion↵ and Adam Funk. Interpreting SentiWordNet for opinion classifica-
tion. In Seventh Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation,
pages 1129–1133, 2010.
Santwana Sagnika, Bhabani Shankar Prasad Mishra, and Saroj K Meher. Improved
method of word embedding for efficient analysis of human sentiments. Multimedia
Tools and Applications, 79(43):32389–32413, 2020.
Santwana Sagnika, Bhabani Shankar Prasad Mishra, and Saroj K Meher. An
attention-based CNN-LSTM model for subjectivity detection in opinion-mining.
Neural Computing and Applications, 33(24):17425–17438, 2021.
Hassan Saif, Yulan He, Miriam Fernandez, and Harith Alani. Contextual semantics
for sentiment analysis of Twitter. Information Processing & Management, 52(1):
5–19, 2016.
Keisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, and Yejin Choi. Wino-
grande: An adversarial winograd schema challenge at scale. In AAAI, pages
8732–8740, 2020.
Keisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, and Yejin Choi. Wino-
grande: An adversarial winograd schema challenge at scale. Communications of
the ACM, 64(9):99–106, 2021.
474 References

David Salgado, Martin Krallinger, Marc Depaule, Elodie Drula, Ashish V Tendulkar,
Florian Leitner, Alfonso Valencia, and Christophe Marcelle. MyMiner: a web
application for computer-assisted biocuration and text annotation. Bioinformatics,
28(17):2285–2287, 2012.
Said A Salloum, Rehan Khan, and Khaled Shaalan. A survey of semantic analysis
approaches. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computer
Vision, pages 61–70, 2020.
Merrilee H Salmon. Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking. Matthew J. Van
Cleave, 1989.
Steven L. Salzberg. C4.5: Programs for machine learning by j. ross quinlan. morgan
kaufmann publishers, inc., 1993. Machine Learning, 16(3):235–240, 1994.
Fahime Same, Guanyi Chen, and Kees Van Deemter. Non-neural models matter: a
re-evaluation of neural referring expression generation systems. In ACL, pages
5554–5567, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022. doi: 10.18653/v1/[Link]-long.380.
George Sanchez. Sentence boundary detection in legal text. In Natural Legal
Language Processing Workshop 2019, pages 31–38, 2019.
Mark Sanderson. Word sense disambiguation and information retrieval. In SIGIR,
pages 142–151, 1994.
Erik F Sang and Sabine Buchholz. Introduction to the CoNLL-2000 shared task:
Chunking. arXiv preprint cs/0009008, 2000.
Erik F Sang and Jorn Veenstra. Representing text chunks. arXiv preprint cs/9907006,
1999.
Erik Tjong Kim Sang. Text chunking by system combination. In Fourth Confer-
ence on Computational Natural Language Learning and the Second Learning
Language in Logic Workshop, 2000.
Erik Tjong Kim Sang and Fien De Meulder. Introduction to the CoNLL-2003
shared task: Language-independent named entity recognition. In HLT-NAACL,
pages 142–147, 2003.
Cicero Nogueira dos Santos and Victor Guimaraes. Boosting named entity recogni-
tion with neural character embeddings. arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.05008, 2015.
Maarten Sap, Ronan Le Bras, Emily Allaway, Chandra Bhagavatula, Nicholas Lourie,
Hannah Rashkin, Brendan Roof, Noah A Smith, and Yejin Choi. ATOMIC: An
atlas of machine commonsense for if-then reasoning. In AAAI, volume 33, pages
3027–3035, 2019a.
Maarten Sap, Hannah Rashkin, Derek Chen, Ronan Le Bras, and Yejin Choi. Social
iqa: Commonsense reasoning about social interactions. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages
4462–4472, 2019b.
Sunita Sarawagi and William W Cohen. Semi-Markov conditional random fields for
information extraction. NeurIPS, 17:1185–1192, 2004.
Ryohei Sasano and Sadao Kurohashi. A discriminative approach to Japanese zero
anaphora resolution with large-scale lexicalized case frames. In IJCNLP, pages
758–766, 2011.
Ryohei Sasano, Daisuke Kawahara, and Sadao Kurohashi. A fully-lexicalized proba-
bilistic model for Japanese zero anaphora resolution. In COLING, pages 769–776,
2008.
References 475

Kumara Sastry, David Goldberg, and Graham Kendall. Genetic algorithms. In

Search Methodologies, pages 97–125. Springer, 2005.
Ranjan Satapathy, Iti Chaturvedi, Erik Cambria, Shirley S Ho, and Jin Cheon Na.
Subjectivity detection in nuclear energy tweets. Computación y Sistemas, 21(4):
657–664, 2017a.
Ranjan Satapathy, Claudia Guerreiro, Iti Chaturvedi, and Erik Cambria. Phonetic-
based microtext normalization for twitter sentiment analysis. In ICDM Workshops,
pages 407–413, 2017b.
Ranjan Satapathy, Yang Li, Sandro Cavallari, and Erik Cambria. Seq2seq deep
learning models for microtext normalization. In IJCNN, pages 1–8, 2019a.
Ranjan Satapathy, Aalind Singh, and Erik Cambria. PhonSenticNet: A cognitive
approach to microtext normalization for concept-level sentiment analysis. In
International Conference on Computational Data and Social Networks, pages
177–188, 2019b.
Ranjan Satapathy, Erik Cambria, Andrea Nanetti, and Amir Hussain. A review
of shorthand systems: From brachygraphy to microtext and beyond. Cognitive
Computation, 12(4):778–792, 2020.
Ranjan Satapathy, Shweta Rajesh Pardeshi, and Erik Cambria. Polarity and subjec-
tivity detection with multitask learning and BERT embedding. Future Internet,
14(7):191, 2022.
Ville Satopaa, Jeannie Albrecht, David Irwin, and Barath Raghavan. Finding a
“kneedle” in a haystack: Detecting knee points in system behavior. In 2011 31st
International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, pages
166–171, 2011.
Gerard Saucier. An alternative multi-language structure for personality attributes.
European Journal of Personality, 17(3):179–205, 2003.
Danielle Saunders, Rosie Sallis, and Bill Byrne. Neural machine translation doesn’t
translate gender coreference right unless you make it. In Second Workshop on
Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, pages 35–43, 2020.
Agata Savary, Bartosz Zaborowski, Aleksandra Krawczyk-Wieczorek, and Filip
Makowiecki. Sejfek - a lexicon and a shallow grammar of polish economic
multi-word units. In 3rd Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon, pages
195–214, 2012.
Mark Savickas. Career Counseling. American Psychological Association Washing-
ton, DC, 2019.
Ramit Sawhney, Shivam Agarwal, Atula Tejaswi Neerkaje, Nikolaos Aletras, Preslav
Nakov, and Lucie Flek. Towards suicide ideation detection through online conver-
sational context. In 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and
Development in Information Retrieval, pages 1716–1727, 2022.
Prateek Saxena and Soma Paul. EPIE dataset: A corpus for possible idiomatic
expressions. In International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue, pages
87–94, 2020.
Bianca Scarlini, Tommaso Pasini, and Roberto Navigli. Just “onesec” for producing
multilingual sense-annotated data. In ACL, pages 699–709, 2019.
476 References

Bianca Scarlini, Tommaso Pasini, and Roberto Navigli. With more contexts comes
better performance: Contextualized sense embeddings for all-round word sense
disambiguation. In EMNLP, pages 3528–3539, 2020a.
Bianca Scarlini, Tommaso Pasini, and Roberto Navigli. SensEmBERT: Context-
enhanced sense embeddings for multilingual word sense disambiguation. In AAAI,
pages 8758–8765, 2020b.
Roger C Schank. Conceptual dependency: A theory of natural language understand-
ing. Cognitive psychology, 3(4):552–631, 1972.
Robert E Schapire and Yoram Singer. Improved boosting algorithms using
confidence-rated predictions. Machine learning, 37(3):297–336, 1999.
Robert E Schapire and Yoram Singer. BoosTexter: A boosting-based system for text
categorization. Machine Learning, 39(2):135–168, 2000.
Timo Schick and Hinrich Schütze. It’s not just size that matters: Small language
models are also few-shot learners. In NAACL-HLT, pages 2339–2352, 2021.
Helmut Schmid. Unsupervised learning of period disambiguation for tokenisation.
Internal Report, IMS-CL, 2000.
Marine Schmitt and Matthieu Constant. Neural lemmatization of multiword ex-
pressions. In Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and WordNet (MWE-WN
2019), pages 142–148, 2019.
Martin Schmitt, Simon Steinheber, Konrad Schreiber, and Benjamin Roth. Joint
aspect and polarity classification for aspect-based sentiment analysis with end-to-
end neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.09238, 2018.
Kaitlyn B Schodt, Selena I Quiroz, Brittany Wheeler, Deborah L Hall, and Yasin N
Silva. Cyberbullying and mental health in adults: The moderating role of social
media use and gender. Frontiers in Psychiatry, page 954, 2021.
Karin Kipper Schuler. VerbNet: A broad-coverage, comprehensive verb lexicon.
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA,United States, 2005.
H Andrew Schwartz, Johannes C Eichstaedt, Margaret L Kern, Lukasz Dziurzynski,
Stephanie M Ramones, Megha Agrawal, Achal Shah, Michal Kosinski, David
Stillwell, Martin EP Seligman, et al. Personality, gender, and age in the language
of social media: The open-vocabulary approach. PloS One, 8(9):e73791, 2013.
Federico Scozzafava, Marco Maru, Fabrizio Brignone, Giovanni Torrisi, and Roberto
Navigli. Personalized pagerank with syntagmatic information for multilingual
word sense disambiguation. In ACL, pages 37–46, 2020.
Djamé Seddah, Reut Tsarfaty, Sandra Kübler, Marie Candito, Jinho Choi, Richárd
Farkas, Jennifer Foster, Iakes Goenaga, Koldo Gojenola, Yoav Goldberg, et al.
Overview of the SPMRL 2013 shared task: cross-framework evaluation of parsing
morphologically rich languages. In Fourth Workshop on Statistical Parsing of
Morphologically-Rich Languages, 2013.
Norbert M Seel. Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Springer Science &
Business Media, 2011.
Kazuhiro Seki, Atsushi Fujii, and Tetsuya Ishikawa. A probabilistic model for
japanese zero pronoun resolution integrating syntactic and semantic features. In
NLPRS, pages 403–410, 2001.
References 477

