Related papers: Very strict selectional restrictions
GF(2)-grammars are a recently introduced grammar family with some unusual algebraic properties. They are closely connected to unambiguous grammars. By using the method of formal power series, we establish strong conditions that are…
Targeted syntactic evaluation of subject-verb number agreement in English (TSE) evaluates language models' syntactic knowledge using hand-crafted minimal pairs of sentences that differ only in the main verb's conjugation. The method…
We investigate connections between SAT (the propositional satisfiability problem) and combinatorics, around the minimum degree (number of occurrences) of variables in various forms of redundancy-free boolean conjunctive normal forms…
We provide the syntax and semantics of the cat language, a domain specific language to describe consistency properties of parallel/distributed programs. The language is implemented in the herd7 too (http://diy.inria.fr/doc/herd.html)l.
A way of extracting French verbal chunks, inflected and infinitive, is explored and tested on effective corpus. Declarative morphological and local grammar rules specifying chunks and some simple contextual structures are used, relying on…
While syntactic inference restrictions don't play an important role for SAT, they are an essential reasoning technique for more expressive logics, such as first-order logic, or fragments thereof. In particular, they can result in short…
While the task of assessing the plausibility of events such as ''news is relevant'' has been addressed by a growing body of work, less attention has been paid to capturing changes in plausibility as triggered by event modification.…
Idioms are unlike most phrases in two important ways. First, the words in an idiom have non-canonical meanings. Second, the non-canonical meanings of words in an idiom are contingent on the presence of other words in the idiom. Linguistic…
The precise formulation of derivation for tree-adjoining grammars has important ramifications for a wide variety of uses of the formalism, from syntactic analysis to semantic interpretation and statistical language modeling. We argue that…
Verbs occur in different syntactic environments, or frames. We investigate whether artificial neural networks encode grammatical distinctions necessary for inferring the idiosyncratic frame-selectional properties of verbs. We introduce five…
In this work we analyze the performances of two of the most used word embeddings algorithms, skip-gram and continuous bag of words on Italian language. These algorithms have many hyper-parameter that have to be carefully tuned in order to…
The vector representation of words, known as word embeddings, has opened a new research approach in linguistic studies. These representations can capture different types of information about words. The grammatical gender of nouns is a…
Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the `descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages,…
Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synthetic word-order variants of natural languages. We observe…
In this paper we discuss the following issue: How do we decide whether a certain property of language is a competence property or a performance property? Our claim is that the answer to this question is not given a-priori. The answer…
This paper is concerned with minimal-length representatives of equivalence classes of words in F_2 under Aut F_2. We give a simple inequality characterizing words of minimal length in their equivalence class. We consider an operation that…
Recent studies have shown that word embeddings exhibit gender bias inherited from the training corpora. However, most studies to date have focused on quantifying and mitigating such bias only in English. These analyses cannot be directly…
Learning fine-grained distinctions between vocabulary items is a key challenge in learning a new language. For example, the noun "wall" has different lexical manifestations in Spanish -- "pared" refers to an indoor wall while "muro" refers…
We present a trainable model for identifying sentence boundaries in raw text. Given a corpus annotated with sentence boundaries, our model learns to classify each occurrence of ., ?, and ! as either a valid or invalid sentence boundary. The…
Modal verbs, such as "can", "may", and "must", are commonly used in daily communication to convey the speaker's perspective related to the likelihood and/or mode of the proposition. They can differ greatly in meaning depending on how…