Related papers: Specimens: "most of" generic NPs in a contextually…
Distributional semantics has had enormous empirical success in Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science in modeling various semantic phenomena, such as semantic similarity, and distributional models are widely used in…
Generalized planning is concerned with the computation of general policies that solve multiple instances of a planning domain all at once. It has been recently shown that these policies can be computed in two steps: first, a suitable…
We report a series of experiments with different semantic models on top of various statistical models for extractive text summarization. Though statistical models may better capture word co-occurrences and distribution around the text, they…
Frequentist inference typically is described in terms of hypothetical repeated sampling but there are advantages to an interpretation that uses a single random sample. Contemporary examples are given that indicate probabilities for random…
In this paper, we derive a notion of 'word meaning in context' that characterizes meaning as both intensional and conceptual. We introduce a framework for specifying local as well as global constraints on word meaning in context, together…
Conceptual combination performs a fundamental role in creating the broad range of compound phrases utilized in everyday language. This article provides a novel probabilistic framework for assessing whether the semantics of conceptual…
The neural architectures of language models are becoming increasingly complex, especially that of Transformers, based on the attention mechanism. Although their application to numerous natural language processing tasks has proven to be very…
Abstraction is a powerful idea widely used in science, to model, reason and explain the behavior of systems in a more tractable search space, by omitting irrelevant details. While notions of abstraction have matured for deterministic…
We explore the use of large pretrained language models as few-shot semantic parsers. The goal in semantic parsing is to generate a structured meaning representation given a natural language input. However, language models are trained to…
Semantic type mismatch between a noun and its context is central to coercion phenomena. This paper introduces a graph-based method to examine how lexical and contextual type information is reflected in word embeddings. We select nouns from…
Scientists often use generics, that is, unquantified statements about whole categories of people or phenomena, when communicating research findings (e.g., "statins reduce cardiovascular events"). Large language models (LLMs), such as…
Psychology has had difficulty accounting for the creative, context-sensitive manner in which concepts are used. We believe this stems from the view of concepts as identifiers rather than bridges between mind and world that participate in…
We seek to semantically describe a set of images, capturing both the attributes of single images and the variations within the set. Our procedure is analogous to Principle Component Analysis, in which the role of projection vectors is…
Team semantics is a semantical framework for the study of dependence and independence concepts ubiquitous in many areas such as databases and statistics. In recent works team semantics has been generalised to accommodate also multisets and…
Natural Language Processing prides itself to be an empirically-minded, if not outright empiricist field, and yet lately it seems to get itself into essentialist debates on issues of meaning and measurement ("Do Large Language Models…
In a recent work, arXiv:2503.05884, we proposed a unified notion of nonclassicality that applies to arbitrary processes in quantum theory, including individual quantum states, measurements, channels, set of these, etc. This notion is…
We introduce a framework for quantifying semantic variation of common words in Communities of Practice and in sets of topic-related communities. We show that while some meaning shifts are shared across related communities, others are…
After some general remarks about the interrelation between philosophical and statistical thinking, the discussion centres largely on significance tests. These are defined as the calculation of $p$-values rather than as formal procedures for…
An interesting line of research in natural language processing (NLP) aims to incorporate linguistic typology to bridge linguistic diversity and assist the research of low-resource languages. While most works construct linguistic similarity…
Categories such as animal or furniture are acquired at an early age and play an important role in processing, organizing, and communicating world knowledge. Categories exist across cultures: they allow to efficiently represent the…