Related papers: A Predictive Model for Notional Anaphora in Englis…
The word order of a sentence is shaped by multiple principles. The principle of syntactic dependency distance minimization is in conflict with the principle of surprisal minimization (or predictability maximization) in single head syntactic…
Theoretical linguists have suggested that some languages (e.g., Chinese and Japanese) are "cooler" than other languages based on the observation that the intended meaning of phrases in these languages depends more on their contexts. As a…
Reflexive anaphora present a challenge for semantic interpretation: their meaning varies depending on context in a way that appears to require abstract variables. Past work has raised doubts about the ability of recurrent networks to meet…
The relationship between written and spoken words is convoluted in languages with a deep orthography such as English and therefore it is difficult to devise explicit rules for generating the pronunciations for unseen words. Pronunciation by…
Article prediction is a task that has long defied accurate linguistic description. As such, this task is ideally suited to evaluate models on their ability to emulate native-speaker intuition. To this end, we compare the performance of…
Semantic relations are often signaled with prepositional or possessive marking--but extreme polysemy bedevils their analysis and automatic interpretation. We introduce a new annotation scheme, corpus, and task for the disambiguation of…
Entity resolution aims at resolving repeated references to an entity in a document and forms a core component of natural language processing (NLP) research. This field possesses immense potential to improve the performance of other NLP…
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) involves identifying relations between entities distributed in multiple sentences within a document. Existing methods focus on building a heterogeneous document graph to model the internal…
We present a study on two key characteristics of human syntactic annotations: anchoring and agreement. Anchoring is a well known cognitive bias in human decision making, where judgments are drawn towards pre-existing values. We study the…
Derivational morphology is a fundamental and complex characteristic of language. In this paper we propose the new task of predicting the derivational form of a given base-form lemma that is appropriate for a given context. We present an…
Contrastive explanations, where one decision is explained in contrast to another, are supposed to be closer to how humans explain a decision than non-contrastive explanations, where the decision is not necessarily referenced to an…
It is increasingly recognized that human annotators do not always agree, and such disagreement is inherent in many annotation tasks. However, not all instances in a given task elicit the same degree of opinion divergence. In this paper, we…
Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In…
Slang is a common type of informal language, but its flexible nature and paucity of data resources present challenges for existing natural language systems. We take an initial step toward machine generation of slang by developing a…
This paper proposes to compute the meanings associated to sentences with generic NPs corresponding to the most of generalized quantifier. We call these generics specimens and they resemble stereotypes or prototypes in lexical semantics. The…
Possessive pronouns are used as determiners in English when no equivalent would be used in a Japanese sentence with the same meaning. This paper proposes a heuristic method of generating such possessive pronouns even when there is no…
The advent of context-aware NMT has resulted in promising improvements in the overall translation quality and specifically in the translation of discourse phenomena such as pronouns. Previous works have mainly focused on the use of past…
Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptable instance of their language. Acceptability provides a means of evaluating whether computational language models are processing language in a human-like manner. We test the ability…
A number of writers(Joseph Halpern and Fahiem Bacchus among them) have offered semantics for formal languages in which inferences concerning probabilities can be made. Our concern is different. This paper provides a formalization of…
Novel metaphor comprehension involves complex semantic processes and linguistic creativity, making it an interesting task for studying language models (LMs). This study investigates whether surprisal, a probabilistic measure of…