Improving the Recognizability of Syntactic Relations Using Contextualized Examples

Abstract

A common task in qualitative data analysis is to characterize the usage of a linguistic entity by issuing queries over syntactic relations between words. Previous interfaces for searching over syntactic structures require programming-style queries. User interface research suggests that it is easier to recognize a pattern than to compose it from scratch; therefore, interfaces for non-experts should show previews of syntactic relations. What these previews should look like is an open question that we explored with a 400-participant Mechanical Turk experiment. We found that syntactic relations are recognized with 34% higher accuracy when contextual examples are shown than a baseline of naming the relations alone. This suggests that user interfaces should display contextual examples of syntactic relations to help users choose between different relations.

SENPAI: Supporting Exploratory Text Analysis through Semantic & Syntactic Pattern Inspection

“…To better convey the meaning of the words in the pattern, we also showed up to 5 substitute words for each word in the pattern. Previous research observed that offering example words and sentences helps disambiguate syntactic search queries (Muralidharan and Hearst 2014). Hence, we gave annotators four unannotated documents, of which exactly one did not contain the pattern.…”