Related papers: Hierarchies in Dictionary Definition Space
Similarity is a core notion that is used in psychology and two branches of linguistics: theoretical and computational. The similarity datasets that come from the two fields differ in design: psychological datasets are focused around a…
A quantitative method is suggested, where meanings of words, and grammatic rules about these, of a vocabulary are represented by real numbers. People meet randomly, and average their vocabularies if they are equal; otherwise they either…
Our understanding of the visual world goes beyond naming objects, encompassing our ability to parse objects into meaningful parts, attributes, and relations. In this work, we leverage natural language descriptions for a diverse set of 2K…
In this paper, we are interested in developing semantic parsers which understand natural language questions embedded in a conversation with a user and ground them to formal queries over definitions in a general purpose knowledge graph (KG)…
Recent progress in pretraining language models on large corpora has resulted in large performance gains on many NLP tasks. These large models acquire linguistic knowledge during pretraining, which helps to improve performance on downstream…
Distributional semantics models are known to struggle with small data. It is generally accepted that in order to learn 'a good vector' for a word, a model must have sufficient examples of its usage. This contradicts the fact that humans can…
Words can have multiple senses. Compositional distributional models of meaning have been argued to deal well with finer shades of meaning variation known as polysemy, but are not so well equipped to handle word senses that are…
We propose a mathematical framework for a unification of the distributional theory of meaning in terms of vector space models, and a compositional theory for grammatical types, for which we rely on the algebra of Pregroups, introduced by…
Chinese word segmentation is a foundational task in natural language processing (NLP), with far-reaching effects on syntactic analysis. Unlike alphabetic languages like English, Chinese lacks explicit word boundaries, making segmentation…
A new approach to the construction of general persistent polyhierarchical classifications is proposed. It is based on implicit description of category polyhierarchy by a generating polyhierarchy of classification criteria. Similarly to…
Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and…
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…
Existing discourse formalisms use different taxonomies of discourse relations, which require expert knowledge to understand, posing a challenge for annotation and automatic classification. We show that discourse relations can be effectively…
In order to design strong paradigms for isolating lexical access and semantics, we need to know what a word is. Surprisingly few linguists and philosophers have a clear model of what a word is, even though words impact basically every…
Well-established cognitive models coming from anthropology have shown that, due to the cognitive constraints that limit our "bandwidth" for social interactions, humans organize their social relations according to a regular structure. In…
Word meaning is notoriously difficult to capture, both synchronically and diachronically. In this paper, we describe the creation of the largest resource of graded contextualized, diachronic word meaning annotation in four different…
Most classifiers rely on discriminative boundaries that separate instances of each class from everything else. We argue that discriminative boundaries are counter-intuitive as they define semantics by what-they-are-not; and should be…
Humans are social by nature. Throughout history, people have formed communities and built relationships. Most relationships with coworkers, friends, and family are developed during face-to-face interactions. These relationships are…
A Concept Tree is a structure for storing knowledge where the trees are stored in a database called a Concept Base. It sits between the highly distributed neural architectures and the distributed information systems, with the intention of…
Language understanding is a key scientific issue in the fields of cognitive and computer science. However, the two disciplines differ substantially in the specific research questions. Cognitive science focuses on analyzing the specific…