Kazuhiro Seki, Atsushi Fujii, and Tetsuya Ishikawa. A probabilistic method for
analyzing japanese anaphora integrating zero pronoun detection and resolution.
In COLING, pages 1–7, 2002.
Rico Sennrich, Orhan Firat, Kyunghyun Cho, Alexandra Birch, Barry Haddow, Ju-
lian Hitschler, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Samuel Läubli, Antonio Valerio Miceli
Barone, Jozef Mokry, et al. Nematus: a toolkit for neural machine translation.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.04357, 2017.
Jesus Serrano-Guerrero, Jose A Olivas, Francisco P Romero, and Enrique Herrera-
Viedma. Sentiment analysis: A review and comparative analysis of web services.
Information Sciences, 311:18–38, 2015.
Fei Sha and Fernando Pereira. Shallow parsing with conditional random fields. In
NAACL-HLT, pages 213–220, 2003.
Sarah Shafqat, Hammad Majeed, Qaisar Javaid, and Hafiz Farooq Ahmad. Standard
NER tagging scheme for big data healthcare analytics built on unified medical
corpora. Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Technology, 2(4):152–157, 2022.
Yan Shao, Christian Hardmeier, Jörg Tiedemann, and Joakim Nivre. Character-based
joint segmentation and pos tagging for chinese using bidirectional rnn-crf. arXiv
preprint arXiv:1704.01314, 2017.
Guangyao Shen, Jia Jia, Liqiang Nie, Fuli Feng, Cunjun Zhang, Tianrui Hu, Tat-
Seng Chua, and Wenwu Zhu. Depression detection via harvesting social media:
A multimodal dictionary learning solution. In IJCAI, pages 3838–3844, 2017.
Libin Shen, Giorgio Satta, and Aravind Joshi. Guided learning for bidirectional se-
quence classification. In 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational
Linguistics, pages 760–767, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007.
Xiangqing Shen, Siwei Wu, and Rui Xia. Dense-atomic: Towards densely-connected
ATOMIC with high knowledge coverage and massive multi-hop paths. In ACL,
pages 13292–13305, 2023a.
Yiqiu Shen, Laura Heacock, Jonathan Elias, Keith D Hentel, Beatriu Reig, George
Shih, and Linda Moy. Chatgpt & other large language models are double-edged
swords. Radiology, 307(2):e230163, 2023b.
Jonathan Richard Shewchuk et al. An introduction to the conjugate gradient method
without the agonizing pain, 1994.
Yong Shi, Luyao Zhu, Wei Li, Kun Guo, and Yuanchun Zheng. Survey on classic
and latest textual sentiment analysis articles and techniques. International Journal
of Information Technology & Decision Making, 18(04):1243–1287, 2019.
Takashi Shibuya and Eduard Hovy. Nested named entity recognition via second-best
sequence learning and decoding. Transactions of the Association for Computa-
tional Linguistics, 8:605–620, 2020.
Mayank Shrivastava and Shishir Kumar. A pragmatic and intelligent model for
sarcasm detection in social media text. Technology in Society, 64:101489, 2021.
Ekaterina Shutova. Automatic metaphor interpretation as a paraphrasing task. In
NAACL-HLT, pages 1029–1037, 2010.
Ekaterina Shutova. Design and evaluation of metaphor processing systems. Com-
putational Linguistics, 41(4):579–623, 2015.
478 References

Ekaterina Shutova and Simone Teufel. Metaphor corpus annotated for source-target
domain mappings. In Seventh International Conference on Language Resources
and Evaluation (LREC’10), pages 3255–3261, 2010.
Ekaterina Shutova, Douwe Kiela, and Jean Maillard. Black holes and white rabbits:
Metaphor identification with visual features. In NAACL-HLT, pages 160–170,
2016.
Vered Shwartz, Peter West, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, and Yejin Choi.
Unsupervised commonsense question answering with self-talk. In EMNLP, pages
4615–4629, 2020.
Candace Lee Sidner. Towards a computational theory of definite anaphora com-
prehension in english discourse. Technical report, Massachusetts Inst of Tech
Cambridge Artificial Intelligence lab, 1979.
Natalia Silveira, Timothy Dozat, Marie-Catherine De Marneffe, Samuel R Bowman,
Miriam Connor, John Bauer, and Christopher D Manning. A gold standard
dependency corpus for English. In LREC, pages 2897–2904, 2014.
Stefano Silvestri, Francesco Gargiulo, and Mario Ciampi. Iterative annotation of
biomedical ner corpora with deep neural networks and knowledge bases. Applied
Sciences, 12(12):5775, 2022.
John Simpson and Edmund Weiner. The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2 edition, 1989.
Push Singh, Thomas Lin, Erik T. Mueller, Grace Lim, Travell Perkins, and Wan Li
Zhu. Open mind common sense: Knowledge acquisition from the general public.
In On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems, volume 2519 of Lecture Notes in
Computer Science, pages 1223–1237, 2002.
Richard Laishram Singh, Krishnendu Ghosh, Kishorjit Nongmeikapam, and Sivaji
Bandyopadhyay. A decision tree based word sense disambiguation system in
manipuri language. Advanced Computing, 5(4):17, 2014.
Juan Sixto, Aitor Almeida, and Diego López-de Ipiña. An approach to subjectivity
detection on Twitter using the structured information. In International Conference
on Computational Collective Intelligence, pages 121–130, 2016.
Sara Skilbred-Fjeld, Silje Endresen Reme, and Svein Mossige. Cyberbullying in-
volvement and mental health problems among late adolescents. Cyberpsychology:
Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 14(1), 2020.
Wojciech Skut, Brigitte Krenn, Thorsten Brants, and Hans Uszkoreit. An annota-
tion scheme for free word order languages. 5th Conference on Applied Natural
Language Processing, 05 2002. doi: 10.3115/974557.974571.
Stavroula Skylaki, Ali Oskooei, Omar Bari, Nadja Herger, and Zac Kriegman. Named
entity recognition in the legal domain using a pointer generator network. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2012.09936, 2020.
Edgar A Smith. Devereux readability index. The Journal of Educational Research,
54(8):298–303, 1961.
Paul Smolensky, Richard McCoy, Roland Fernandez, Matthew Goldrick, and Jian-
feng Gao. Neurocompositional computing: From the central paradox of cognition
to a new generation of ai systems. AI Magazine, 43(3):308–322, 2022.
References 479

Jake Snell, Kevin Swersky, and Richard Zemel. Prototypical networks for few-shot
learning. In 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing
Systems, pages 4080–4090, 2017. ISBN 9781510860964.
Rion Snow, Dan Jurafsky, and Andrew Y Ng. Semantic taxonomy induction from
heterogenous evidence. In ACL, pages 801–808, 2006.
Benjamin Snyder and Martha Palmer. The English all-words task. In SENSEVAL-3,
the Third International Workshop on the Evaluation of Systems for the Semantic
Analysis of Text, pages 41–43, 2004.
Richard Socher, Danqi Chen, Christopher D Manning, and Andrew Ng. Reasoning
with neural tensor networks for knowledge base completion. In NIPS, pages
926–934, 2013a.
Richard Socher, Alex Perelygin, Jean Wu, Jason Chuang, Christopher D Manning,
Andrew Y Ng, and Christopher Potts. Recursive deep models for semantic com-
positionality over a sentiment treebank. In EMNLP, pages 1631–1642, 2013b.
Anders Søgaard. Simple semi-supervised training of part-of-speech taggers. In ACL
2010 Conference Short Papers, pages 205–208, Uppsala, Sweden, July 2010.
Mohammad Soleymani, Sadjad Asghari-Esfeden, Yun Fu, and Maja Pantic. Analysis
of eeg signals and facial expressions for continuous emotion detection. IEEE
Transactions on Affective Computing, 7(1):17–28, 2015.
Swapna Somasundaran and Janyce Wiebe. Recognizing stances in ideological on-
line debates. In NAACL HLT 2010 workshop on computational approaches to
analysis and generation of emotion in text, pages 116–124, 2010.
Swapna Somasundaran, Josef Ruppenhofer, and Janyce Wiebe. Detecting arguing
and sentiment in meetings. In 8th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue,
pages 26–34, 2007.
Sheetal Sonawane and Parag Kulkarni. The role of coreference resolution in extrac-
tive summarization. In 2016 International Conference on Computing, Analytics
and Security Trends (CAST), pages 351–356, 2016.
Bosheng Song, Fen Li, Yuansheng Liu, and Xiangxiang Zeng. Deep learning meth-
ods for biomedical named entity recognition: a survey and qualitative comparison.
Briefings in Bioinformatics, 22(6):bbab282, 2021.
Linfeng Song, Kun Xu, Yue Zhang, Jianshu Chen, and Dong Yu. ZPR2: Joint zero
pronoun recovery and resolution using multi-task learning and BERT. In ACL,
pages 5429–5434, 2020a.
Min Song, Il-Yeol Song, Xiaohua Hu, and Robert B Allen. Integrating text chunking
with mixture hidden Markov models for effective biomedical information extrac-
tion. In International Conference on Computational Science, pages 976–984,
2005.
Wei Song, Jingjin Guo, Ruiji Fu, Ting Liu, and Lizhen Liu. A knowledge graph
embedding approach for metaphor processing. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio,
Speech, and Language Processing, 29:406–420, 2020b.
Wee Meng Soon, Hwee Tou Ng, and Daniel Chung Yong Lim. A machine learning
approach to coreference resolution of noun phrases. Computational Linguistics,
27(4):521–544, 2001.
480 References

Hoong-Cheng Soong, Norazira Binti A Jalil, Ramesh Kumar Ayyasamy, and Rehan
Akbar. The essential of sentiment analysis and opinion mining in social media:
Introduction and survey of the recent approaches and techniques. In 2019 IEEE 9th
Symposium on Computer Applications & Industrial Electronics, pages 272–277,
2019.
Vibeke Sorensen, John Stephen Lansing, Nagaraju Thummanapalli, and Erik Cam-
bria. Mood of the planet: Challenging visions of big data in the arts. Cognitive
Computation, 14(1):310–321, 2022.
Benjamin Spector. Global positive polarity items and obligatory exhaustivity. Se-
mantics and Pragmatics, 7:11–1, 2014.
Robyn Speer, Joshua Chin, and Catherine Havasi. ConceptNet 5.5: An open multi-
lingual graph of general knowledge. In AAAI, pages 4444–4451, 2017.
Elizabeth S Spelke and Katherine D Kinzler. Core knowledge. Developmental
science, 10(1):89–96, 2007.
Drahomíra Spoustová, Jan Haji , Jan Raab, and Miroslav Spousta. Semi-supervised
training for the averaged perceptron POS tagger. In 12th Conference of the
European Chapter of the ACL (EACL 2009), pages 763–771, Athens, Greece,
March 2009.
Clemens Stachl, Florian Pargent, Sven Hilbert, Gabriella M Harari, Ramona
Schoedel, Sumer Vaid, Samuel D Gosling, and Markus Bühner. Personality
research and assessment in the era of machine learning. European Journal of
Personality, 34(5):613–631, 2020.
Sanja ätajner and Seren Yenikent. A survey of automatic personality detection from
texts. In COLING, pages 6284–6295, 2020.
Sanja ätajner and Seren Yenikent. Why is MBTI personality detection from texts a
difficult task? In EACL, pages 3580–3589, 2021.
Efstathios Stamatatos, Nikos Fakotakis, and George Kokkinakis. Automatic extrac-
tion of rules for sentence boundary disambiguation. In Workshop on Machine
Learning in Human Language Technology, pages 88–92, 1999.
Keith Stanovich and Richard West. Advancing the rationality debate. Behavioral
and brain sciences, 23(5):701–717, 2000.
Harald Steck, Chaitanya Ekanadham, and Nathan Kallus. Is cosine-similarity of
embeddings really about similarity? In Web Conference, WWW ’24. ACM, May
2024. doi: 10.1145/3589335.3651526.
Gerard Steen, Lettie Dorst, Berenike Herrmann, Anna Kaal, Tina Krennmayr, and
Trijntje Pasma. A method for linguistic metaphor identification from MIP to
MIPVU preface. Method For Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP To
MIPVU, 14:IX–+, 2010.
Josef Steinberger, Massimo Poesio, Mijail A Kabadjov, and Karel Jeûek. Two uses of
anaphora resolution in summarization. Information Processing & Management,
43(6):1663–1680, 2007.
Pontus Stenetorp, Sampo Pyysalo, Goran TopiÊ, Tomoko Ohta, Sophia Ananiadou,
and Jun’ichi Tsujii. Brat: a web-based tool for nlp-assisted text annotation. In
EACL, pages 102–107, 2012.
References 481

