Ad Hoc Compounds for Stance Detection

Qi Yu, Fabian Schlotterbeck, Hening Wang, Naomi Reichmann, Britta Stolterfoht, Regine Eckardt, Miriam Butt


Abstract
In this paper we focus on a subclass of multi-word expressions, namely compound formation in German. The automatic detection of compounds is a known problem and we argue that its resolution should be given more urgency in light of a new role we uncovered with respect to ad hoc compound formation: the systematic expression of attitudinal meaning and its potential importance for the down-stream NLP task of stance detection. We demonstrate that ad hoc compounds in German indeed systematically express attitudinal meaning by adducing corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic experimental data. However, an investigation of state-of-the-art dependency parsers and Universal Dependency treebanks shows that German compounds are parsed and annotated very unevenly, so that currently one cannot reliably identify or access ad hoc compounds with attitudinal meaning in texts. Moreover, we report initial experiments with large language models underlining the challenges in capturing attitudinal meanings conveyed by ad hoc compounds. We consequently suggest a systematized way of annotating (and thereby also parsing) ad hoc compounds that is based on positive experiences from within the multilingual ParGram grammar development effort.
Anthology ID:
2024.mwe-1.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD) @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Archna Bhatia, Gosse Bouma, A. Seza Doğruöz, Kilian Evang, Marcos Garcia, Voula Giouli, Lifeng Han, Joakim Nivre, Alexandre Rademaker
Venues:
MWE | UDW | WS
SIGs:
SIGLEX | SIGPARSE
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
231–242
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.mwe-1.27
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qi Yu, Fabian Schlotterbeck, Hening Wang, Naomi Reichmann, Britta Stolterfoht, Regine Eckardt, and Miriam Butt. 2024. Ad Hoc Compounds for Stance Detection. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD) @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 231–242, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Ad Hoc Compounds for Stance Detection (Yu et al., MWE-UDW-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.mwe-1.27.pdf