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Memorization in language models is typically treated as a homogenous phenomenon, neglecting the specifics of the memorized data. We instead model memorization as the effect of a set of complex factors that describe each sample and relate it…
Emerging computational paradigms, such as probabilistic and hybrid programming, introduce new primitive operations that often need to be combined with classic programming constructs. However, it still remains a challenge to provide a…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it. Assuming such a structure we show that the semantics of various natural language…
Discourse relations bind smaller linguistic units into coherent texts. However, automatically identifying discourse relations is difficult, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked arguments. A more subtle challenge is…
A range of studies have concluded that neural word prediction models can distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences with high accuracy. However, these studies are based primarily on monolingual evidence from English. To…
Languages may encode similar meanings using different sentence structures. This makes it a challenge to provide a single set of formal rules that can derive meanings from sentences in many languages at once. To overcome the challenge, we…
We revisit Levin's theory about the correspondence of verb meaning and syntax and infer semantic classes from a large syntactic classification of more than 600 German verbs taking clausal and non-finite arguments. Grasping the meaning…
Techniques in which words are represented as vectors have proved useful in many applications in computational linguistics, however there is currently no general semantic formalism for representing meaning in terms of vectors. We present a…
Matching logic is a general formal framework for reasoning about a wide range of theories, with particular emphasis on programming language semantics. Notably, the intermediate language of the K semantics framework is an extension of…
The purpose of this paper is to show that the dual notions of elements & distinctions are the basic analytical concepts needed to unpack and analyze morphisms, duality, and universal constructions in the Sets, the category of sets and…
We introduce the logical grammar emdebbing (LGE), a model inspired by pregroup grammars and categorial grammars to enable unsupervised inference of lexical categories and syntactic rules from a corpus of text. LGE produces comprehensible…
Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express an unbounded set of emerging ideas. One result of this tension is the formation of new compositions, such that existing linguistic units can be combined with emerging items into novel…
Comparative constructions play an important role in natural language inference. However, attempts to study semantic representations and logical inferences for comparatives from the computational perspective are not well developed, due to…
Current approaches in paraphrase generation and detection heavily rely on a single general similarity score, ignoring the intricate linguistic properties of language. This paper introduces two new tasks to address this shortcoming by…
We present a dataset for evaluating the grammaticality of the predictions of a language model. We automatically construct a large number of minimally different pairs of English sentences, each consisting of a grammatical and an…
Traditional language models treat language as a finite state automaton on a probability space over words. This is a very strong assumption when modeling something inherently complex such as language. In this paper, we challenge this by…
We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with…
In this paper, our goal is to investigate to what degree multilingual pretrained language models capture cross-linguistically valid abstract linguistic representations. We take the approach of developing curated synthetic data on a large…
Translations between different nonmonotonic formalisms always have been an important topic in the field, in particular to understand the knowledge-representation capabilities those formalisms offer. We provide such an investigation in terms…
We prove a theorem stating that any semantics can be encoded as a compositional semantics, which means that, essentially, the standard definition of compositionality is formally vacuous. We then show that when compositional semantics is…