An Inclusive Notion of Text

Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
Natural language processing (NLP) researchers develop models of grammar, meaning and communication based on written text. Due to task and data differences, what is considered text can vary substantially across studies. A conceptual framework for systematically capturing these differences is lacking. We argue that clarity on the notion of text is crucial for reproducible and generalizable NLP. Towards that goal, we propose common terminology to discuss the production and transformation of textual data, and introduce a two-tier taxonomy of linguistic and non-linguistic elements that are available in textual sources and can be used in NLP modeling. We apply this taxonomy to survey existing work that extends the notion of text beyond the conservative language-centered view. We outline key desiderata and challenges of the emerging inclusive approach to text in NLP, and suggest community-level reporting as a crucial next step to consolidate the discussion.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.633
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11311–11327
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.633
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.633
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ilia Kuznetsov and Iryna Gurevych. 2023. An Inclusive Notion of Text. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 11311–11327, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Inclusive Notion of Text (Kuznetsov & Gurevych, ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.633.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.633.mp4