Related papers: Non-crossing dependencies: least effort, not gramm…
Structured language models for speech recognition have been shown to remedy the weaknesses of n-gram models. All current structured language models are, however, limited in that they do not take into account dependencies between…
This work presents an information-theoretic operationalisation of cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. It is not a new idea that there are small, cross-linguistic associations between the forms and meanings of words. For instance, it has…
Naturally-occurring bracketings, such as answer fragments to natural language questions and hyperlinks on webpages, can reflect human syntactic intuition regarding phrasal boundaries. Their availability and approximate correspondence to…
A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language…
The principle of DEPENDENCY LENGTH MINIMIZATION, which seeks to keep syntactically related words close in a sentence, is thought to universally shape the structure of human languages for effective communication. However, the extent to which…
Axiomatization has been widely used for testing logical implications. This paper suggests a non-axiomatic method, the chase, to test if a new dependency follows from a given set of probabilistic dependencies. Although the chase computation…
Consider a linguistic structure formed by $n$ elements, for instance, subject, direct object and verb ($n=3$) or subject, direct object, indirect object and verb ($n=4$). We investigate whether the frequency of the $n!$ possible orders is…
There is much interest in providing probabilistic semantics for defaults but most approaches seem to suffer from one of two problems: either they require numbers, a problem defaults were intended to avoid, or they generate peculiar side…
Unaided human decision making appears to systematically violate consistency constraints imposed by normative theories; these biases in turn appear to justify the application of formal decision-analytic models. It is argued that both claims…
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented as a graph, where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between them. In this setting, the distance between two linked words is defined as the difference…
If $A$ and $B$ are sets such that $A \subset B$, generalisation may be understood as the inference from $A$ of a hypothesis sufficient to construct $B$. One might infer any number of hypotheses from $A$, yet only some of those may…
The syntactic structure of a sentence is often represented using syntactic dependency trees. The sum of the distances between syntactically related words has been in the limelight for the past decades. Research on dependency distances led…
We propose a hypothesis only baseline for diagnosing Natural Language Inference (NLI). Especially when an NLI dataset assumes inference is occurring based purely on the relationship between a context and a hypothesis, it follows that…
Syntactic rules in natural language typically need to make reference to hierarchical sentence structure. However, the simple examples that language learners receive are often equally compatible with linear rules. Children consistently…
A conjecture of Hopkins (2018) posits that for certain high-dimensional hypothesis testing problems, no polynomial-time algorithm can outperform so-called "simple statistics", which are low-degree polynomials in the data. This conjecture…
A test of the null hypothesis that a hazard rate is monotone nondecreasing, versus the alternative that it is not, is proposed. Both the test statistic and the means of calibrating it are new. Unlike previous approaches, neither is based on…
A logic is defined that allows to express information about statistical probabilities and about degrees of belief in specific propositions. By interpreting the two types of probabilities in one common probability space, the semantics given…
Particularly in genomics, but also in other fields, it has become commonplace to undertake highly multiple Student's $t$-tests based on relatively small sample sizes. The literature on this topic is continually expanding, but the main…
The cross entropy loss is widely used due to its effectiveness and solid theoretical grounding. However, as training progresses, the loss tends to focus on hard to classify samples, which may prevent the network from obtaining gains in…
While syntactic dependency annotations concentrate on the surface or functional structure of a sentence, semantic dependency annotations aim to capture between-word relationships that are more closely related to the meaning of a sentence,…