Related papers: Pragmatic Side Effects
Recent causal probing literature reveals when language models and syntactic probes use similar representations. Such techniques may yield "false negative" causality results: models may use representations of syntax, but probes may have…
The mathematical representation of semantics is a key issue for Natural Language Processing (NLP). A lot of research has been devoted to finding ways of representing the semantics of individual words in vector spaces. Distributional…
In this thesis I will give a formal definition of side effects. I will do so by modifying a system for modelling program instructions and program states, Quantified Dynamic Logic, to a system called DLAf (for Dynamic Logic with Assignments…
A logic is presented for reasoning on iterated sequences of formulae over some given base language. The considered sequences, or "schemata", are defined inductively, on some algebraic structure (for instance the natural numbers, the lists,…
Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be…
The theory of finite term algebras provides a natural framework to describe the semantics of functional languages. The ability to efficiently reason about term algebras is essential to automate program analysis and verification for…
Call a semantics for a language with variables absolute when variables map to fixed entities in the denotation. That is, a semantics is absolute when the denotation of a variable a is a copy of itself in the denotation. We give a trio of…
A standard form of analysis for linguistic typology is the universal implication. These implications state facts about the range of extant languages, such as ``if objects come after verbs, then adjectives come after nouns.'' Such…
Logic languages based on the theory of rational, possibly infinite, trees have much appeal in that rational trees allow for faster unification (due to the safe omission of the occurs-check) and increased expressivity (cyclic terms can…
We improve the informativeness of models for conditional text generation using techniques from computational pragmatics. These techniques formulate language production as a game between speakers and listeners, in which a speaker should…
Quantum lambda calculus has been studied mainly as an idealized programming language -- the evaluation essentially corresponds to a deterministic abstract machine. Very little work has been done to develop a rewriting theory for quantum…
Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…
Despite widespread use of LLMs as conversational agents, evaluations of performance fail to capture a crucial aspect of communication: interpreting language in context -- incorporating its pragmatics. Humans interpret language using beliefs…
We investigate the internal structure of language model computations using causal analysis and demonstrate two motifs: (1) a form of adaptive computation where ablations of one attention layer of a language model cause another layer to…
The objective of this paper is to develop a functional programming language for quantum computers. We develop a lambda calculus for the classical control model, following the first author's work on quantum flow-charts. We define a…
A computational model of the construction of word meaning through exposure to texts is built in order to simulate the effects of co-occurrence values on word semantic similarities, paragraph by paragraph. Semantic similarity is here viewed…
Model-checking is one of the most powerful techniques for verifying systems and programs, which since the pioneering results by Knapik et al., Ong, and Kobayashi, is known to be applicable to functional programs with higher-order types…
Understanding pragmatics-the use of language in context-is crucial for developing NLP systems capable of interpreting nuanced language use. Despite recent advances in language technologies, including large language models, evaluating their…
For those of us who generally live in the world of syntax, semantic proof techniques such as reducibility, realizability or logical relations seem somewhat magical despite -- or perhaps due to -- their seemingly unreasonable effectiveness.…
Pressed by the difficulty of writing asynchronous, event-driven code, mainstream languages have recently been building in support for a variety of advanced control-flow features. Meanwhile, experimental language designs have suggested…