Mónica Domínguez

Also published as: Monica Dominguez


2022

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Directions for NLP Practices Applied to Online Hate Speech Detection
Paula Fortuna | Monica Dominguez | Leo Wanner | Zeerak Talat
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Addressing hate speech in online spaces has been conceptualized as a classification task that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Through this conceptualization, the hate speech detection task has relied on common conventions and practices from NLP. For instance, inter-annotator agreement is conceptualized as a way to measure dataset quality and certain metrics and benchmarks are used to assure model generalization. However, hate speech is a deeply complex and situated concept that eludes such static and disembodied practices. In this position paper, we critically reflect on these methodologies for hate speech detection, we argue that many conventions in NLP are poorly suited for the problem and encourage researchers to develop methods that are more appropriate for the task.

2020

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ThemePro: A Toolkit for the Analysis of Thematic Progression
Monica Dominguez | Juan Soler | Leo Wanner
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper introduces ThemePro, a toolkit for the automatic analysis of thematic progression. Thematic progression is relevant to natural language processing (NLP) applications dealing, among others, with discourse structure, argumentation structure, natural language generation, summarization and topic detection. A web platform demonstrates the potential of this toolkit and provides a visualization of the results including syntactic trees, hierarchical thematicity over propositions and thematic progression over whole texts.

2018

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Compilation of Corpora for the Study of the Information Structure–Prosody Interface
Alicia Burga | Mónica Domínguez | Mireia Farrús | Leo Wanner
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2016

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An Automatic Prosody Tagger for Spontaneous Speech
Mónica Domínguez | Mireia Farrús | Leo Wanner
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Speech prosody is known to be central in advanced communication technologies. However, despite the advances of theoretical studies in speech prosody, so far, no large scale prosody annotated resources that would facilitate empirical research and the development of empirical computational approaches are available. This is to a large extent due to the fact that current common prosody annotation conventions offer a descriptive framework of intonation contours and phrasing based on labels. This makes it difficult to reach a satisfactory inter-annotator agreement during the annotation of gold standard annotations and, subsequently, to create consistent large scale annotations. To address this problem, we present an annotation schema for prominence and boundary labeling of prosodic phrases based upon acoustic parameters and a tagger for prosody annotation at the prosodic phrase level. Evaluation proves that inter-annotator agreement reaches satisfactory values, from 0.60 to 0.80 Cohen’s kappa, while the prosody tagger achieves acceptable recall and f-measure figures for five spontaneous samples used in the evaluation of monologue and dialogue formats in English and Spanish. The work presented in this paper is a first step towards a semi-automatic acquisition of large corpora for empirical prosodic analysis.

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Praat on the Web: An Upgrade of Praat for Semi-Automatic Speech Annotation
Mónica Domínguez | Iván Latorre | Mireia Farrús | Joan Codina-Filbà | Leo Wanner
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

This paper presents an implementation of the widely used speech analysis tool Praat as a web application with an extended functionality for feature annotation. In particular, Praat on the Web addresses some of the central limitations of the original Praat tool and provides (i) enhanced visualization of annotations in a dedicated window for feature annotation at interval and point segments, (ii) a dynamic scripting composition exemplified with a modular prosody tagger, and (iii) portability and an operational web interface. Speech annotation tools with such a functionality are key for exploring large corpora and designing modular pipelines.