Mark Stevenson and Robert Gaizauskas. Experiments on sentence boundary detec-

tion. In Sixth Applied Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 84–89,
2000.
Rosemary J. Stevenson, Rosalind A. Crawley, and David Kleinman. Thematic roles,
focus and the representation of events. Language and Cognitive Processes, 9(4):
519–548, 1994.
DJ Stillwell and M Kosinski. myPersonality project website, 2015. URL https:
//[Link]/[Link]/mypersonality.
Dario Stojanovski and Alexander Fraser. Coreference and coherence in neural
machine translation: A study using oracle experiments. In Third Conference on
Machine Translation: Research Papers, pages 49–60, 2018.
Christopher Stokoe, Michael P Oakes, and John Tait. Word sense disambiguation
in information retrieval revisited. In 26th Annual International ACM SIGIR Con-
ference on Research and Development in Informaion Retrieval, pages 159–166,
2003.
Philip J Stone, Dexter C Dunphy, and Marshall S Smith. The general inquirer: A
computer approach to content analysis. MIT press, 1966.
Veselin Stoyanov, Claire Cardie, and Janyce Wiebe. Multi-perspective question
answering using the opqa corpus. In EMNLP-HLT, pages 923–930, 2005.
Veselin Stoyanov, Nathan Gilbert, Claire Cardie, and Ellen Riloff. Conundrums
in noun phrase coreference resolution: Making sense of the state-of-the-art. In
ACL-IJCNLP, pages 656–664, 2009.
Jana Straková, Milan Straka, and Jan Hajic. Neural architectures for nested NER
through linearization. In ACL, pages 5326–5331, 2019.
Carlo Strapparava, Alessandro Valitutti, et al. Wordnet affect: an affective extension
of wordnet. In LREC, pages 1083–1086, 2004.
Stephanie Strassel. Simple metadata annotation specification version 5.0–may 14,
2003, 2003.
Michael Strube, Stefan Rapp, and Christoph Müller. The influence of minimum edit
distance on reference resolution. In EMNLP, pages 312–319, 2002.
Tomek Strzalkowski, George Aaron Broadwell, Sarah Taylor, Laurie Feldman,
Samira Shaikh, Ting Liu, Boris Yamrom, Kit Cho, Umit Boz, Ignacio Cases,
et al. Robust extraction of metaphor from novel data. In First Workshop on
Metaphor in NLP, pages 67–76, 2013.
Amber Stubbs and Özlem Uzuner. Annotating longitudinal clinical narratives for de-
identification: The 2014 I2B2/uthealth corpus. Journal of Biomedical Informatics,
58:S20–S29, 2015.
Chang Su, Shuman Huang, and Yijiang Chen. Context-dependent metaphor inter-
pretation based on semantic relatedness. In Natural Language Processing and
Chinese Computing, pages 182–193. Springer, 2015.
Chang Su, Shuman Huang, and Yijiang Chen. Automatic detection and interpretation
of nominal metaphor based on the theory of meaning. Neurocomputing, 219:300–
311, 2017.
482 References

Chang Su, Ying Peng, Shuman Huang, and Yijiang Chen. A metaphor compre-
hension method based on culture-related hierarchical semantic model. Neural
Processing Letters, 51(3):2807–2826, 2020.
Jianlin Su, Ahmed Murtadha, Shengfeng Pan, Jing Hou, Jun Sun, Wanwei Huang,
Bo Wen, and Yunfeng Liu. Global pointer: Novel efficient span-based approach
for named entity recognition. arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.03054, 2022.
Ming-Hsiang Su, Chung-Hsien Wu, and Yu-Ting Zheng. Exploiting turn-taking tem-
poral evolution for personality trait perception in dyadic conversations. IEEE/ACM
Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 24(4):733–744, 2016.
Niranjan Subrahmanya and Yung C Shin. Sparse multiple kernel learning for signal
processing applications. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence, 32(5):788–798, 2009.
Amarnag Subramanya, Slav Petrov, and Fernando Pereira. Efficient graph-based
semi-supervised learning of structured tagging models. In EMNLP, EMNLP ’10,
pages 167–176, USA, 2010.
Fabian M. Suchanek, Gjergji Kasneci, and Gerhard Weikum. YAGO: A core of
semantic knowledge. In International Conference on the World Wide Web, pages
697–706, 2007.
Rhea Sukthanker, Soujanya Poria, Erik Cambria, and Ramkumar Thirunavukarasu.
Anaphora and coreference resolution: A review. Information Fusion, 59:139–162,
2020.
Chi Sun, Xipeng Qiu, Yige Xu, and Xuanjing Huang. How to fine-tune BERT
for text classification? In China National Conference on Chinese Computational
Linguistics, pages 194–206, 2019.
Xiangguo Sun, Bo Liu, Jiuxin Cao, Junzhou Luo, and Xiaojun Shen. Who am I?
Personality detection based on deep learning for texts. In 2018 IEEE International
Conference on Communications (ICC), pages 1–6, 2018.
Xu Sun, Louis-Philippe Morency, Daisuke Okanohara, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka, and
Jun’ichi Tsujii. Modeling latent-dynamic in shallow parsing: A latent conditional
model with improved inference. In COLING, pages 841–848, 2008.
Yu Sun, Shuohuan Wang, Yukun Li, Shikun Feng, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, and Haifeng
Wang. ERNIE 2.0: A continual pre-training framework for language understand-
ing. In AAAI, pages 8968–8975, 2020.
Yosephine Susanto, Andrew Livingstone, Bee Chin Ng, and Erik Cambria. The
hourglass model revisited. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 35(5):96–102, 2020.
Charles Sutton, Andrew McCallum, and Khashayar Rohanimanesh. Dynamic condi-
tional random fields: Factorized probabilistic models for labeling and segmenting
sequence data. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 8(3), 2007.
Jun Suzuki and Hideki Isozaki. Semi-supervised sequential labeling and segmen-
tation using giga-word scale unlabeled data. In ACL-08: HLT, pages 665–673,
2008.
Swati Swati, Adrian MladeniÊ Grobelnik, Dunja MladeniÊ, and Marko Grobelnik.
A commonsense-infused language-agnostic learning framework for enhancing
prediction of political polarity in multilingual news headlines. arXiv e-prints,
pages arXiv–2212, 2022.
References 483

Afraz Z Syed, Muhammad Aslam, and Ana Maria Martinez-Enriquez. Associating

targets with sentiunits: a step forward in sentiment analysis of urdu text. Artificial
intelligence review, 41(4):535–561, 2014.
Symeon Symeonidis, Dimitrios Effrosynidis, and Avi Arampatzis. A comparative
evaluation of pre-processing techniques and their interactions for twitter sentiment
analysis. Expert Systems with Applications, 110:298–310, 2018.
Anna Szabolcsi. Positive polarity–negative polarity. Natural Language & Linguistic
Theory, 22(2):409–452, 2004.
Charles S Taber and Milton Lodge. Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of
political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50(3):755–769, 2006.
Maite Taboada, Julian Brooke, Milan Tofiloski, Kimberly Voll, and Manfred Stede.
Lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis. Computational Linguistics, 37(2):
267–307, 2011.
Kaveh Taghipour and Hwee Tou Ng. Semi-supervised word sense disambiguation
using word embeddings in general and specific domains. In NAACL-HLT, pages
314–323, 2015a.
Kaveh Taghipour and Hwee Tou Ng. One million sense-tagged instances for word
sense disambiguation and induction. In Nineteenth Conference on Computational
Natural Language Learning, pages 338–344, 2015b.
Shunichi Tahara, Kazushi Ikeda, and Keiichiro Hoashi. Empathic dialogue system
based on emotions extracted from tweets. In 24th International Conference on
Intelligent User Interfaces, pages 52–56, 2019.
Henri Tajfel, John C Turner, William G Austin, and Stephen Worchel. An inte-
grative theory of intergroup conflict. Organizational Identity: A Reader, 56(65):
9780203505984–16, 1979.
Alon Talmor, Jonathan Herzig, Nicholas Lourie, and Jonathan Berant. Common-
senseqa: A question answering challenge targeting commonsense knowledge. In
NAACL-HLT, pages 4149–4158, 2019.
Partha Pratim Talukdar and Koby Crammer. New regularized algorithms for trans-
ductive learning. In Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases:
European Conference, pages 442–457, 2009.
Xin Tan, Shaohui Kuang, and Deyi Xiong. Detecting and translating dropped
pronouns in neural machine translation. In NLPCC, pages 343–354, 2019.
Niket Tandon, Gerard de Melo, Fabian M. Suchanek, and Gerhard Weikum. We-
bchild: harvesting and organizing commonsense knowledge from the web. In 7th
ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM, pages
523–532, 2014.
An Quang Tang, Xiuzhen Zhang, Minh Ngoc Dinh, and Erik Cambria. Prompted
aspect key point analysis for quantitative review summarization. In ACL, 2024.
Duyu Tang, Furu Wei, Bing Qin, Ming Zhou, and Ting Liu. Building large-scale
Twitter-specific sentiment lexicon: A representation learning approach. In COL-
ING, pages 172–182, 2014a.
Duyu Tang, Furu Wei, Nan Yang, Ming Zhou, Ting Liu, and Bing Qin. Learning
sentiment-specific word embedding for twitter sentiment classification. In ACL,
volume 1, pages 1555–1565, 2014b.
484 References

