Related papers: Very strict selectional restrictions
These are the notes for a minicourse held in Odessa (2016) and Belo Horizonte (2017). My aim was to provide a short introduction to basic notions of category theory and representation theory of finite-dimensional algebras. We learnt the…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of human languages, often used to express complex ideas in compressed or conventional ways (e.g. eager beaver as a keen and enthusiastic person). However, their interpretations may not be…
Regular nested word languages (a.k.a. visibly pushdown languages) strictly extend regular word languages, while preserving their main closure and decidability properties. Previous works have shown that considering languages of 2-nested…
It has been proposed that the order in which words are prepared for production depends on the speaker's language. When producing the translation equivalent of the small cat, speakers of German or Dutch select the gender-marked determiner at…
Many tasks in Natural Language Processing involve recognizing lexical entailment. Two different approaches to this problem have been proposed recently that are quite different from each other. The first is an asymmetric similarity measure…
Our study applies statistical methods to French and Italian corpora to examine the phenomenon of multi-word term reduction in specialty languages. There are two kinds of reduction: anaphoric and lexical. We show that anaphoric reduction…
Multilingual discourse parsing is a very prominent research topic. The first stage for discourse parsing is discourse segmentation. The study reported in this article addresses a review of two on-line available discourse segmenters (for…
We investigate two operators on classes of regular languages: polynomial closure (Pol) and Boolean closure (Bool). We apply these operators to classes of group languages G and to their well-suited extensions G+, which is the least Boolean…
The article describes a model of automatic analysis of puns, where a word is intentionally used in two meanings at the same time (the target word). We employ Roget's Thesaurus to discover two groups of words which, in a pun, form around two…
Because meaning can often be inferred from lexical semantics alone, word order is often a redundant cue in natural language. For example, the words chopped, chef, and onion are more likely used to convey "The chef chopped the onion," not…
We present Attract-Repel, an algorithm for improving the semantic quality of word vectors by injecting constraints extracted from lexical resources. Attract-Repel facilitates the use of constraints from mono- and cross-lingual resources,…
An attractive mechanism to specify global constraints in rostering and other domains is via formal languages. For instance, the Regular and Grammar constraints specify constraints in terms of the languages accepted by an automaton and a…
The contribution of this paper is the development of the syntax and semantics of multi-sorted nominal abstract binding trees (abts), an extension of second order universal algebra to support symbol-indexed families of operators. Nominal…
Transformer-based language models achieve high performance on various tasks, but we still lack understanding of the kind of linguistic knowledge they learn and rely on. We evaluate three models (BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT), testing their…
We discuss two constructions (long scrambling and ECM verbs) which challenge most syntactic theories (including traditional TAG approaches) since they seem to require exceptional mechanisms and postulates. We argue that these constructions…
Tree-controlled grammars are context-free grammars where the derivation process is controlled in such a way that every word on a level of the derivation tree must belong to a certain control language. We investigate the generative capacity…
A range of studies have concluded that neural word prediction models can distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences with high accuracy. However, these studies are based primarily on monolingual evidence from English. To…
The variation of word meaning according to the context leads us to enrich the type system of our syntactical and semantic analyser of French based on categorial grammars and Montague semantics (or lambda-DRT). The main advantage of a deep…
We define a notion of randomness for individual and collections of formal languages based on automatic martingales acting on sequences of words from some underlying domain. An automatic martingale bets if the incoming word belongs to the…
The capabilities and limitations of BERT and similar models are still unclear when it comes to learning syntactic abstractions, in particular across languages. In this paper, we use the task of subordinate-clause detection within and across…