Related papers: Toward verbalizing ontologies in isiZulu
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
Recent studies leverage large language models with multi-tasking capabilities, using natural language prompts to guide the model's behavior and surpassing performance of task-specific models. Motivated by this, we ask: can we build a single…
Hausa language belongs to the Afroasiatic phylum, and with more first-language speakers than any other sub-Saharan African language. With a majority of its speakers residing in the Northern and Southern areas of Nigeria and the Republic of…
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…
This survey provides an overview of the evolution of visually grounded models of spoken language over the last 20 years. Such models are inspired by the observation that when children pick up a language, they rely on a wide range of…
Grammaticality and likelihood are distinct notions in human language. Pretrained language models (LMs), which are probabilistic models of language fitted to maximize corpus likelihood, generate grammatically well-formed text and…
An object--oriented approach to create a natural language understanding system is considered. The understanding program is a formal system built on the base of predicative calculus. Horn's clauses are used as well--formed formulas. An…
Historically two types of NLP have been investigated: fully automated processing of language by machines (NLP) and autonomous processing of natural language by people, i.e. the human brain (psycholinguistics). We believe that there is room…
Infants, adults, non-human primates and non-primates all learn patterns implicitly, and they do so across modalities. The biological evidence supports the hypothesis that the mechanism for this learning is general but computationally local.…
With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world. Yet, this diversity is scarcely reflected in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) systems…
Virtual assistants and text chatbots have recently been gaining popularity. Given the short message nature of text-based chat interactions, the language identification systems of these bots might only have 15 or 20 characters to make a…
Bangla is the sixth most widely spoken language globally, with approximately 234 million native speakers. However, progress in open-source Bangla machine translation remains limited. Most online resources are in English and often remain…
This case study investigates the extent to which a language model (GPT-2) is able to capture native speakers' intuitions about implicit causality in a sentence completion task. We first reproduce earlier results (showing lower surprisal…
We investigate the properties of formal languages expressible in terms of formulas over quantifier-free theories of word equations, arithmetic over length constraints, and language membership predicates for the classes of regular, visibly…
In order to take steps towards establishing a methodology for evaluating Natural Language systems, we conducted a case study. We attempt to evaluate two different approaches to anaphoric processing in discourse by comparing the accuracy and…
Compositionality, the phenomenon where the meaning of a phrase can be derived from its constituent parts, is a hallmark of human language. At the same time, many phrases are non-compositional, carrying a meaning beyond that of each part in…
Creating speech datasets, models, and evaluation frameworks for low-resource languages remains challenging given the lack of a broad base of pertinent experience to draw from. This paper reports on the field collection of 612 hours of…
An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…
We propose a formalism for representation of finite languages, referred to as the class of IDL-expressions, which combines concepts that were only considered in isolation in existing formalisms. The suggested applications are in natural…
The development of high-performing, robust, and reliable speech technologies depends on large, high-quality datasets. However, African languages -- including our focus, Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba -- remain under-represented due to insufficient…