Gongbo Tang, Rico Sennrich, and Joakim Nivre. Encoders help you disambiguate
word senses in neural machine translation. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages 1429–1435,
2019.
Mariona Taulé, M Antònia Martí, and Marta Recasens. AnCora: Multilevel annotated
corpora for catalan and spanish. In Sixth International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation (LREC’08), pages 1–6, 2008.
Yla R Tausczik and James W Pennebaker. The psychological meaning of words:
LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social
Psychology, 29(1):24–54, 2010.
Paul Taylor, Alan W Black, and Richard Caley. The architecture of the Festival
speech synthesis system. In The Third ESCA/COCOSDA Workshop (ETRW) on
Speech Synthesis, 1998.
Simone Tedeschi and Roberto Navigli. MultiNERD: A multilingual, multi-genre
and fine-grained dataset for named entity recognition (and disambiguation). In
NAACL, pages 801–812, 2022.
Simone Tedeschi, Simone Conia, Francesco Cecconi, and Roberto Navigli. Named
entity recognition for entity linking: What works and what’s next. In EMNLP,
pages 2584–2596, 2021a.
Simone Tedeschi, Valentino Maiorca, Niccolò Campolungo, Francesco Cecconi, and
Roberto Navigli. WikiNEuRal: Combined neural and knowledge-based silver data
creation for multilingual ner. In EMNLP, pages 2521–2533, 2021b.
Heike Telljohann, Erhard Hinrichs, Sandra Kübler, and Ra Kübler. The TüBa-D/Z
treebank: Annotating german with a context-free backbone. In LREC, pages
2229–2232, 2004.
Puneshkumar U Tembhare, Ritesh Hiware, Shrey Ojha, Abhisheik Nimpure, and
Faiz raza. Content recommender system based on users reviews. In International
Conference on ICT for Sustainable Development, pages 441–451, 2023.
Joel R. Tetreault. A corpus-based evaluation of centering and pronoun resolution.
Computational Linguistics, 27(4):507–520, 2001.
Mike Thelwall, Kevan Buckley, and Georgios Paltoglou. Sentiment strength detec-
tion for the social web. Journal of the American Society for Information Science
and Technology, 63(1):163–173, 2012.
Yuan Tian, Nan Xu, Wenji Mao, and Daniel Zeng. Modeling conceptual attribute
likeness and domain inconsistency for metaphor detection. In EMNLP, pages
7736–7752, 2023.
Orith Toledo-Ronen, Matan Orbach, Yoav Katz, and Noam Slonim. Multi-domain
targeted sentiment analysis. In NAACL-HLT, pages 2751–2762, Seattle, United
States, July 2022.
Antonela Tommasel, Alejandro Corbellini, Daniela Godoy, and Silvia Schiaffino.
Exploring the role of personality traits in followee recommendation. Online
Information Review, 39(6):812–830, 2015.
Antonela Tommasel, Alejandro Corbellini, Daniela Godoy, and Silvia Schiaffino.
Personality-aware followee recommendation algorithms: An empirical analysis.
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 51:24–36, 2016.
References 485

Hanghang Tong, Christos Faloutsos, and Jia-Yu Pan. Fast random walk with restart
and its applications. In ICDM, pages 613–622, 2006.
Kristina Toutanova and Colin Cherry. A global model for joint lemmatization and
part-of-speech prediction. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages 486–494, 2009.
Kristina Toutanova and Mark Johnson. A Bayesian LDA-based model for semi-
supervised part-of-speech tagging. NeurIPS, 20:1521–1528, 2007.
Kristina Toutanova, Dan Klein, Christopher D. Manning, and Yoram Singer. Feature-
rich part-of-speech tagging with a cyclic dependency network. In NAACL-HLT,
NAACL ’03, pages 173–180, USA, 2003. doi: 10.3115/1073445.1073478.
Kristina Toutanvoa and Christopher D Manning. Enriching the knowledge sources
used in a maximum entropy part-of-speech tagger. In Joint SIGDAT conference
on Empirical methods in natural language processing and very large corpora,
pages 63–70, 2000.
Elizabeth Closs Traugott. Revisiting subjectification and intersubjectification. Sub-
jectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, 29:71, 2010.
Marcos V. Treviso, Christopher D. Shulby, and Sandra M. Aluisio. Evaluating word
embeddings for sentence boundary detection in speech transcripts, 2017.
Marcos Vinícius Treviso, Christopher Shulby, and Sandra Maria Aluísio. Sentence
segmentation in narrative transcripts from neuropsychological tests using recur-
rent convolutional neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.00211, 2016.
Rocco Tripodi and Roberto Navigli. Game theory meets embeddings: a unified
framework for word sense disambiguation. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages 88–99,
2019.
Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Shaojie Bai, Paul Pu Liang, J Zico Kolter, Louis-Philippe
Morency, and Ruslan Salakhutdinov. Multimodal transformer for unaligned mul-
timodal language sequences. In ACL, volume 2019, page 6558, 2019.
S. C. Tseng. Processing spoken mandarin corpora. Traitement Automatique Des
Langues, 45(2):89–108, 2004.
Yoshimasa Tsuruoka and Jun’ichi Tsujii. Bidirectional inference with the easiest-first
strategy for tagging sequence data. In HLT-EMNLP, HLT ’05, pages 467–474,
USA, 2005. doi: 10.3115/1220575.1220634.
Yulia Tsvetkov, Leonid Boytsov, Anatole Gershman, Eric Nyberg, and Chris Dyer.
Metaphor detection with cross-lingual model transfer. In ACL, pages 248–258,
2014.
Geng Tu, Taiyu Niu, Ruifeng Xu, Bin Bin Liang, and Erik Cambria. AdaCLF:
An adaptive curriculum learning framework for emotional support conversation.
IEEE Intelligent Systems, 39(4):5–11, 2024.
Zhaopeng Tu, Zhengdong Lu, Yang Liu, Xiaohua Liu, and Hang Li. Modeling
coverage for neural machine translation. In ACL, pages 76—85, 2016.
Mohammad Tubishat, Norisma Idris, and Mohammad Abushariah. Explicit aspects
extraction in sentiment analysis using optimal rules combination. Future Gener-
ation Computer Systems, 114:448–480, 2021.
Peter D Turney and Patrick Pantel. From frequency to meaning: Vector space models
of semantics. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 37:141–188, 2010.
486 References

Peter Tyrer, Geoffrey M Reed, and Mike J Crawford. Classification, assessment,

prevalence, and effect of personality disorder. The Lancet, 385(9969):717–726,
2015.
Simone Ueberwasser and Elisabeth Stark. What’s up, switzerland? a corpus-based
research project in a multilingual country. Linguistik online, 84(5), 2017.
Jan Ulrich, Gabriel Murray, and Giuseppe Carenini. A publicly available annotated
corpus for supervised email summarization. In AAAI08 email workshop, pages
1–6, 2008.
Alexandra Uma, Dina Almanea, and Massimo Poesio. Scaling and disagreements:
Bias, noise, and ambiguity. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 5:1–11, 2022.
Alexandra N Uma, Tommaso Fornaciari, Dirk Hovy, Silviu Paun, Barbara Plank, and
Massimo Poesio. Learning from disagreement: A survey. Journal of Artificial
Intelligence Research, 72:1385–1470, 2021.
Chirayu Upadhyay, Hasan Abu-Rasheed, Christian Weber, and Madjid Fathi. Ex-
plainable job-posting recommendations using knowledge graphs and named entity
recognition. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cy-
bernetics, pages 3291–3296, 2021.
Olga Uryupina, Ron Artstein, Antonella Bristot, Federica Cavicchio, Francesca De-
logu, Kepa J Rodriguez, and Massimo Poesio. Annotating a broad range of
anaphoric phenomena, in a variety of genres: the ARRAU corpus. Natural Lan-
guage Engineering, 26(1):95–128, 2020.
Paul E. Utgoff, Neil C. Berkman, and Jeffery A. Clouse. Decision tree induction
based on efficient tree restructuring. Machine Learning, 29(1):5–44, 1997. doi:
10.1023/A:1007413323501.
Özlem Uzuner, Brett R South, Shuying Shen, and Scott L DuVall. 2010 i2b2/va
challenge on concepts, assertions, and relations in clinical text. Journal of the
American Medical Informatics Association, 18(5):552–556, 2011.
Ozlem Uzuner, Andreea Bodnari, Shuying Shen, Tyler Forbush, John Pestian, and
Brett R South. Evaluating the state of the art in coreference resolution for electronic
medical records. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 19
(5):786–791, 2012.
Ana Valdivia, Victoria Luzón, Erik Cambria, and Francisco Herrera. Consensus vote
models for detecting and filtering neutrality in sentiment analysis. Information
Fusion, 44:126–135, 2018.
Hans van Halteren. A default first order family weight determination procedure
for WPDV models. In Fourth Conference on Computational Natural Language
Learning and the Second Learning Language in Logic Workshop, 2000.
Hans Van Halteren. Chunking with WPDV models. In Fourth Conference on
Computational Natural Language Learning and the Second Learning Language
in Logic Workshop, 2000.
Hans van Halteren, Walter Daelemans, and Jakub Zavrel. Improving accuracy in
word class tagging through the combination of machine learning systems. Comput.
Linguist., 27(2):199–229, 2001.
References 487

Cynthia Van Hee, Els Lefever, and Véronique Hoste. SemEval-2018 task 3: Irony de-
tection in English tweets. In 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation,
pages 39–50, 2018.
Colette M Van Kerckvoorde. An Introduction to Middle Dutch. De Gruyter Mouton,
2019.
Emiel van Miltenburg, Wei-Ting Lu, Emiel Krahmer, Albert Gatt, Guanyi Chen,
Lin Li, and Kees van Deemter. Gradations of error severity in automatic image
descriptions. In 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation,
pages 398–411, 2020.
Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N
Gomez, £ukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. Attention is all you need. NeurIPS,
30, 2017.
Leonid Velikovich, Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, Kerry Hannan, and Ryan McDonald.
The viability of web-derived polarity lexicons. In NAACL-HLT, pages 777–785,
2010.
Ben Verhoeven, Walter Daelemans, and Barbara Plank. Twisty: a multilingual Twitter
stylometry corpus for gender and personality profiling. In Tenth International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16), pages 1632–
1637, 2016.
Kanishk Verma and Brian Davis. Implicit aspect-based opinion mining and analysis
of airline industry based on user-generated reviews. SN Computer Science, 2(4):
1–9, 2021.
Loïc Vial, Benjamin Lecouteux, and Didier Schwab. Sense vocabulary compression
through the semantic knowledge of WordNet for neural word sense disambigua-
tion. In 10th Global WordNet Conference, pages 108–117, 2019.
Felipe Viegas, Mário S Alvim, Sérgio Canuto, Thierson Rosa, Marcos André
Gonçalves, and Leonardo Rocha. Exploiting semantic relationships for unsu-
pervised expansion of sentiment lexicons. Information Systems, 94:101606, 2020.
Renata Vieira and Massimo Poesio. An empirically-based system for processing
definite descriptions. Computational Linguistics, 26(4):539–593, 2000.
Supriti Vijay and Aman Priyanshu. NERDA-Con: Extending NER models for con-
tinual learning–integrating distinct tasks and updating distribution shifts. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2206.14607, 2022.
Marc Vilain, John D Burger, John Aberdeen, Dennis Connolly, and Lynette
Hirschman. A model-theoretic coreference scoring scheme. In MUC-6, pages
45–52, 1995.
Julio Villena, Janine García-Morera, Miguel García-Cumbreras, Eugenio Martínez-
Cámara, Maria Martín-Valdivia, and L. López. Overview of TASS 2015. In TASS
2015: Workshop on Sentiment Analysis at SEPLN co-located with 31st SEPLN
Conference, pages 13–21, 09 2015.
Alessandro Vinciarelli and Gelareh Mohammadi. A survey of personality computing.
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 5(3):273–291, 2014.
Oriol Vinyals, Meire Fortunato, and Navdeep Jaitly. Pointer networks. In NeurIPS,
pages 2692–2700, 2015a.
488 References

