Related papers: Appropriate Nouns with Obligatory Modifiers
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
When translating Japanese nouns into English, we face the problem of articles and numbers which the Japanese language does not have, but which are necessary for the English composition. To solve this difficult problem we classified the…
Recent work (Ross et al., 2025, 2024) has argued that the ability of humans and LLMs respectively to generalize to novel adjective-noun combinations shows that they each have access to a compositional mechanism to determine the phrase's…
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…
Ad hoc parsers are everywhere: they appear any time a string is split, looped over, interpreted, transformed, or otherwise processed. Every ad hoc parser gives rise to a language: the possibly infinite set of input strings that the program…
Most large language models are trained on linguistic input alone, yet humans appear to ground their understanding of words in sensorimotor experience. A natural solution is to augment LM representations with human judgments of a word's…
While a language assigns a value of either `yes' or `no' to each word, a lattice language assigns an element of a given lattice to each word. An advantage of lattice languages is that joins and meets of languages can be defined as…
Similes play an important role in literary texts not only as rhetorical devices and as figures of speech but also because of their evocative power, their aptness for description and the relative ease with which they can be combined with…
In this paper we suggest a typed compositional seman-tics for nominal compounds of the form [Adj Noun] that models adjectives as higher-order polymorphic functions, and where types are assumed to represent concepts in an ontology that…
Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptable instance of their language. Acceptability provides a means of evaluating whether computational language models are processing language in a human-like manner. We test the ability…
Classifiers tend to learn a false causal relationship between an over-represented concept and a label, which can result in over-reliance on the concept and compromised classification accuracy. It is imperative to have methods in place that…
Adjoint logic is a general approach to combining multiple logics with different structural properties, including linear, affine, strict, and (ordinary) intuitionistic logics, where each proposition has an intrinsic mode of truth. It has…
Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…
Do state-of-the-art natural language understanding models care about word order - one of the most important characteristics of a sequence? Not always! We found 75% to 90% of the correct predictions of BERT-based classifiers, trained on many…
Explanations in a recommender system assist users in making informed decisions among a set of recommended items. Great research attention has been devoted to generating natural language explanations to depict how the recommendations are…
The order of `noun and adposition' is the important parameter of word ordering rules in the world's languages. The seven parameters, `adverb and verb' and others, have a strong dependence on the `noun and adposition'. Japanese as well as…
Recent advances on instruction fine-tuning have led to the development of various prompting techniques for large language models, such as explicit reasoning steps. However, the success of techniques depends on various parameters, such as…
Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the…
This thesis is concerned with type-logical grammars and their practical applicability as tools of reasoning about sentence syntax and semantics. The focal point is narrowed to Dutch, a language exhibiting a large degree of word order…
Hard cases of pronoun resolution have been used as a long-standing benchmark for commonsense reasoning. In the recent literature, pre-trained language models have been used to obtain state-of-the-art results on pronoun resolution. Overall,…