Yall should read this! Identifying Plurality in Second-Person Personal Pronouns in English Texts

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of distinguishing singular and plural 'you' in English texts, leveraging dialectal and multilingual cues to improve natural language processing tasks like translation and coreference resolution.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale distantly-supervised dataset for plural vs. singular 'you' detection and trains a model demonstrating reasonable in-domain accuracy with notable domain transfer challenges.

Findings

In-domain accuracy exceeds 77%

Domain transfer remains highly challenging

Publicly available code and data

Abstract

Distinguishing between singular and plural "you" in English is a challenging task which has potential for downstream applications, such as machine translation or coreference resolution. While formal written English does not distinguish between these cases, other languages (such as Spanish), as well as other dialects of English (via phrases such as "yall"), do make this distinction. We make use of this to obtain distantly-supervised labels for the task on a large-scale in two domains. Following, we train a model to distinguish between the single/plural you, finding that although in-domain training achieves reasonable accuracy (over 77%), there is still a lot of room for improvement, especially in the domain-transfer scenario, which proves extremely challenging. Our code and data are publicly available.