Analogical Proportions and Creativity: A Preliminary Study

Analogical proportions are statements of the form "$a$ is to $b$ as $c$ is to $d$", which expresses that the comparisons of the elements in pair $(a, b)$ and in pair $(c, d)$ yield similar results. Analogical proportions are creative in the sense that given 3 distinct items, the representation of a 4th item $d$, distinct from the previous items, which forms an analogical proportion with them can be calculated, provided certain conditions are met. After providing an introduction to analogical proportions and their properties, the paper reports the results of an experiment made with a database of animal descriptions and their class, where we try to "create" new animals from existing ones, retrieving rare animals such as platypus. We perform a series of experiments using word embeddings as well as Boolean features in order to propose novel animals based on analogical proportions, showing that word embeddings obtain better results.

Testing SDRT's Right Frontier

The Right Frontier Constraint (RFC), as a constraint on the attachment of new constituents to an existing discourse structure, has important implications for the interpretation of anaphoric elements in discourse and for Machine Learning (ML) approaches to learning discourse structures. In this paper we provide strong empirical support for SDRT's version of RFC. The analysis of about 100 doubly annotated documents by five different naive annotators shows that SDRT's RFC is respected about 95% of the time. The qualitative analysis of presumed violations that we have performed shows that they are either click-errors or structural misconceptions.

Learning Recursive Segments for Discourse Parsing

Automatically detecting discourse segments is an important preliminary step towards full discourse parsing. Previous research on discourse segmentation have relied on the assumption that elementary discourse units (EDUs) in a document always form a linear sequence (i.e., they can never be nested). Unfortunately, this assumption turns out to be too strong, for some theories of discourse like SDRT allows for nested discourse units. In this paper, we present a simple approach to discourse segmentation that is able to produce nested EDUs. Our approach builds on standard multi-class classification techniques combined with a simple repairing heuristic that enforces global coherence. Our system was developed and evaluated on the first round of annotations provided by the French Annodis project (an ongoing effort to create a discourse bank for French). Cross-validated on only 47 documents (1,445 EDUs), our system achieves encouraging performance results with an F-score of 73% for finding EDUs.