Invited Talks

The workshop will feature two invited talks.

Irony Acquisition: How Children Learn to Detect Sarcasm

Professor Penny M. Pexman, University of Calgary

Abstract: One of the challenges children face in learning to navigate the social world is created by the fact that people often speak indirectly, for example, with sarcasm or verbal irony. Research has shown that typically developing children don’t usually begin to convey and appreciate ironic intent until the early school years. Children’s use and appreciation of ironic language develop over a fairly long developmental window, and are related to their cognitive development and social experiences. Most of these insights have come from research that is focused on the product of interpretation: the understanding that children convey through verbal descriptions, ratings, or yes/no decisions. In a series of studies, we developed methodology that allows us to explore the process of children’s irony interpretation. Using a variant of the visual world paradigm, we track children’s eye gaze and reaching behavior as they judge speaker intent for ironic language that unfolds in real time. We have used this paradigm to identify factors that make irony particularly challenging for children. Most recently, those studies have helped us to devise a training paradigm to teach children to detect sarcastic speech. I’ll discuss what our findings tell us about what it takes to develop a sense of sarcasm.

Bio: Penny Pexman is currently Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice-President (Research) at the University of Calgary. Penny earned her PhD in Psychology at the University of Western Ontario in 1998 and joined the University of Calgary the same year. Her research expertise is in psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and social-cognitive development. In broad terms, she is interested in how we derive meaning from language, and how those processes are changed by context or experience. Her research investigates several aspects of language understanding, ranging from lexical-semantic processes to figurative language. Penny has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters on those topics. An award-winning mentor and researcher, Penny is an elected Fellow of both the Canadian Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

Modelling Multiword Expressions and Idiomaticity: an Acid Test for Understanding

Professor Aline Villavicencio, University of Sheffield

Abstract: Advances in large-scale word representation models have been successful in capturing distinct (and very specific) word usages in context. However, these models still face a serious challenge when dealing with non-literal or non-compositional language, like that involved in Multiword Expressions (MWEs) such as noun compounds (grandfather clock), light verb constructions (give a talk), and verb particle constructions (give up). MWEs are an integral part of the mental lexicon of native speakers often used to express complex ideas in a conventionalised way accepted by a given linguistic community, but often displaying a wealth of idiosyncrasies, from lexical, syntactic and semantic to statistical which means that they represent a real challenge for current NLP techniques. However, their accurate integration has the potential for improving the precision, naturalness and fluency of downstream tasks like machine translation and text simplification. In this talk, I will present an overview of how advances in word representations have made an impact for the identification and modelling of idiomaticity and MWEs. I will concentrate on what models seem to incorporate of idiomaticity, as idiomatic interpretation may require knowledge that goes beyond what can be gathered from the individual words of an expression (e.g. “dark horse” as an unknown candidate who unexpectedly succeeds).

Bio: Aline Villavicencio is the Chair in Natural Language Processing at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield (UK). Prior to that she was affiliated as a Reader to the Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), and as a Lecturer at the University of Essex (UK). She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2001, and held postdoc positions at the University of Cambridge and University of Essex (UK). She was a Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA, 2011-2012 and 2014-2015), at the École Normale Supé­rieure (France, 2014), an Erasmus-Mundus Visting Scholar at Saarland University (Germany in 2012/2013) and at the University of Bath (UK, 2006-2009). She held a Research Fellowship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Brazil, 2009-2017). She is a member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics, TACL and of JNLE. She was a PC Co-Chair of the 60th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022), and was a PC Co-Chair of CoNLL-2019, Senior Area Chair for ACL-2020 and ACL-2019 among others and General co-chair for the 2018 International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese. She is also a member of the NAACL board, SIGLEX board and of the program committees of various *ACL and AI conferences, and has co-chaired several *ACL workshops on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition and on Multiword Expressions. Her research interests include lexical semantics, multilinguality, multiword expressions and cognitively motivated NLP, and has co-edited special issues and books dedicated to these topics.