Related papers: A Note on Ontology and Ordinary Language
Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches to meaning. More specifically, proposals have been put forward to augment formal semantic machinery with…
Suppose we want to build a system that answers a natural language question by representing its semantics as a logical form and computing the answer given a structured database of facts. The core part of such a system is the semantic parser…
Compositional generalization is the ability to generalize systematically to a new data distribution by combining known components. Although humans seem to have a great ability to generalize compositionally, state-of-the-art neural models…
Syntax is a latent hierarchical structure which underpins the robust and compositional nature of human language. In this work, we explore the hypothesis that syntactic dependencies can be represented in language model attention…
Can recurrent neural nets, inspired by human sequential data processing, learn to understand language? We construct simplified datasets reflecting core properties of natural language as modeled in formal syntax and semantics: recursive…
Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of larger units given the meanings of their parts. Meanings are often assumed to combine…
Human language can be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and neighboring words in sentences are connected by edges. It was recently found (Ferrer and…
Ontologies are one of the core foundations of the Semantic Web. To participate in Semantic Web projects, domain experts need to be able to understand the ontologies involved. Visual notations can provide an overview of the ontology and help…
At the heart of intuitionistic type theory lies an intuitive semantics called the "meaning explanations"; crucially, when meaning explanations are taken as definitive for type theory, the core notion is no longer "proof" but "verification".…
Languages may encode similar meanings using different sentence structures. This makes it a challenge to provide a single set of formal rules that can derive meanings from sentences in many languages at once. To overcome the challenge, we…
This note clarifies the concept of syntax and semantics and their relationships. Today, a lot of confusion arises from the fact that the word "semantics" is used in different meanings. We discuss a general approach at defining semantics…
Explanation constitutes an archetypal feature of human rationality, underpinning learning and generalisation, and representing one of the media supporting scientific discovery and communication. Due to the importance of explanations in…
Categorical compositional distributional semantics is a model of natural language; it combines the statistical vector space models of words with the compositional models of grammar. We formalise in this model the generalised quantifier…
We develop a classical propositional logic for reasoning about combinatory logic. We define its syntax, axiomatic system and semantics. The syntax and axiomatic system are presented based on classical propositional logic, with typed…
A natural next step in the evolution of constraint-based grammar formalisms from rewriting formalisms is to abstract fully away from the details of the grammar mechanism---to express syntactic theories purely in terms of the properties of…
Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…
Ontologies have been used for the purpose of bringing system and consistency to subject and knowledge areas. We present a criticism of the present mathematical structure of ontologies and indicate that they are not sufficient in their…
Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding--namely, that the way something is expressed reflects…
This paper describes a computational framework for a grammar architecture in which different linguistic domains such as morphology, syntax, and semantics are treated not as separate components but compositional domains. Word and phrase…
From a general abstract system theoretical perspective, a quantum-like system description in the spirit of a generalized Quantum Theory may appear to be simpler and more natural than a classically inspired description. We investigate the…