Oriol Vinyals, Meire Fortunato, and Navdeep Jaitly. Pointer networks. In 28th
International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems-Volume 2,
pages 2692–2700, 2015b.
Duy-Tin Vo and Yue Zhang. Target-dependent Twitter sentiment classification with
rich automatic features. In IJCAI, 2015.
Luis Von Ahn. Games with a purpose. Computer, 39(6):92–94, 2006.
Luis von Ahn, Mihir Kedia, and Manuel Blum. Verbosity: a game for collect-
ing common-sense facts. In 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems, CHI, pages 75–78, 2006.
Denny Vrande iÊ. Ontology evaluation. In Handbook on Ontologies, pages 293–313.
Springer, 2009.
Denny Vrandecic and Markus Krötzsch. Wikidata: a free collaborative knowledge-
base. Communications of the ACM, 57(10):78–85, 2014.
Tung Vuong, Salvatore Andolina, Giulio Jacucci, and Tuukka Ruotsalo. Spoken
conversational context improves query auto-completion in web search. ACM
Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 39(3):1–32, 2021.
Lennart Wachowiak and Dagmar Gromann. Systematic analysis of image schemas
in natural language through explainable multilingual neural language processing.
In COLING, pages 5571–5581, 2022.
Christopher Walker, Stephanie Strassel, Julie Medero, and Kazuaki Maeda. ACE
2005 multilingual training corpus. Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia, 57:
45, 2006.
Marilyn Walker and Steve Whittaker. Mixed initiative in dialogue: an investigation
into discourse segmentation. In ACL, pages 70–78, 1990.
Byron C Wallace, Laura Kertz, Eugene Charniak, et al. Humans require context to
infer ironic intent (so computers probably do, too). In ACL, pages 512–516, 2014.
Hai Wan, Yufei Yang, Jianfeng Du, Yanan Liu, Kunxun Qi, and Jeff Z Pan. Target-
aspect-sentiment joint detection for aspect-based sentiment analysis. In AAAI,
pages 9122–9129, 2020.
Mengting Wan and Julian McAuley. Modeling ambiguity, subjectivity, and diverging
viewpoints in opinion question answering systems. In ICDM, pages 489–498,
2016.
Qian Wan, Luona Wei, Xinhai Chen, and Jie Liu. A region-based hypergraph network
for joint entity-relation extraction. Knowledge-Based Systems, 228:107298, 2021.
Xiaojun Wan. Co-training for cross-lingual sentiment classification. In ACL-
IJCNLP, pages 235–243, 2009.
Bailin Wang and Wei Lu. Neural segmental hypergraphs for overlapping mention
recognition. In EMNLP, pages 204–214, 2018.
Feixiang Wang, Man Lan, and Wenting Wang. Towards a one-stop solution to both
aspect extraction and sentiment analysis tasks with neural multi-task learning. In
IJCNN, pages 1–8, 2018a.
Hongwei Wang, Fuzheng Zhang, Jialin Wang, Miao Zhao, Wenjie Li, Xing Xie, and
Minyi Guo. Exploring high-order user preference on the knowledge graph for
recommender systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 37(3):1–26,
2019a.
References 489

Longyue Wang, Zhaopeng Tu, Xing Wang, and Shuming Shi. One model to learn
both: Zero pronoun prediction and translation. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages 921–
930, 2019b.
Ming Wang and Yinglin Wang. A synset relation-enhanced framework with a try-
again mechanism for word sense disambiguation. In EMNLP, pages 6229–6240,
2020.
Peilu Wang, Yao Qian, Frank K. Soong, Lei He, and Hai Zhao. Part-of-speech
tagging with bidirectional long short-term memory recurrent neural network.
CoRR, abs/1510.06168, 2015a.
Pidong Wang and Hwee Tou Ng. A beam-search decoder for normalization of
social media text with application to machine translation. In NAACL-HLT, pages
471–481, 2013.
Shan Wang and Francis Bond. Building the Chinese open Wordnet (COW): Starting
from core synsets. In 11th Workshop on Asian Language Resources, pages 10–18,
2013.
Sida Wang and Christopher Manning. Fast dropout training. In ICML, pages 118–
126, 2013.
Sida I Wang and Christopher D Manning. Baselines and bigrams: Simple, good
sentiment and topic classification. In ACL, pages 90–94, 2012.
Wei Wang, Ling He, Yenchun Jim Wu, and Mark Goh. Signaling persuasion in
crowdfunding entrepreneurial narratives: the subjectivity vs objectivity debate.
Computers in Human Behavior, 114:106576, 2021.
Wenguan Wang and Yi Yang. Towards data-and knowledge-driven artificial intelli-
gence: A survey on neuro-symbolic computing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.15889,
2022.
Wenya Wang, Sinno Jialin Pan, Daniel Dahlmeier, and Xiaokui Xiao. Coupled
multi-layer attentions for co-extraction of aspect and opinion terms. In AAAI,
2017.
Xiaochen Wang, Wenzheng Feng, Jie Tang, and Qingyang Zhong. Course concept
extraction in MOOC via explicit/implicit representation. In Third IEEE Interna-
tional Conference on Data Science in Cyberspace, pages 339–345, 2018b.
Yanan Wang, Qi Liu, Chuan Qin, Tong Xu, Yijun Wang, Enhong Chen, and Hui
Xiong. Exploiting topic-based adversarial neural network for cross-domain
keyphrase extraction. In ICDM, pages 597–606, 2018c.
Yexiang Wang, Yi Guo, and Siqi Zhu. Slot attention with value normalization for
multi-domain dialogue state tracking. In EMNLP, pages 3019–3028, 2020.
Yong Wang and Ian H Witten. Induction of model trees for predicting continuous
classes. In European Conference on Machine Learning, 1996.
Yu Wang, Hanghang Tong, Ziye Zhu, and Yun Li. Nested named entity recognition:
A survey. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, 16(6):1–29,
2022.
Zhongyuan Wang, Haixun Wang, Ji-Rong Wen, and Yanghua Xiao. An inference
approach to basic level of categorization. In CIKM, pages 653–662, 2015b.
William Warner and Julia Hirschberg. Detecting hate speech on the world wide web.
In Second Workshop on Language in Social Media, pages 19–26, 2012.
490 References

Bonnie Lynn Webber. Discourse deixis: Reference to discourse segments. In ACL,

pages 113–122, 1988.
Bonnie Lynn Webber. A formal approach to discourse anaphora. Routledge, 2016.
Kellie Webster, Marta Recasens, Vera Axelrod, and Jason Baldridge. Mind the
GAP: A balanced corpus of gendered ambiguous pronouns. Transactions of the
Association for Computational Linguistics, 6:605–617, 2018.
Wei Wei, Zanbo Wang, Xianling Mao, Guangyou Zhou, Pan Zhou, and Sheng Jiang.
Position-aware self-attention based neural sequence labeling. Pattern Recognition,
110:107636, 2021.
Zhepei Wei, Jianlin Su, Yue Wang, Yuan Tian, and Yi Chang. A novel hierarchical
binary tagging framework for joint extraction of entities and relations. arXiv
preprint arXiv:1909.03227, 2019.
Ralph Weischedel, Martha Palmer, Mitchell Marcus, Eduard Hovy, Sameer Pradhan,
Lance Ramshaw, Nianwen Xue, Ann Taylor, Jeff Kaufman, Michelle Franchini,
et al. Ontonotes release 5.0. Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia, PA, 23,
2013.
Matthew West. Developing High Quality Data Models. Morgan Kaufmann Publish-
ers Inc., 340 Pine Street, Sixth FloorSan FranciscoCAUnited States, 2011.
Peter West, Chandra Bhagavatula, Jack Hessel, Jena D. Hwang, Liwei Jiang, Ro-
nan Le Bras, Ximing Lu, Sean Welleck, and Yejin Choi. Symbolic knowledge
distillation: from general language models to commonsense models. In NAACL,
pages 4602–4625, 2022.
David L Wheeler, Tanya Barrett, Dennis A Benson, Stephen H Bryant, Kathi Canese,
Vyacheslav Chetvernin, Deanna M Church, Michael DiCuccio, Ron Edgar, Scott
Federhen, et al. Database resources of the national center for biotechnology
information. Nucleic Acids Research, 36(suppl_1):D13–D21, 2007.
Janyce Wiebe. Tracking point of view in narrative. Computational Linguistics, 20
(2):233–287, 1994.
Janyce Wiebe. Learning subjective adjectives from corpora. In AAAI/IAAI, pages
735–740, 2000.
Janyce Wiebe and Ellen Riloff. Creating subjective and objective sentence classifiers
from unannotated texts. In International conference on intelligent text processing
and computational linguistics, pages 486–497, 2005.
Janyce Wiebe and Ellen Riloff. Finding mutual benefit between subjectivity analysis
and information extraction. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2(4):
175–191, 2011.
Janyce Wiebe, Theresa Wilson, and Claire Cardie. Annotating expressions of opin-
ions and emotions in language. Language Resources and Evaluation, 39(2):
165–210, 2005.
Janyce Marbury Wiebe. Recognizing Subjective Sentences: A Computational Inves-
tigation of Narrative Text. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1990.
Anna Wierzbicka. Semantic Primitives. Athena um-Verl, 1972.
Anna Wierzbicka. Semantics: Primes and universals: Primes and universals. Oxford
University Press, UK, 1996.
References 491

