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The Air Travel Information Service (ATIS) corpus has been the most common benchmark for evaluating Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) tasks for more than three decades since it was released. Recent state-of-the-art neural models have obtained F1-scores near 98% on the task of slot filling. We developed a rule-based grammar for the ATIS domain that achieves a 95.82% F1-score on our evaluation set. In the process, we furthermore discovered numerous shortcomings in the ATIS corpus annotation, which we have fixed. This paper presents a detailed account of these shortcomings, our proposed repairs, our rulebased grammar and the neural slot-filling architectures associated with ATIS. We also rationally reappraise the motivations for choosing a neural architecture in view of this account. Fixing the annotation errors results in a relative error reduction of between 19.4 and 52% across all architectures. We nevertheless argue that neural models must play a different role in ATIS dialogues because of the latter's lack of variety.

Ever since Pereira (2000) provided evidence against Chomsky's (1957) conjecture that statistical language modelling is incommensurable with the aims of grammaticality prediction as a research enterprise, a new area of research has emerged that regards statistical language models as "psycholinguistic subjects" and probes their ability to acquire syntactic knowledge. The advent of The Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (CoLA) (Warstadt et al., 2019) has earned a spot on the leaderboard for acceptability judgements, and the polemic between Lau et al. (2017) and Sprouse et al. (2018) has raised fundamental questions about the nature of grammaticality and how acceptability judgements should be elicited. All the while, we are told that neural language models continue to improve.

In the midst of a global pandemic, understanding the public's opinion of their government's policy-level, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) is a crucial component of the health-policy-making process. Prior work on COVID-19 NPI sentiment analysis by the epidemiological community has proceeded without a method for properly attributing sentiment changes to events, an ability to distinguish the influence of various events across time, a coherent model for predicting the public's opinion of future events of the same sort, nor even a means of conducting significance tests. We argue here that this urgently needed evaluation method does already exist. In the financial sector, event studies of the fluctuations in a publicly traded company's stock price are commonplace for determining the effects of earnings announcements, product placements, etc. The same method is suitable for analysing temporal sentiment variation in the light of policy-level NPIs. We provide a case study of Twitter sentiment towards policy-level NPIs in Canada. Our results confirm a generally positive connection between the announcements of NPIs and Twitter sentiment, and we document a promising correlation between the results of this study and a public-health survey of popular compliance with NPIs.