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Living Machines: A study of atypical animacy

Mariona Coll Ardanuy, Federico Nanni, Kaspar Beelen, Kasra Hosseini, Ruth Ahnert, Jon Lawrence, Katherine McDonough, Giorgia Tolfo, Daniel CS Wilson, Barbara McGillivray


Abstract
This paper proposes a new approach to animacy detection, the task of determining whether an entity is represented as animate in a text. In particular, this work is focused on atypical animacy and examines the scenario in which typically inanimate objects, specifically machines, are given animate attributes. To address it, we have created the first dataset for atypical animacy detection, based on nineteenth-century sentences in English, with machines represented as either animate or inanimate. Our method builds on recent innovations in language modeling, specifically BERT contextualized word embeddings, to better capture fine-grained contextual properties of words. We present a fully unsupervised pipeline, which can be easily adapted to different contexts, and report its performance on an established animacy dataset and our newly introduced resource. We show that our method provides a substantially more accurate characterization of atypical animacy, especially when applied to highly complex forms of language use.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.400
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4534–4545
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.400
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.400
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mariona Coll Ardanuy, Federico Nanni, Kaspar Beelen, Kasra Hosseini, Ruth Ahnert, Jon Lawrence, Katherine McDonough, Giorgia Tolfo, Daniel CS Wilson, and Barbara McGillivray. 2020. Living Machines: A study of atypical animacy. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4534–4545, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Living Machines: A study of atypical animacy (Coll Ardanuy et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.400.pdf
Code
 Living-with-machines/AtypicalAnimacy