Jerry S Wiggins. Personality structure. Annual Review of Psychology, 19(1):293–

350, 1968.
Robert Wilensky. Some problems and proposals for knowledge representation.
Technical report, University of California, Berkeley. Institute of cognitive studies,
1986.
Yorick Wilks. Preference semantics. Technical report, Computer Science Depart-
ment, Stanford University, 1973.
Yorick Wilks. A preferential, pattern-seeking, semantics for natural language infer-
ence. Artificial Intelligence, 6(1):53–74, 1975.
Theresa Wilson. Annotating subjective content in meetings. In Sixth International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’08), pages 2738–
2745, 2008.
Theresa Wilson, Janyce Wiebe, and Rebecca Hwa. Just how mad are you? finding
strong and weak opinion clauses. In AAAI, volume 4, pages 761–769, 2004.
Theresa Wilson, Janyce Wiebe, and Paul Hoffmann. Recognizing contextual polarity
in phrase-level sentiment analysis. In EMNLP-HLT, pages 347–354, 2005.
William Winkler. String comparator metrics and enhanced decision rules in the
Fellegi-Sunter model of record linkage. Section on Survey Research Methods, 01
1990.
Terry Winograd. Understanding natural language. Cognitive Psychology, 3(1):
1–191, 1972.
Terry Winograd. Towards a procedural understanding of semantics. Revue interna-
tionale de philosophie, pages 260–303, 1976.
Sam Wiseman and Karl Stratos. Label-agnostic sequence labeling by copying nearest
neighbors. In ACL, pages 5363–5369, 2019.
Sam Wiseman, Alexander M. Rush, Stuart Shieber, and Jason Weston. Learning
anaphoricity and antecedent ranking features for coreference resolution. In ACL-
IJCNLP, pages 1416–1426, 2015.
Sam Wiseman, Alexander M. Rush, and Stuart M. Shieber. Learning global features
for coreference resolution. In NAACL-HLT, pages 994–1004, 2016.
David S Wishart, Yannick D Feunang, An C Guo, Elvis J Lo, Ana Marcu, Jason R
Grant, Tanvir Sajed, Daniel Johnson, Carin Li, Zinat Sayeeda, et al. DrugBank
5.0: a major update to the DrugBank database for 2018. Nucleic Acids Research,
46(D1):D1074–D1082, 2018.
René Witte and Sabine Bergler. Fuzzy coreference resolution for summarization. In
2003 International Symposium on Reference Resolution and Its Applications to
Question Answering and Summarization (ARQAS), pages 43–50, 2003.
Martin Wöllmer, Felix Weninger, Tobias Knaup, Björn Schuller, Congkai Sun, Kenji
Sagae, and Louis-Philippe Morency. Youtube movie reviews: Sentiment analysis
in an audio-visual context. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 28(3):46–53, 2013.
Derek F Wong, Lidia S Chao, and Xiaodong Zeng. isentenizer-: Multilingual sen-
tence boundary detection model. The Scientific World Journal, 2014, 2014.
Fai Wong and Sam Chao. isentenizer: An incremental sentence boundary classifier.
In 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge
Engineering (NLPKE-2010), pages 1–7, 2010.
492 References

Beverly Park Woolf. Chapter 5 - communication knowledge. In Beverly Park Woolf,

editor, Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors, pages 136–182. Morgan Kaufmann,
San Francisco, 2009.
Britta Wrede and Elizabeth Shriberg. Spotting “hot spots” in meetings: human
judgments and prosodic cues. In EUROSPEECH, volume 2003, pages 2805–
2808, 2003.
Chao Wu, Qingyu Xiong, Hualing Yi, Yang Yu, Qiwu Zhu, Min Gao, and Jie Chen.
Multiple-element joint detection for aspect-based sentiment analysis. Knowledge-
Based Systems, 223:107073, 2021a.
Chien-Sheng Wu, Steven CH Hoi, Richard Socher, and Caiming Xiong. TOD-
BERT: Pre-trained natural language understanding for task-oriented dialogue. In
EMNLP, pages 917–929, 2020a.
Fangzhao Wu, Yongfeng Huang, Yangqiu Song, and Shixia Liu. Towards building
a high-quality microblog-specific chinese sentiment lexicon. Decision Support
Systems, 87:39–49, 2016.
Jialun Wu, Kai He, Rui Mao, Chen Li, and Erik Cambria. Megacare: Knowledge-
guided multi-view hypergraph predictive framework for healthcare. Information
Fusion, 100(101939), 2023.
Minghao Wu, Fei Liu, and Trevor Cohn. Evaluating the utility of hand-crafted
features in sequence labelling. In EMNLP, pages 2850–2856, 2018.
Shengqiong Wu, Hao Fei, Yafeng Ren, Donghong Ji, and Jingye Li. Learn from
syntax: Improving pair-wise aspect and opinion terms extractionwith rich syntactic
knowledge. arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.02520, 2021b.
Shijie Wu and Ryan Cotterell. Exact hard monotonic attention for character-level
transduction. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.06319, 2019.
Wei Wu, Fei Wang, Arianna Yuan, Fei Wu, and Jiwei Li. CorefQA: Coreference
resolution as query-based span prediction. In ACL, pages 6953–6963, 2020b.
Wen Wu. Implicit acquisition of user personality for augmenting recommender sys-
tems. In 22nd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces Companion,
pages 201–204, 2017.
Wentao Wu, Hongsong Li, Haixun Wang, and Kenny Qili Zhu. Probase: a probabilis-
tic taxonomy for text understanding. In ACM SIGMOD International Conference
on Management of Data, pages 481–492, 2012.
Yang Wu, Yanyan Zhao, Xin Lu, Bing Qin, Yin Wu, Jian Sheng, and Jinlong Li.
Modeling incongruity between modalities for multimodal sarcasm detection. IEEE
MultiMedia, 28(2):86–95, 2021c.
Youyou Wu, Michal Kosinski, and David Stillwell. Computer-based personality
judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. National Academy of
Sciences, 112(4):1036–1040, 2015.
Youyou Wu, David Stillwell, H Andrew Schwartz, and Michal Kosinski. Birds of a
feather do flock together: Behavior-based personality-assessment method reveals
personality similarity among couples and friends. Psychological Science, 28(3):
276–284, 2017.
References 493

Zhen Wu, Chengcan Ying, Fei Zhao, Zhifang Fan, Xinyu Dai, and Rui Xia. Grid
tagging scheme for aspect-oriented fine-grained opinion extraction. arXiv preprint
arXiv:2010.04640, 2020c.
Yu Xia, Quan Wang, Yajuan Lyu, Yong Zhu, Wenhao Wu, Sujian Li, and Dai Dai.
Learn and review: Enhancing continual named entity recognition via reviewing
synthetic samples. In ACL, pages 2291–2300, 2022.
Pan Xiao, YongQuan Fan, and YaJun Du. A personality-aware followee recommen-
dation model based on text semantics and sentiment analysis. In Natural Language
Processing and Chinese Computing, pages 503–514, 2018.
Chenyan Xiong, Russell Power, and Jamie Callan. Explicit semantic ranking for
academic search via knowledge graph embedding. In Rick Barrett, Rick Cum-
mings, Eugene Agichtein, and Evgeniy Gabrilovich, editors, 26th International
Conference on World Wide Web, pages 1271–1279, 2017.
Shengzhou Xiong, Yihua Tan, and Guoyou Wang. Explore visual concept formation
for image classification. In Marina Meila and Tong Zhang, editors, ICML, volume
139 of Machine Learning Research, pages 11470–11479. PMLR, 2021.
Fangzhi Xu, Qika Lin, Jiawei Han, Tianzhe Zhao, Jun Liu, and Erik Cambria. Are
large language models really good logical reasoners? a comprehensive evaluation
from deductive, inductive and abductive views. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.09841,
2024.
Hu Xu, Bing Liu, Lei Shu, and Philip S Yu. Double embeddings and CNN-based
sequence labeling for aspect extraction. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.04601, 2018.
Hua Xu, Fan Zhang, and Wei Wang. Implicit feature identification in Chinese reviews
using explicit topic mining model. Knowledge-Based Systems, 76:166–175, 2015a.
Ke Xu, Yunqing Xia, and Chin-Hui Lee. Tweet normalization with syllables. In
ACL-IJCNLP, pages 920–928, 2015b.
Kelvin Xu, Jimmy Ba, Ryan Kiros, Kyunghyun Cho, Aaron Courville, Ruslan
Salakhudinov, Rich Zemel, and Yoshua Bengio. Show, attend and tell: Neu-
ral image caption generation with visual attention. In ICML, pages 2048–2057,
2015c.
Lu Xu, Hao Li, Wei Lu, and Lidong Bing. Position-aware tagging for aspect sentiment
triplet extraction. arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.02609, 2020a.
Lu Xu, Yew Ken Chia, and Lidong Bing. Learning span-level interactions for aspect
sentiment triplet extraction. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages 4755–4766, 2021.
Qiannan Xu, Li Zhu, Tao Dai, Lei Guo, and Sisi Cao. Non-negative matrix fac-
torization for implicit aspect identification. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and
Humanized Computing, 11:2683–2699, 2020b.
Huong Nguyen Thi Xuan, Anh Cuong Le, et al. Linguistic features for subjectivity
classification. In 2012 International Conference on Asian Language Processing,
pages 17–20, 2012.
Ying Xue, Jianshan Sun, Yezheng Liu, Xin Li, and Kun Yuan. Facial expression-
enhanced recommendation for virtual fitting rooms. Decision Support Systems,
177:114082, 2024.
Zhenzhen Xue, Dawei Yin, and Brian D Davison. Normalizing microtext. In AAAI,
2011.
494 References

