Two-Part Discourse Markers in Chinese: The Processing of Causal and Concessive Relations
Merel Scholman, Jingqi Yan, Frances Yung, Vera Demberg (Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2026)
CV
Education
- Ph.D in Computational Linguistics, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, 2017
- M.Eng. in Computational Linguistics, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, 2014
- M.A. in Language Studies, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2011
- B.A. in Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2003
Research experience
- May 2026 – April 2029
- Gesture-informed language models: Evaluating Multimodal Discourse Processing in LLMs and Humans
- DFG Priority Programme SPP 2556 (LaSTing), PI: Frances Yung
- Funding: EUR 321,920 (264,600 + 40,320 + 17,000)
- July 2022 – April 2026
- Cognitive Modelling of Information Density for Discourse Relations
- SFB1102 Project B2 Phase 3, PIs: Vera Demberg, Merel Scholman
- Multilingual discourse relation resources; cross-lingual corpus analysis
- Domain adaptation of discourse parsers, perspectiveness in discourse
- July 2018 – June 2022
- Cognitive Modelling of Information Density for Discourse Relations
- SFB1102 Project B2 Phase 2, PI: Vera Demberg
- RAS models for discourse processing
- crowdsourcing discourse relations
- April 2017 - June 2018
- Cognitive Modelling of Information Density for Discourse Relations
- SFB1102 Project B2 Phase 1, PI: Vera Demberg
- Uniform Information Density and discourse relation markedness
Publications
Semi-automatic Approach for Tamil Discourse Relation Annotation
Frances Yung, Enosh Peter Ponraj, Vera Demberg (WILDRE-8 @ LREC 2026)
Human Label Variation in Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition
Frances Yung, Daniil Ignatev, Merel Scholman, Vera Demberg, Massimo Poesio (LREC 2026)
Synthetic Data Augmentation for Cross-domain Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition
Frances Yung, Varsha Suresh, Zaynab Reza, Mansoor Ahmad, Vera Demberg (SIGDIAL 2025)
On Crowdsoursing Discourse Relation Annotation
Frances Yung, Vera Demberg (CoMeDi Workshop @ Coling 2025)
Meaning Shifts of Implicit Discourse Relations in Translation: a Multi-lingual Corpus Study
Frances Yung, Vera Demberg (UCCTS)
Prompting Implicit Discourse Relation Annotation
Frances Yung, Mansoor Ahmad, Merel Scholman, Vera Demberg (Linguistic Annotation Workshop @ EACL 2024)
DiscoGeM 2.0: A Parallel Corpus of English, German, French and Czech Implicit Discourse Relations
Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, Šárka Zikánová, Vera Demberg (LREC-COLING 2024)
Capturing variation of discourse relations in English parallel data through automatic annotation and alignment
Christina Pollkläsener, Frances Yung, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski (Across Languages and Cultures 2024)
Translation Effect on Discourse Connective Choice
Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Christina Pollkläsener, Vera Demberg (DGfS 2023)
Investigating Explicitation of Discourse Connectives in Translation using Automatic Annotations
Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Christina Pollkläsener, Vera Demberg (SIGDIAL 2023)
Exploiting Knowledge about Discourse Relations for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification
Nobel Varghese, Frances Yung, Kaveri Anuranjana, Vera Demberg (Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse@ ACL 2023)
Design Choices for Crowdsourcing Implicit Discourse Relations: Revealing the Biases introduced by Task Design
Valentina Pyatkin, Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, Ido Dagan, Reut Tsarfaty, Vera Demberg (TACL 2023)
Label distributions help implicit discourse relation classification
Frances Yung, Kaveri Anuranjana, Merel Scholman, Vera Demberg (Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse@ COLING 2022)
Establishing annotation quality in multi-label annotations
Marian Marchal, Merel Scholman, Frances Yung, Vera Demberg (COLING 2022)
Discogem: A crowdsourced corpus of genre-mixed implicit discourse relations
Merel Scholman, Tianai Dong, Frances Yung, Vera Demberg (LREC 2022)
Design choices in crowdsourcing discourse relation annotations: The effect of worker selection and training
Merel Scholman, Valentina Pyatkin, Frances Yung, Ido Dagan, Reut Tsarfaty, Vera Demberg (LREC 2022)
A practical perspective on connective generation
Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, Vera Demberg (Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse@ EMNLP 2021)
Limits to the rational production of discourse connectives
Frances Yung, Jana Jungbluth, Vera Demberg (Frontiers in Psychology 2021)
Comparison of methods for explicit discourse connective identification across various domains
Merel Scholman, Tianai Dong, Frances Yung, Vera Demberg (Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse@ EMNLP 2021)
Modeling the interplay of rational production and comprehension of ambiguous connectives
Frances Yung, Jana Jungbluth, Vera Demberg (Societas Linguistica Europaea 2020)
Crowdsourcing discourse relation annotations by a two-step connective insertion task
Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, Vera Demberg (Linguistic Annotation Workshop @ ACL 2019)
Do speakers produce discourse connectives rationally?
