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Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of natural language and constantly being added to a language. Owing to their non-compositionality and their ability to take on a figurative or literal meaning depending on the sentential context,…
Semantically non-compositional phrases constitute an intriguing research topic in Natural Language Processing. Semantic non-compositionality --the situation when the meaning of a phrase cannot be derived from the meaning of its components,…
This paper proposes a simple test for compositionality (i.e., literal usage) of a word or phrase in a context-specific way. The test is computationally simple, relying on no external resources and only uses a set of trained word vectors.…
Paraphrasing is the task of expressing an essential idea or meaning in different words. But how different should the words be in order to be considered an acceptable paraphrase? And can we exclusively use automated metrics to evaluate the…
Conceptual combination performs a fundamental role in creating the broad range of compound phrases utilized in everyday language. This article provides a novel probabilistic framework for assessing whether the semantics of conceptual…
Natural language allows us to refer to novel composite concepts by combining expressions denoting their parts according to systematic rules, a property known as \emph{compositionality}. In this paper, we study whether the language emerging…
The average uncertainty associated with words is an information-theoretic concept at the heart of quantitative and computational linguistics. The entropy has been established as a measure of this average uncertainty - also called average…
Natural language and visualization are being increasingly deployed together for supporting data analysis in different ways, from multimodal interaction to enriched data summaries and insights. Yet, researchers still lack systematic…
Meaning can be generated when information is related at a systemic level. Such a system can be an observer, but also a discourse, for example, operationalized as a set of documents. The measurement of semantics as similarity in patterns…
Recent work (Ross et al., 2025, 2024) has argued that the ability of humans and LLMs respectively to generalize to novel adjective-noun combinations shows that they each have access to a compositional mechanism to determine the phrase's…
The measurement of phrasal semantic relatedness is an important metric for many natural language processing applications. In this paper, we present three approaches for measuring phrasal semantics, one based on a semantic network model,…
Artificial agents that learn to communicate in order to accomplish a given task acquire communication protocols that are typically opaque to a human. A large body of work has attempted to evaluate the emergent communication via various…
We present a quantitative analysis of human word association pairs and study the types of relations presented in the associations. We put our main focus on the correlation between response types and respondent characteristics such as…
We study regular expressions that use variables, or parameters, which are interpreted as alphabet letters. We consider two classes of languages denoted by such expressions: under the possibility semantics, a word belongs to the language if…
The paper explores how the human natural language structure can be seen as a product of evolution of inter-personal communication code, targeting maximisation of such culture-agnostic and cross-lingual metrics such as anti-entropy,…
The study of rational relations is fundamental to the study of formal languages and automata theory. A rational relation is conjugate if each pair of words in the relation is conjugate (or cyclic shifts of each other). The notion of…
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…
Kolmogorov complexity of a finite binary word reflects both algorithmic structure and the empirical distribution of symbols appearing in the word. Words with symbol frequencies far from one half have smaller combinatorial richness and…
This paper is an attempt to bring together two approaches to language analysis. The possible use of probabilistic information in principle-based grammars and parsers is considered, including discussion on some theoretical and computational…
When natural language phrases are combined, their meaning is often more than the sum of their parts. In the context of NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis, where the meaning of a phrase is its sentiment, that still applies. Many NLP…