Related papers: Syntax diagrams as a formalism for representation …
Sequence diagrams are a widely used design notation for describing software behaviors. Many reusable software artifacts such as design patterns and design aspects make use of sequence diagrams to describe interaction behaviors. When a…
Query formulation is increasingly performed by systems that need to guess a user's intent (e.g. via spoken word interfaces). But how can a user know that the computational agent is returning answers to the "right" query? More generally,…
This tutorial gives an advanced introduction to string diagrams and graph languages for higher-order computation. The subject matter develops in a principled way, starting from the two dimensional syntax of key categorical concepts such as…
Dependency syntax represents the structure of a sentence as a tree composed of dependencies, i.e., directed relations between lexical units. While in its more general form any such tree is allowed, in practice many are not plausible or are…
Semantic data and knowledge infrastructures must reconcile two fundamentally different forms of representation: natural language, in which most knowledge is created and communicated, and formal semantic models, which enable…
We present a metagrammatical formalism, {\em generic rules}, to give a default interpretation to grammar rules. Our formalism introduces a process of {\em dynamic binding} interfacing the level of pure grammatical knowledge representation…
Formal semantics offers a complete and rigorous definition of a language. It is important to define different semantic models for a language and different models serve different purposes. Building equivalence between different semantic…
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…
Meaning can be generated when information is related at a systemic level. Such a system can be an observer, but also a discourse, for example, operationalized as a set of documents. The measurement of semantics as similarity in patterns…
NLP is deeply intertwined with the formal study of language, both conceptually and historically. Arguably, this connection goes all the way back to Chomsky's Syntactic Structures in 1957. It also still holds true today, with a strand of…
We present a novel approach to construction of a formal semantics for a programming language. Our approach, using a parametric denotational semantics, allows the semantics to be easily extended to support new language features, and…
Neural approaches to program synthesis and understanding have proliferated widely in the last few years; at the same time graph based neural networks have become a promising new tool. This work aims to be the first empirical study comparing…
This paper includes a reflection on the role of networks in the study of English language acquisition, as well as a collection of practical criteria to annotate free-speech corpora from children utterances. At the theoretical level, the…
Hierarchies are the hidden backbones of complex systems and their analysis allows for a deeper understanding of their structure and how they evolve. We consider languages also to be complex adaptive systems with several intricate networks…
The emergence of a variety of graph-based meaning representations (MRs) has sparked an important conversation about how to adequately represent semantic structure. These MRs exhibit structural differences that reflect different theoretical…
In this article we undertake a study of extension complexity from the perspective of formal languages. We define a natural way to associate a family of polytopes with binary languages. This allows us to define the notion of extension…
A visual programming language uses pictorial tools such as diagrams to represent its structural units and control stream. It is useful for enhancing understanding, maintenance, verification, testing, and parallelism. This paper proposes a…
Probabilistic puzzles can be confusing, partly because they are formulated in natural languages - full of unclarities and ambiguities - and partly because there is no widely accepted and intuitive formal language to express them. We propose…
We study regular expressions that use variables, or parameters, which are interpreted as alphabet letters. We consider two classes of languages denoted by such expressions: under the possibility semantics, a word belongs to the language if…
Summarization of long sequences into a concise statement is a core problem in natural language processing, requiring non-trivial understanding of the input. Based on the promising results of graph neural networks on highly structured data,…