Frances Yung, Vera Demberg (Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing @ ACL 2018)
Acquiring annotated data with cross-lingual explicitation for implicit discourse relation classification
Wei Shi, Frances Yung, Vera Demberg (Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking @ NAACL 2018)
Using explicit discourse connectives in translation for implicit discourse relation classification
Wei Shi, Frances Yung, Raphael Rubino, Vera Demberg (IJPNLP 2017)
A psycholinguistic model for the marking of discourse relations
Frances Yung, Kevin Duh, Taku Komura, Yuji Matsumoto (Dialogue and Discourse 2017)
Can Discourse Relations be Identified Incrementally?
Frances Yung, Hiroshi Noji, Yuji Matsumoto (IJPNLP 2017)
Modelling the usage of discourse connectives as rational speech acts
Frances Yung, Kevin Duh, Taku Komura, Yuji Matsumoto (CoNLL @ ACL 2016)
Modeling the interpretation of discourse connectives by Bayesian pragmatics
Frances Yung, Kevin Duh, Taku Komura, Yuji Matsumoto (ACL 2016)
Evalution 1.0: an evolving semantic dataset for training and evaluation of distributional semantic models
Enrico Santus, Frances Yung, Alessandro Lenci, Chu-Ren Huang (Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics @ ACL 2015)
Sequential annotation and chunking of Chinese discourse structure
Frances Yung, Kevin Duh, Yuji Matsumoto (SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing @ ACL 2015)
Crosslingual annotation and analysis of implicit discourse connectives for machine translation
Frances Yung, Kevin Duh, Yuji Matsumoto (Workshop on Discourse in Machine Translation @ EMNLP 2015)
Towards a discourse relation-aware approach for Chinese-English machine translation
Frances Yung (Student Research Workshop @ ACL 2014)
Analysis and Prediction of Unalignable Words in Parallel Text
Frances Yung, Kevin Duh, Yuji Matsumoto (EACL 2014)
Construction of English MWE dictionary and its application to POS tagging
Yutaro Shigeto, Ai Azuma, Sorami Hisamoto, Shuhei Kondo, Tomoya Kose, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Akifumi Yoshimoto, Frances Yung, Yuji Matsumoto (Workshop on Multiword Expressions @ NAACL 2013)
Teaching
Elements of data science and artificial intelligence
Teaching Assistant; Lectures and exercises for Bachelor students, Saarland University, Department of Computer Science, 2019–2026
Foundations of Linguistics
Co-teach; Lecture for Master students, Saarland University, Department of Language Science and Technology, 2023–2026
Prompting large language models
Seminar for Bachelor and Master students, Saarland University, Department of Language Science and Technology, 2024
Learning inherent human disagreement in annotation
Seminar for Bachelor and Master students, Saarland University, Department of Language Science and Technology, 2023
NLP applications for non-English languages
Software project for Bachelor and Master students, Saarland University, Department of Language Science and Technology, 2022
Recent Advances in Experimental and Computational Pragmatics
Seminar for Bachelor and Master students, Saarland University, Department of Language Science and Technology, 2020
Crowdsourcing linguistic annotations
Seminar for Bachelor and Master students, Saarland University, Department of Language Science and Technology, 2020
Discourse Relations: Cognition, Resources and NLP
Seminar for Bachelor and Master students, Saarland University, Department of Language Science and Technology, 2019
Recent Advances in Discourse Processing
Seminar for Bachelor and Master students, Saarland University, Department of Language Science and Technology, 2018
Co-Supervision
- Mahmoud Mohamed
- Master in Informatics, expected May 2025
- Title: Fine-tuning LLMs for explicit discourse relation identification
- Mansoor Ahmad
- Master in Informatics, 2024
- Title: Implicit Discourse Relation AnnotationUsing Large Language Models: A Prompt-driven Approach
- Shahana Mogal
- Master in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, 2024
- Title: Domain Adaptation for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification using Self-supervised Approaches
- Nobel Varghese
- Master in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, 2023
- Title: Improving discourse relation recognition using label information
- Edena Berhani
- Master in Informatics, 2023
- Title: Multi-label classification using Crowd Layer for Collective Human Opinions on Natural Language Inference Data
- Iza Skrjanec
- Master in Language Science and Technology, 2020
- Title: Generating Summaries of Bar Charts
Service
- Reviewer
- 2016 - 2024
- Conferences: AAR, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, COLING, IJCNLP
- Workshops: *SEM, CMCL, CODI
- Journal: Frontiers, Discourse \& Dialogues, Computational Linguistics, Language and Linguistics Compass
- Area chair
- Sigdial 2024-2025