Outstanding Paper Award for Giulia Rambelli at the 19th Workshop on Multiword Expressions

Giulia Rambelli, former LPL doctoral student, has just received the Outstanding Paper Award for her scientific paper entitled “Are Frequent Phrases Directly Retrieved like Idioms? An Investigation with Self-Paced Reading and Language Models” of which she is first author, along with Emmanuele Chersoni, Marco S. G. Senaldi, Philippe Blache and Alessandro Lenci. The award was presented on May 6 at the 19th Workshop on Multiword Expressions held during the EACL 2023 conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The publication is closely related to Giulia’s thesis carried out under the direction of Philippe Blache and Alessandro Lenci and defended in September 2022.

Currently, Giulia has joined the ABSTRACTION project team which is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and coordinated by Marianna Bolognesi at the University of Bologna, Italy.

Congratulations, Giulia!

Abstract:
An open question in language comprehension studies is whether non-compositional multiword expressions like idioms and compositional-but-frequent word sequences are processed differently. Are the latter constructed online, or are instead directly retrieved from the lexicon, with a degree of entrenchment depending on their frequency? In this paper, we address this question with two different methodologies. First, we set up a self-paced reading experiment comparing human reading times for idioms and both high-frequency and low-frequency compositional word sequences. Then, we ran the same experiment using the Surprisal metrics computed with Neural Language Models (NLMs). Our results provide evidence that idiomatic and high-frequency compositional expressions are processed similarly by both humans and NLMs. Additional experiments were run to test the possible factors that could affect the NLMs’ performance.

UNADREO thesis award for Natacha Cordonnier

Natacha Cordonier has just obtained the UNADREO award for her PhD thesis carried out under the supervision of Maud Champagne-Lavau (LPL) and Marion Fossard (Univ. Neuchâtel).

PhD title: La compréhension de l’ironie et des requêtes indirectes non conventionnelles chez des individus cérébrolésés droits et traumatisés crâniens : profils pathologiques, développement d’un outil d’évaluation et prise en charge

PhD Defense: October 29, 2021

Congratulations to Natacha and also to Timothy Pommée who at the same time obtained the UNADREO's 40th anniversary special thesis award!

 

 

SPPAS honored at the CNRS Institute for Humanities and Social Science (INSHS)

The INSHS has just published a nice article about the SPPAS software rewarded at the beginning of February on the occasion of the Open Science European Conference (see announcement below).

Online article (in French): Le logiciel SPPAS récompensé lors de la remise des Prix science ouverte du logiciel libre de la recherche | INSHS (cnrs.fr)

More information: SPPAS software rewarded at the "Open science prize for free research software" - Laboratoire Parole et Langage (lpl-aix.fr)

SPPAS software rewarded at the “Open science prize for free research software”

We are pleased to announce that the SPPAS automatic annotation software, developed by Brigitte Bigi, CNRS researcher at LPL, is one of the ten software rewarded during the Open Science European Conference (OSEC 2022, February 4-5, 2022).

It is for the very first year and within the framework of the second National Plan for Open Science that the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation has organized a presentation of the Open Science Award for Open Source Research Software.

Website: http://www.sppas.org/
Contact: brigitte.bigi@lpl-aix.fr

Ana Zappa laureate of the 2021 AMU thesis prize

Ana Zappa, a young doctor from the LPL and currently a post-doctoral fellow at the ILCB, is among the 16 laureates of the 2021 AMU thesis prize! She will be honored next Wednesday for her work entitled "Embodied semantics put to the test: eletrophysiological evidence from virtual reality and classic environments", conducted under the supervision of Cheryl Frenck-Mestre.

Ana's work is dedicated to language processing and second language learning within the framework of embodied semantics. His studies used new methodologies that combine EEG and virtual reality to examine language processing and learning in highly interactive and environmentally sound environments. They have given rise to several publications in international journals.

Congratulation!

Ana Zappa on the HAL platform : CV HAL : Ana Zappa: Post-doctorante à l'ILCB (archives-ouvertes.fr)

Best Paper Award of the conference *SEM 2021

The paper Did the Cat Drink the Coffee? Challenging Transformers with Generalized Event Knowledge from Paolo Pedinotti, Giulia Rambelli (LPL), Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Alessandro Lenci and Philippe Blache (LPL) has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the *SEM 2021 Conference. The 10th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics will be held on August 5-6. Congratulations!

More information :
*SEM 2021 Conference
Article sur Youtube

Best Paper Award: Giulia Rambelli, PhD student at the LPL

Giulia Rambelli, PhD student at LPL under the supervision of Philippe Blache and Alessandro Lenci (Pisa), has just obtained the “Best Paper Award” for the scientific article entitled “Comparing Probabilistic, Distributional and Transformer-Based Models on Logical Metonymy Interpretation” of which she is the first author, alongside P. Blache, E. Chersoni, A. Lenci and C.-R. Huang.

The award was presented last Friday at the AACL-IJCNLP conference held online December 4-7 (Suzhou, China). Congratulations, Giulia!

Abstract:

In linguistics and cognitive science, Logical metonymies are defined as type clashes between an event-selecting verb and an entitydenoting noun (e.g. The editor finished the article), which are typically interpreted by inferring a hidden event (e.g. reading) on the basis of contextual cues. This paper tackles the problem of logical metonymy interpretation, that is, the retrieval of the covert event via computational methods. We compare different types of models, including the probabilistic and the distributional ones previously introduced in the literature on the topic. For the first time, we also tested on this task some of the recent Transformer-based models, such as BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, and GPT-2. Our results show a complex scenario, in which the best Transformer-based models and some traditional distributional models perform very similarly. However, the low performance on some of the testing datasets suggests that logical metonymy is still a challenging phenomenon for computational modeling.

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Update February 2nd, 2021

Giulia Rambelli's distinction highlighted in the AMU Newsletter

In its latest issue of the Newsletter of AMU, Aix-Marseille University devoted a brief to Giulia Rambelli, PhD student at LPL, and the distinction received at the AACL-IJCNLP conference last December.

Link to the brief: http://url.univ-amu.fr/lettreamu_janvier21_n85 (p. 23)

See article on www.lpl-aix.fr: Best Paper Award : Giulia Rambelli, PhD student at the LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage (lpl-aix.fr)