Meaning Unit Segmentation in English and Chinese: a New Approach to Discourse Phenomena
Meaning Unit Segmentation in English and Chinese: a New Approach to Discourse Phenomena
We present a new approach to dialogue processing in terms of “meaning units”. In our annotation task, we asked speakers of English and Chinese to mark boundaries where they could construct the maximal concept using minimal words. We compared English data across genres (news, literature, and policy). We analyzed the agreement for annotators using a state-of the-art segmentation similarity algorithm and compared annotations with a random baseline. We found that annotators are able to identify meaning units systematically, even though they may disagree on the quantity and position of units. Our analysis includes an examination of phrase structure for annotated units using constituency parses.
Association for Computational Linguistics
Williams, Jennifer
3a1568b4-8a0b-41d2-8635-14fe69fbb360
Banchs, Rafel
66f55933-6269-420a-8ed1-03e394e7e932
Li, Haizhou
a65f5753-4b77-4a96-9d13-219efd4d907c
9 August 2013
Williams, Jennifer
3a1568b4-8a0b-41d2-8635-14fe69fbb360
Banchs, Rafel
66f55933-6269-420a-8ed1-03e394e7e932
Li, Haizhou
a65f5753-4b77-4a96-9d13-219efd4d907c
Williams, Jennifer, Banchs, Rafel and Li, Haizhou
(2013)
Meaning Unit Segmentation in English and Chinese: a New Approach to Discourse Phenomena.
In ACL 2013 DiscoMT Workshop.
Association for Computational Linguistics.
9 pp
.
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Conference or Workshop Item
(Paper)
Abstract
We present a new approach to dialogue processing in terms of “meaning units”. In our annotation task, we asked speakers of English and Chinese to mark boundaries where they could construct the maximal concept using minimal words. We compared English data across genres (news, literature, and policy). We analyzed the agreement for annotators using a state-of the-art segmentation similarity algorithm and compared annotations with a random baseline. We found that annotators are able to identify meaning units systematically, even though they may disagree on the quantity and position of units. Our analysis includes an examination of phrase structure for annotated units using constituency parses.
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Published date: 9 August 2013
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Local EPrints ID: 470364
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/470364
PURE UUID: 9c58529e-6782-4115-9849-ab5f89da1a53
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Date deposited: 07 Oct 2022 16:32
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 04:12
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Contributors
Author:
Jennifer Williams
Author:
Rafel Banchs
Author:
Haizhou Li
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