Related papers: Comparing morphological complexity of Spanish, Oto…
Ontologies present an attractive technology for describing bio-medicine, because they can be shared, and have rich computational properties. However, they lack the rich expressivity of English and fit poorly with the current scientific…
We explore the ability of word embeddings to capture both semantic and morphological similarity, as affected by the different types of linguistic properties (surface form, lemma, morphological tag) used to compose the representation of each…
We use large language models (LLMs) to uncover long-ranged structure in English texts from a variety of sources. The conditional entropy or code length in many cases continues to decrease with context length at least to $N\sim 10^4$…
Language models (LMs) are statistical models trained to assign probability to human-generated text. As such, it is reasonable to question whether they approximate linguistic variability exhibited by humans well. This form of statistical…
Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…
Pragmatics is core to natural language, enabling speakers to communicate efficiently with structures like ellipsis and anaphora that can shorten utterances without loss of meaning. These structures require a listener to interpret an…
Variations in languages across geographic regions or cultures are crucial to address to avoid biases in NLP systems designed for culturally sensitive tasks, such as hate speech detection or dialog with conversational agents. In languages…
Recent work on quantitative approaches to explaining query answers employs responsibility measures to assign scores to facts in order to quantify their respective contributions to obtaining a given answer. In this paper, we study the…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…
Word complexity is defined in a number of different ways. Psycholinguistic, morphological and lexical proxies are often used. Human ratings are also used. The problem here is that these proxies do not measure complexity directly, and human…
Automatic lexical simplification is a task to substitute lexical items that may be unfamiliar and difficult to understand with easier and more common words. This paper presents the description and analysis of two novel datasets for lexical…
In ontology-mediated query answering, access to incomplete data sources is mediated by a conceptual layer constituted by an ontology. To correctly compute answers to queries, it is necessary to perform complex reasoning over the constraints…
Orthographic transparency -- how directly spelling is related to sound -- lacks a unified, script-agnostic metric. Using ideas from algorithmic information theory, we quantify orthographic transparency in terms of the mutual compressibility…
The extent to which individual language characteristics influence tokenization and language modeling is an open question. Differences in morphological systems have been suggested as both unimportant and crucial to consider (Cotterell et…
We introduce and study several notions of approximation for ontology-mediated queries based on the description logics ALC and ALCI. Our approximations are of two kinds: we may (1) replace the ontology with one formulated in a tractable…
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…
In a topological dynamical system the complexity of an orbit is a measure of the amount of information (algorithmic information content) that is necessary to describe the orbit. This indicator is invariant up to topological conjugation. We…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
Since word embeddings have been the most popular input for many NLP tasks, evaluating their quality is of critical importance. Most research efforts are focusing on English word embeddings. This paper addresses the problem of constructing…
Language modelling is regularly analysed at word, subword or character units, but syllables are seldom used. Syllables provide shorter sequences than characters, they can be extracted with rules, and their segmentation typically requires…