Related papers: Ask, and shall you receive?: Understanding Desire …
Many genres of natural language text are narratively structured, a testament to our predilection for organizing our experiences as narratives. There is broad consensus that understanding a narrative requires identifying and tracking the…
Narrative understanding involves capturing the author's cognitive processes, providing insights into their knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Although large language models (LLMs) excel in generating grammatically coherent text,…
Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation, frustrating users and creating safety risks when that interpretation is wrong. We propose generating a single structured response that…
When people interpret text, they rely on inferences that go beyond the observed language itself. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a method for the analysis of text that takes implicitly communicated content explicitly into…
The availability of an abundance of knowledge sources has spurred a large amount of effort in the development and enhancement of Information Retrieval techniques. Users information needs are expressed in natural language and successful…
Natural Language Processing prides itself to be an empirically-minded, if not outright empiricist field, and yet lately it seems to get itself into essentialist debates on issues of meaning and measurement ("Do Large Language Models…
We must recognize that natural language is a way of information encoding, and it encodes not only the information but also the procedures for how information is processed. To understand natural language, the same as we conceive and design…
Motivated by the rapid ascent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and debates about the extent to which they possess human-level qualities, we propose a framework for testing whether any agent (be it a machine or a human) understands a subject…
Query Understanding concerns about inferring the precise intent of search by the user with his formulated query, which is challenging because the queries are often very short and ambiguous. The report discusses the various kind of queries…
Given the present state of work in natural language processing, this address argues first, that advance in both science and applications requires a revival of concern about what language is about, broadly speaking the world; and second,…
In this introductory article we present the basics of an approach to implementing computational interpreting of natural language aiming to model the meanings of words and phrases. Unlike other approaches, we attempt to define the meanings…
Requests are at the core of many social media systems such as question & answer sites and online philanthropy communities. While the success of such requests is critical to the success of the community, the factors that lead community…
We describe the task of Visual Understanding and Narration, in which a robot (or agent) generates text for the images that it collects when navigating its environment, by answering open-ended questions, such as 'what happens, or might have…
Designing natural language interfaces has historically required collecting supervised data to translate user requests into carefully designed intent representations. This requires enumerating and labeling a long tail of user requests, which…
Early stages of system development involve outlining desired features such as functionality, availability, or usability. Specifications are derived from these features that concretize vague ideas presented in natural languages. The…
Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding--namely, that the way something is expressed reflects…
Understanding search queries is a hard problem as it involves dealing with "word salad" text ubiquitously issued by users. However, if a query resembles a well-formed question, a natural language processing pipeline is able to perform more…
State-of-the-art deep-learning-based approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) are credited with various capabilities that involve reasoning with natural language texts. In this paper we carry out a large-scale empirical study…
Desire is a set of human aspirations and wishes that comprise verbal and cognitive aspects that drive human feelings and behaviors, distinguishing humans from other animals. Understanding human desire has the potential to be one of the most…
Providing plausible responses to why questions is a challenging but critical goal for language based human-machine interaction. Explanations are challenging in that they require many different forms of abstract knowledge and reasoning.…