Related papers: The Pet-Fish problem on the World-Wide Web
The `pet fish' phenomenon is often cited as a paradigm example of the `non-compositionality' of human concept use. We show here how this phenomenon is naturally accommodated within a compositional distributional model of meaning. This model…
We introduce the notion of the 'meaning bound' of a word with respect to another word by making use of the World-Wide Web as a conceptual environment for meaning. The meaning of a word with respect to another word is established by…
People use conjunctions and disjunctions of concepts in ways that violate the rules of classical logic, such as the law of compositionality. Specifically, they overextend conjunctions of concepts, a phenomenon referred to as the Guppy…
Euphemisms have not received much attention in natural language processing, despite being an important element of polite and figurative language. Euphemisms prove to be a difficult topic, not only because they are subject to language…
This paper presents a linguistically driven proof of concept for finding potentially euphemistic terms, or PETs. Acknowledging that PETs tend to be commonly used expressions for a certain range of sensitive topics, we make use of…
Dictionary definitions are historically the arbitrator of what words mean, but this primacy has come under threat by recent progress in NLP, including word embeddings and generative models like ChatGPT. We present an exploratory study of…
Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain…
Our results characterize the long-term behavior for a broad class of $\Lambda$-Wright--Fisher processes with frequency-dependent and environmental selection. In particular, we reveal a rich variety of parameter-dependent behaviors and…
A word may contain one or more hidden concepts. While the "animal" word evokes many images in our minds and encapsulates many concepts (birds, dogs, cats, crocodiles, etc.), the `parrot' word evokes a single image (a colored bird with a…
This paper presents a new model for word sense disambiguation formulated in terms of evolutionary game theory, where each word to be disambiguated is represented as a node on a graph whose edges represent word relations and senses are…
The words of a language reflect the structure of the human mind, allowing us to transmit thoughts between individuals. However, language can represent only a subset of our rich and detailed cognitive architecture. Here, we ask what kinds of…
Certain concepts, words, and images are intuitively more similar than others (dog vs. cat, dog vs. spoon), though quantifying such similarity is notoriously difficult. Indeed, this kind of computation is likely a critical part of learning…
We investigate the problem of understanding the message (gist) conveyed by images and their captions as found, for instance, on websites or news articles. To this end, we propose a methodology to capture the meaning of image-caption pairs…
Wit is a form of rich interaction that is often grounded in a specific situation (e.g., a comment in response to an event). In this work, we attempt to build computational models that can produce witty descriptions for a given image.…
The progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT raises the question of how they can be integrated into education. One hope is that they can support mathematics learning, including word-problem solving. Since LLMs can handle…
Large language models like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable proficiency in a broad spectrum of language-based tasks, some of which are traditionally associated with hallmarks of human intelligence. This has prompted ongoing disagreements…
Understanding context-dependent variation in word meanings is a key aspect of human language comprehension supported by the lexicon. Lexicographic resources (e.g., WordNet) capture only some of this context-dependent variation; for example,…
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most…
A challenging task for word embeddings is to capture the emergent meaning or polarity of a combination of individual words. For example, existing approaches in word embeddings will assign high probabilities to the words "Penguin" and "Fly"…
Meaning of Web-page content plays a big role while produced a search result from a search engine. Most of the cases Web-page meaning stored in title or meta-tag area but those meanings do not always match with Web-page content. To overcome…