Vikas Yadav and Steven Bethard. A survey on recent advances in named entity
recognition from deep learning models. In COLING, pages 2145–2158, 2018.
Shahpar Yakhchi, Amin Beheshti, Seyed Mohssen Ghafari, and Mehmet Orgun.
Enabling the analysis of personality aspects in recommender systems. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2001.04825, 2020.
Kosuke Yamada, Ryohei Sasano, and Koichi Takeda. Incorporating textual informa-
tion on user behavior for personality prediction. In ACL, pages 177–182, 2019.
Hang Yan, Junqi Dai, Tuo Ji, Xipeng Qiu, and Zheng Zhang. A unified generative
framework for aspect-based sentiment analysis. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages 2416–
2429, 2021a.
Hang Yan, Tao Gui, Junqi Dai, Qipeng Guo, Zheng Zhang, and Xipeng Qiu. A
unified generative framework for various NER subtasks. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages
5808–5822, 2021b.
Yukun Yan and Sen Song. Local hypergraph-based nested named entity recognition
as query-based sequence labeling. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.11467, 2022.
Zhiheng Yan, Chong Zhang, Jinlan Fu, Qi Zhang, and Zhongyu Wei. A partition
filter network for joint entity and relation extraction. In EMNLP, pages 185–197,
2021c.
Zhijun Yan, Meiming Xing, Dongsong Zhang, and Baizhang Ma. EXPRS: An
extended pagerank method for product feature extraction from online consumer
reviews. Information & Management, 52(7):850–858, 2015.
Chin Lung Yang, Peter C Gordon, Randall Hendrick, and Jei Tun Wu. Comprehen-
sion of referring expressions in chinese. Language and Cognitive Processes, 14
(5-6):715–743, 1999.
Dongqiang Yang and David Martin Powers. Measuring semantic similarity in the
taxonomy of WordNet. Australian Computer Society, Australia, 2005.
Feifan Yang, Xiaojun Quan, Yunyi Yang, and Jianxing Yu. Multi-document trans-
former for personality detection. In AAAI, pages 14221–14229, 2021a.
Feifan Yang, Tao Yang, Xiaojun Quan, and Qinliang Su. Learning to answer psy-
chological questionnaire for personality detection. In EMNLP, pages 1131–1142,
2021b.
Hsin-Chang Yang and Zi-Rui Huang. Mining personality traits from social messages
for game recommender systems. Knowledge-Based Systems, 165:157–168, 2019.
Jie Yang, Shuailong Liang, and Yue Zhang. Design challenges and misconceptions
in neural sequence labeling. arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.04470, 2018.
Jingyuan Yang, Xinbo Gao, Leida Li, Xiumei Wang, and Jinshan Ding. SOLVER:
Scene-object interrelated visual emotion reasoning network. IEEE Transactions
on Image Processing, 30:8686–8701, 2021c.
Shuoheng Yang, Yuxin Wang, and Xiaowen Chu. A survey of deep learning tech-
niques for neural machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.07526, 2020a.
Songlin Yang and Kewei Tu. Bottom-up constituency parsing and nested named
entity recognition with pointer networks. In ACL, pages 2403–2416, 2022.
Tao Yang, Feifan Yang, Haolan Ouyang, and Xiaojun Quan. Psycholinguistic tripar-
tite graph network for personality detection. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages 4229–4239,
2021d.
References 495

Xi Yang, Jiang Bian, William R. Hogan, and Yonghui Wu. Clinical concept extraction
using transformers. J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc., 27(12):1935–1942, 2020b.
Xiaofeng Yang, Guodong Zhou, Jian Su, and Chew Lim Tan. Coreference resolution
using competition learning approach. In ACL, pages 176–183, 2003.
Yi Yang and Jacob Eisenstein. A log-linear model for unsupervised text normaliza-
tion. In EMNLP, pages 61–72, 2013.
Yi Yang and Arzoo Katiyar. Simple and effective few-shot named entity recognition
with structured nearest neighbor learning. In EMNLP, pages 6365–6375, 2020.
Zhilin Yang, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and William Cohen. Multi-task cross-lingual
sequence tagging from scratch. arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.06270, 2016a.
Zhilin Yang, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and William W. Cohen. Transfer learning for
sequence tagging with hierarchical recurrent networks. CoRR, abs/1703.06345,
2017.
Zichao Yang, Diyi Yang, Chris Dyer, Xiaodong He, Alex Smola, and Eduard Hovy.
Hierarchical attention networks for document classification. In NAACL-HLT,
pages 1480–1489, 2016b.
Zonglin Yang, Xinya Du, Erik Cambria, and Claire Cardie. End-to-end case-based
reasoning for commonsense knowledge base completion. In EACL, pages 3509–
3522, 2023.
Zonglin Yang, Li Dong, Xinya Du, Hao Cheng, Erik Cambria, Xiaodong Liu, Jian-
feng Gao, and Furu Wei. Language models as inductive reasoners. In EACL,
pages 209–225, 2024.
Fanglong Yao, Xian Sun, Hongfeng Yu, Wenkai Zhang, Wei Liang, and Kun Fu.
Mimicking the brain’s cognition of sarcasm from multidisciplines for Twitter
sarcasm detection. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems,
2021.
Liang Yao, Chengsheng Mao, and Yuan Luo. KG-BERT: BERT for knowledge graph
completion. CoRR, abs/1909.03193, 2019.
Yuanzhou Yao, Zhao Zhang, Yongjun Xu, and Chao Li. Data augmentation for few-
shot knowledge graph completion from hierarchical perspective. In COLING,
pages 2494–2503, 2022.
Deming Ye, Yankai Lin, Jiaju Du, Zhenghao Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, and
Zhiyuan Liu. Coreferential Reasoning Learning for Language Representation. In
EMNLP, pages 7170–7186, 2020.
Hai Ye and Lu Wang. Semi-supervised learning for neural keyphrase generation. In
EMNLP, pages 4142–4153, 2018.
Weijie Yeo, Teddy Ferdinan, Przemyslaw Kazienko, Ranjan Satapathy, and Erik
Cambria. Self-training large language models through knowledge detection. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2406.11275, 2024a.
Weijie Yeo, Ranjan Satapathy, and Erik Cambria. Plausible extractive rationalization
through semi-supervised entailment signal. In ACL, pages 5182–5192, 2024b.
Weijie Yeo, Ranjan Satapathy, Siow Mong Goh, and Erik Cambria. How interpretable
are reasoning explanations from prompting large language models? In NAACL,
pages 2148–2164, 2024c.
496 References

Eray Yildiz and A Cüneyd Tantu . Morpheus: A neural network for jointly learning
contextual lemmatization and morphological tagging. In Workshop on Computa-
tional Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 25–34, 2019.
Qingyu Yin, Weinan Zhang, Yun Zhang, and Ting Liu. A deep neural network for
chinese zero pronoun resolution. In IJCAI, pages 3322–3328, 2017a.
Qingyu Yin, Yu Zhang, Weinan Zhang, and Ting Liu. Chinese zero pronoun reso-
lution with deep memory network. In EMNLP, pages 1309–1318, 2017b.
Qingyu Yin, Yu Zhang, Wei-Nan Zhang, Ting Liu, and William Yang Wang. Deep
reinforcement learning for Chinese zero pronoun resolution. In ACL, pages 569–
578, 2018a.
Qingyu Yin, Yu Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Ting Liu, and William Yang Wang. Zero
pronoun resolution with attention-based neural network. In COLING, pages 13–
23, 2018b.
Qingyu Yin, Weinan Zhang, Yu Zhang, and Ting Liu. Chinese zero pronoun reso-
lution: A collaborative filtering-based approach. ACM Transactions on Asian and
Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 19(1):1–20, 2019.
Tom Young, Erik Cambria, Iti Chaturvedi, Hao Zhou, Subham Biswas, and Minlie
Huang. Augmenting end-to-end dialogue systems with commonsense knowledge.
In AAAI, pages 4970–4977, 2018.
Bowen Yu, Zhenyu Zhang, Xiaobo Shu, Tingwen Liu, Yubin Wang, Bin Wang, and
Sujian Li. Joint extraction of entities and relations based on a novel decomposition
strategy. In ECAI 2020, pages 2282–2289. IOS Press, 2020.
Guoxin Yu, Jiwei Li, Ling Luo, Yuxian Meng, Xiang Ao, and Qing He. Self
question-answering: Aspect-based sentiment analysis by role flipped machine
reading comprehension. In EMNLP, pages 1331–1342, 2021.
Hong Yu and Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou. Towards answering opinion questions:
Separating facts from opinions and identifying the polarity of opinion sentences.
In EMNLP, pages 129–136, 2003.
Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang, and Rui Xia. Global inference for aspect and opinion terms
co-extraction based on multi-task neural networks. IEEE/ACM Transactions on
Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 27(1):168–177, 2018.
Jianfei Yu, Jieming Wang, Rui Xia, and Junjie Li. Targeted multimodal sentiment
classification based on coarse-to-fine grained image-target matching. In IJCAI,
2022.
Jianxing Yu, Zheng-Jun Zha, Meng Wang, and Tat-Seng Chua. Aspect ranking:
Identifying important product aspects from online consumer reviews. In ACL-
HLT, pages 1496–1505, 2011a.
Jianxing Yu, Zheng-Jun Zha, Meng Wang, Kai Wang, and Tat-Seng Chua. Domain-
assisted product aspect hierarchy generation: Towards hierarchical organization
of unstructured consumer reviews. In EMNLP, pages 140–150, 2011b.
Cuixin Yuan, Junjie Wu, Hong Li, and Lihong Wang. Personality recognition based
on user generated content. In 2018 15th International Conference on Service
Systems and Service Management (ICSSSM), pages 1–6, 2018.
References 497

Dayu Yuan, Julian Richardson, Ryan Doherty, Colin Evans, and Eric Altendorf.
Semi-supervised word sense disambiguation with neural models. In COLING,
pages 1374–1385, 2016.
Tan Yue, Rui Mao, Heng Wang, Zonghai Hu, and Erik Cambria. KnowleNet:
Knowledge fusion network for multimodal sarcasm detection. Information Fusion,
100:101921, 2023.
Yessi Yunitasari, Aina Musdholifah, and Anny Kartika Sari. Sarcasm detection for
sentiment analysis in indonesian tweets. Indonesian Journal of Computing and
Cybernetics Systems, 13(1):53–62, 2019.
Amir Zadeh, Minghai Chen, Soujanya Poria, Erik Cambria, and Louis-Philippe
Morency. Tensor fusion network for multimodal sentiment analysis. In EMNLP,
pages 1103–1114, 2017.
Nurulhuda Zainuddin, Ali Selamat, and Roliana Ibrahim. Improving Twitter aspect-
based sentiment analysis using hybrid approach. In Intelligent Information and
Database Systems, pages 151–160, 2016.
Nasser Zalmout and Nizar Habash. Joint diacritization, lemmatization, normaliza-
tion, and fine-grained morphological tagging. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.02267,
2019.
Nasser Zalmout and Nizar Habash. Utilizing subword entities in character-level
sequence-to-sequence lemmatization models. In COLING, pages 4676–4682,
2020.
Omnia Zayed, John Philip McCrae, and Paul Buitelaar. Figure me out: A gold
standard dataset for metaphor interpretation. In LREC, pages 5810–5819, 2020.
Eugene B. Zechmeister, Andrea M. Chronis, William L. Cull, Catherine A. D’Anna,
and Noreen A. Healy. Growth of a functionally important lexicon. Journal of
Reading Behavior, 27(2):201–212, 1995.
Amir Zeldes. The GUM corpus: Creating multilayer resources in the classroom.
Language Resources and Evaluation, 51(3):581–612, 2017.
Daniel Zeman, Jan Hajic, Martin Popel, Martin Potthast, Milan Straka, Filip Ginter,
Joakim Nivre, and Slav Petrov. CoNLL 2018 shared task: Multilingual parsing
from raw text to universal dependencies. In CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilin-
gual parsing from raw text to universal dependencies, pages 1–21, 2018.
Feifei Zhai, Saloni Potdar, Bing Xiang, and Bowen Zhou. Neural models for sequence
chunking. arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.04027, 2017.
Bowen Zhang, Xu Huang, Zhichao Huang, Hu Huang, Baoquan Zhang, Xianghua
Fu, and Liwen Jing. Sentiment interpretable logic tensor network for aspect-term
sentiment analysis. In COLING, pages 6705–6714, 2022.
Chen Zhang, Qiuchi Li, Dawei Song, and Benyou Wang. A multi-task learning
framework for opinion triplet extraction. arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.01512, 2020a.
Congle Zhang, Tyler Baldwin, Howard Ho, Benny Kimelfeld, and Yunyao Li. Adap-
tive parser-centric text normalization. In ACL, pages 1159–1168, 2013.
Hongming Zhang, Yan Song, Yangqiu Song, and Dong Yu. Knowledge-aware
pronoun coreference resolution. In ACL, pages 867–876, 2019.
498 References

