Related papers: Compositional Semantics Grounded in Commonsense Me…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it. Assuming such a structure we show that the semantics of various natural language…
In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…
We prove a theorem stating that any semantics can be encoded as a compositional semantics, which means that, essentially, the standard definition of compositionality is formally vacuous. We then show that when compositional semantics is…
We argue that logical semantics might have faltered due to its failure in distinguishing between two fundamentally very different types of concepts: ontological concepts, that should be types in a strongly-typed ontology, and logical…
Over two decades ago a "quite revolution" overwhelmingly replaced knowledgebased approaches in natural language processing (NLP) by quantitative (e.g., statistical, corpus-based, machine learning) methods. Although it is our firm belief…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
In the concluding remarks of Ontological Promiscuity Hobbs (1985) made what we believe to be a very insightful observation: given that semantics is an attempt at specifying the relation between language and the world, if "one can assume a…
Accounts of semantic phenomena often involve extending types of meanings and revising composition rules at the same time. The concept of monads allows many such accounts -- for intensionality, variable binding, quantification and focus --…
Tableaux originate as a decision method for a logical language. They can also be extended to obtain a structure that spells out all the information in a set of sentences in terms of truth value assignments to atomic formulas that appear in…
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) we argue that the structure of commonsense knowledge must be discovered, rather than invented; and (ii) we argue that natural language, which is the best known theory of our (shared) commonsense…
Categorical compositional distributional semantics provide a method to derive the meaning of a sentence from the meaning of its individual words: the grammatical reduction of a sentence automatically induces a linear map for composing the…
The categorical compositional approach to meaning has been successfully applied in natural language processing, outperforming other models in mainstream empirical language processing tasks. We show how this approach can be generalized to…
This paper proposes a simple test for compositionality (i.e., literal usage) of a word or phrase in a context-specific way. The test is computationally simple, relying on no external resources and only uses a set of trained word vectors.…
A longstanding question in cognitive science concerns the learning mechanisms underlying compositionality in human cognition. Humans can infer the structured relationships (e.g., grammatical rules) implicit in their sensory observations…
Conceptual combination performs a fundamental role in creating the broad range of compound phrases utilized in everyday language. This article provides a novel probabilistic framework for assessing whether the semantics of conceptual…
The neural architectures of language models are becoming increasingly complex, especially that of Transformers, based on the attention mechanism. Although their application to numerous natural language processing tasks has proven to be very…
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…
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 of a model to generalize to complex, previously unseen types of combinations of entities from just having seen the primitives. This type of generalization is particularly relevant to the semantic…
Comparative constructions play an important role in natural language inference. However, attempts to study semantic representations and logical inferences for comparatives from the computational perspective are not well developed, due to…