Related papers: Pragmatic Side Effects
We explore asynchronous programming with algebraic effects. We complement their conventional synchronous treatment by showing how to naturally also accommodate asynchrony within them, namely, by decoupling the execution of operation calls…
We explore which linguistic factors -- at the sentence and token level -- play an important role in influencing language model predictions, and investigate whether these are reflective of results found in humans and human corpora (Gries and…
We investigate program equivalence for linear higher-order(sequential) languages endowed with primitives for computational effects. More specifically, we study operationally-based notions of program equivalence for a linear…
Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication, and present a long-standing challenge for artificial language models. We perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven…
The Functional Machine Calculus (FMC), recently introduced by the authors, is a generalization of the lambda-calculus which may faithfully encode the effects of higher-order mutable store, I/O and probabilistic/non-deterministic input.…
We extend intersection types to a computational $\lambda$-calculus with algebraic operations \`a la Plotkin and Power. We achieve this by considering monadic intersections, whereby computational effects appear not only in the operational…
Philosophical thinking has a side effect: by aiming to find the essence of a diverse set of phenomena, it often makes it difficult to see the differences between them. This can be the case with Mathematics, Programming, Writing and…
Before being deployed for user-facing applications, developers align Large Language Models (LLMs) to user preferences through a variety of procedures, such as Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference…
People rely heavily on context to enrich meaning beyond what is literally said, enabling concise but effective communication. To interact successfully and naturally with people, user-facing artificial intelligence systems will require…
Pragmatics, the ability to infer meaning beyond literal interpretation, is crucial for social cognition and communication. While LLMs have been benchmarked for their pragmatic understanding, improving their performance remains…
Theories for reasoning about programs with effects initially focused on basic manipulation of lists and other mutable data. The next challenge was to consider higher-order programming, adding functions as first class objects to mutable…
Gradual semantics with abstract argumentation provide each argument with a score reflecting its acceptability, i.e. how "much" it is attacked by other arguments. Many different gradual semantics have been proposed in the literature, each…
With a view towards models of quantum computation and/or the interpretation of linear logic, we define a functional language where all functions are linear operators by construction. A small step operational semantic (and hence an…
The integration of lexical semantics and pragmatics in the analysis of the meaning of natural lan- guage has prompted changes to the global framework derived from Montague. In those works, the original lexicon, in which words were assigned…
Algebraic effect handlers is a programming paradigm where programmers can declare their own syntactic operations, and modularly define the semantics of these using effect handlers. However, we cannot directly define algebraic effect…
Computational models of human language often involve combinatorial problems. For instance, a probabilistic parser may marginalize over exponentially many trees to make predictions. Algorithms for such problems often employ dynamic…
We develop a denotational model for probabilistic and concurrent imperative programs, a class of programs with standard control flow via conditionals and while-loops, as well as probabilistic actions and parallel composition. Whereas…
We present an abstract framework for concurrent processes in which atomic steps have generic side effects, handled according to the principle of monadic encapsulation of effects. Processes in this framework are potentially infinite…
Recent work on combinatory logic demonstrates a compositional translation from lambda calculus that gives meaning to open terms. As the meaning of open terms is a key difficulty in the study of metaprogramming, we investigate whether this…
Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) allow programmers to construct statistical models and then simulate data or perform inference over them. Many PPLs restrict models to a particular instance of simulation or inference, limiting…