Hongming Zhang, Daniel Khashabi, Yangqiu Song, and Dan Roth. Transomcs:
From linguistic graphs to commonsense knowledge. In IJCAI, pages 4004–4010,
2020b.
Hongming Zhang, Xin Liu, Haojie Pan, Yangqiu Song, and Cane Wing-Ki Leung.
ASER: A large-scale eventuality knowledge graph. In Web Conference 2020,
WWW, pages 201–211, 2020c.
Jun Zhang, Yan Yang, Chencai Chen, Liang He, and Zhou Yu. KERS: A knowledge-
enhanced framework for recommendation dialog systems with multiple subgoals.
In EMNLP, pages 1092–1101, 2021a.
Meishan Zhang, Yue Zhang, and Duy-Tin Vo. Neural networks for open domain
targeted sentiment. In EMNLP, pages 612–621, 2015a.
Meishan Zhang, Yue Zhang, and Guohong Fu. End-to-end neural relation extraction
with global optimization. In EMNLP, pages 1730–1740, 2017a.
Qi Zhang, Yang Wang, Yeyun Gong, and Xuanjing Huang. Keyphrase extraction
using deep recurrent neural networks on twitter. In Jian Su, Xavier Carreras, and
Kevin Duh, editors, EMNLP, pages 836–845, 2016.
Rui Zhang, Cícero Nogueira dos Santos, Michihiro Yasunaga, Bing Xiang, and
Dragomir Radev. Neural coreference resolution with deep biaffine attention by
joint mention detection and mention clustering. In ACL, pages 102–107, 2018.
Tong Zhang, Fred Damerau, and David E Johnson. Text chunking using regularized
winnow. In ACL, pages 539–546, 2001.
Wei Zhang, Clement Yu, and Weiyi Meng. Opinion retrieval from blogs. In CIKM,
pages 831–840, 2007.
Wen Zhang, Taketoshi Yoshida, Xijin Tang, and Tu-Bao Ho. Improving effectiveness
of mutual information for substantival multiword expression extraction. Expert
Systems with Applications, 36(8):10919–10930, 2009.
Wenhao Zhang, Hua Xu, and Wei Wan. Weakness finder: Find product weakness
from Chinese reviews by using aspects based sentiment analysis. Expert Systems
with Applications, 39(11):10283–10291, 2012.
Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Xin Li, Yifei Yuan, Lidong Bing, and Wai Lam.
Aspect sentiment quad prediction as paraphrase generation. In EMNLP, pages
9209–9219, 2021b.
Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Yang Deng, Lidong Bing, and Wai Lam. Towards generative
aspect-based sentiment analysis. In ACL-IJCNLP, pages 504–510, 2021c.
Xiang Zhang, Junbo Zhao, and Yann LeCun. Character-level convolutional networks
for text classification. NeurIPS, 28, 2015b.
Xulang Zhang, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. A survey on syntactic processing
techniques. Artificial Intelligence Review, 56:5645–5728, 2023a.
Xulang Zhang, Rui Mao, Kai He, and Erik Cambria. Neurosymbolic sentiment
analysis with dynamic word sense disambiguation. In EMNLP Findings, pages
8772–8783, 2023b.
Xulang Zhang, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. Granular syntax processing with multi-
task and curriculum learning. Cognitive Computation, 16, 2024a.
References 499

Xulang Zhang, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. Multilingual emotion recognition:
Discovering the variations of lexical semantics between languages. In IJCNN,
2024b.
Xulang Zhang, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. SenticVec: Toward robust and human-
centric neurosymbolic sentiment analysis. In ACL Findings, pages 4851–4863,
2024c.
Yuhao Zhang, Victor Zhong, Danqi Chen, Gabor Angeli, and Christopher D. Man-
ning. Position-aware attention and supervised data improve slot filling. In EMNLP,
pages 35–45, 2017b.
Ziming Zhang, Ze-Nian Li, and Mark S Drew. AdaMKL: A novel biconvex multiple
kernel learning approach. In 2010 20th International Conference on Pattern
Recognition, pages 2126–2129, 2010.
Han Zhao, Zhengdong Lu, and Pascal Poupart. Self-adaptive hierarchical sentence
model. In IJCAI, pages 4069–4076, 2015.
He Zhao, Longtao Huang, Rong Zhang, Quan Lu, and Hui Xue. SpanMlt: A
span-based multi-task learning framework for pair-wise aspect and opinion terms
extraction. In ACL, pages 3239–3248, Online, July 2020a.
He Zhao, Longtao Huang, Rong Zhang, Quan Lu, and Hui Xue. SpanMlt: A
span-based multi-task learning framework for pair-wise aspect and opinion terms
extraction. In ACL, pages 3239–3248, 2020b.
Jialiang Zhao and Qi Gao. Annotation and detection of emotion in text-based
dialogue systems with cnn. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.00987, 2017.
Jieyu Zhao, Tianlu Wang, Mark Yatskar, Vicente Ordonez, and Kai-Wei Chang.
Gender bias in coreference resolution: Evaluation and debiasing methods. In
NAACL-HLT, pages 15–20, 2018.
Lujun Zhao, Xipeng Qiu, Qi Zhang, and Xuanjing Huang. Sequence labeling with
deep gated dual path CNN. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and
Language Processing, 27(12):2326–2335, 2019.
Qiyun Zhao, Hao Wang, Pin Lv, and Chen Zhang. A bootstrapping based refinement
framework for mining opinion words and targets. In CIKM, pages 1995–1998,
2014.
Shanheng Zhao and Hwee Tou Ng. Identification and resolution of Chinese zero
pronouns: A machine learning approach. In EMNLP-CoNLL, pages 541–550,
2007.
Suncong Zheng, Feng Wang, Hongyun Bao, Yuexing Hao, Peng Zhou, and Bo Xu.
Joint extraction of entities and relations based on a novel tagging scheme. In ACL,
pages 1227–1236, 2017.
Yaowei Zheng, Richong Zhang, Suyuchen Wang, Samuel Mensah, and Yongyi Mao.
Anchored model transfer and soft instance transfer for cross-task cross-domain
learning: A study through aspect-level sentiment classification. In Web Confer-
ence, pages 2754–2760, 2020.
Peixiang Zhong, Di Wang, and Chunyan Miao. Knowledge-enriched transformer for
emotion detection in textual conversations. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, pages 165–176,
2019.
500 References

Xiaoshi Zhong and Erik Cambria. Time expression recognition and normalization:
A survey. Artificial Intelligence Review, 56:9115–9140, 2023.
Zexuan Zhong and Danqi Chen. A frustratingly easy approach for entity and relation
extraction. In NAACL-HLT, pages 50–61, 2021.
Zhi Zhong and Hwee Tou Ng. It makes sense: A wide-coverage word sense disam-
biguation system for free text. In ACL, pages 78–83, 2010.
Deyu Zhou, Zhikai Zhang, Min-Ling Zhang, and Yulan He. Weakly supervised POS
tagging without disambiguation. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource
Language Information Processing, 17(4):1–19, 2018.
GuoDong Zhou and Jian Su. Error-driven HMM-based chunk tagger with context-
dependent lexicon. In EMNLP-VLC, pages 71–79, 2000.
Houquan Zhou, Yu Zhang, Zhenghua Li, and Min Zhang. Is POS tagging necessary
or even helpful for neural dependency parsing?, 2020a.
Kun Zhou, Wayne Xin Zhao, Shuqing Bian, Yuanhang Zhou, Ji-Rong Wen, and
Jingsong Yu. Improving conversational recommender systems via knowledge
graph based semantic fusion. In SIGKDD, pages 1006–1014, 2020b.
Nina Zhou, Xuancong Wang, and AiTi Aw. Dynamic boundary detection for speech
translation. In APSIPA, pages 651–656, 2017.
Ran Zhou, Xin Li, Ruidan He, Lidong Bing, Erik Cambria, Luo Si, and Chunyan
Miao. MELM: Data augmentation with masked entity language modeling for
low-resource NER. In ACL, pages 2251–2262, 2022.
Yan Zhou, Fuqing Zhu, Pu Song, Jizhong Han, Tao Guo, and Songlin Hu. An
adaptive hybrid framework for cross-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis. In
AAAI, pages 14630–14637, 2021a.
Zhengyu Zhou, In Gyu Choi, Yongliang He, Vikas Yadav, and Chin-Hui Lee. Us-
ing paralinguistic information to disambiguate user intentions for distinguishing
phrase structure and sarcasm in spoken dialog systems. In 2021 IEEE Spoken
Language Technology Workshop (SLT), pages 1020–1027, 2021b.
Zhi-Hua Zhou and Xu-Ying Liu. Training cost-sensitive neural networks with meth-
ods addressing the class imbalance problem. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge
and Data Engineering, 18(1):63–77, 2005.
Luyao Zhu, Wei Li, Rui Mao, Vlad Pandelea, and Erik Cambria. PAED: Zero-shot
persona attribute extraction in dialogues. In ACL, pages 9771–9787, 2023.
Luyao Zhu, Wei Li, Rui Mao, and Erik Cambria. HIPPL: Hierarchical intent-
inferring pointer network with pseudo labeling for consistent persona-driven dia-
logue generation. IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, 2024a.
Luyao Zhu, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria, and Bernard J. Jansen. Neurosymbolic AI
for personalized sentiment analysis. In International Conference on Human-
Computer Interaction (HCII), Washington DC, USA, 2024b.
Yin Zhuang, Zhen Liu, Ting-Ting Liu, Chih-Chieh Hung, and Yan-Jie Chai. Implicit
sentiment analysis based on multi-feature neural network model. Soft Computing,
26(2):635–644, 2022.
Anne Zimmerman, Joel Janhonen, and Emily Beer. Human/AI relationships: chal-
lenges, downsides, and impacts on human/human relationships. AI and Ethics,
2023.