Nicole Macher


2022

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MiST: a Large-Scale Annotated Resource and Neural Models for Functions of Modal Verbs in English Scientific Text
Sophie Henning | Nicole Macher | Stefan Grünewald | Annemarie Friedrich
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Modal verbs (e.g., can, should or must) occur highly frequently in scientific articles. Decoding their function is not straightforward: they are often used for hedging, but they may also denote abilities and restrictions. Understanding their meaning is important for accurate information extraction from scientific text.To foster research on the usage of modals in this genre, we introduce the MIST (Modals In Scientific Text) dataset, which contains 3737 modal instances in five scientific domains annotated for their semantic, pragmatic, or rhetorical function. We systematically evaluate a set of competitive neural architectures on MIST. Transfer experiments reveal that leveraging non-scientific data is of limited benefit for modeling the distinctions in MIST. Our corpus analysis provides evidence that scientific communities differ in their usage of modal verbs, yet, classifiers trained on scientific data generalize to some extent to unseen scientific domains.

2021

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Do we read what we hear? Modeling orthographic influences on spoken word recognition
Nicole Macher | Badr M. Abdullah | Harm Brouwer | Dietrich Klakow
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Theories and models of spoken word recognition aim to explain the process of accessing lexical knowledge given an acoustic realization of a word form. There is consensus that phonological and semantic information is crucial for this process. However, there is accumulating evidence that orthographic information could also have an impact on auditory word recognition. This paper presents two models of spoken word recognition that instantiate different hypotheses regarding the influence of orthography on this process. We show that these models reproduce human-like behavior in different ways and provide testable hypotheses for future research on the source of orthographic effects in spoken word recognition.