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Definition Modeling, the task of generating definitions, was first proposed as a means to evaluate the semantic quality of word embeddings-a coherent lexical semantic representations of a word in context should contain all the information…
A synonym of a polysemous word is usually only the paraphrase of one sense among many. When lexicons are used to improve vector-space word representations, such paraphrases are unreliable and bring noise to the vector-space. The prior works…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of human languages, often used to express complex ideas in compressed or conventional ways (e.g. eager beaver as a keen and enthusiastic person). However, their interpretations may not be…
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…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
This position paper looks into the formation of language and shows ties between structural properties of the words in the English language and their polysemy. Using Ollivier-Ricci curvature over a large graph of synonyms to estimate…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
Linguists distinguish between novel and conventional metaphor, a distinction which the metaphor detection task in NLP does not take into account. Instead, metaphoricity is formulated as a property of a token in a sentence, regardless of…
The non-humanlike behaviour of contemporary pre-trained language models (PLMs) is a leading cause undermining their trustworthiness. A striking phenomenon of such faulty behaviours is the generation of inconsistent predictions, which…
Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches to meaning. More specifically, proposals have been put forward to augment formal semantic machinery with…
Words of estimative probability (WEP) are expressions of a statement's plausibility (probably, maybe, likely, doubt, likely, unlikely, impossible...). Multiple surveys demonstrate the agreement of human evaluators when assigning numerical…
Contextualized word embeddings in language models have given much advance to NLP. Intuitively, sentential information is integrated into the representation of words, which can help model polysemy. However, context sensitivity also leads to…
Language enables humans to share knowledge, reason about the world, and pass on strategies for survival and innovation across generations. At the heart of this process is not just the ability to communicate but also the remarkable…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide accurate word definitions and explanations for any context. However, the scope of the definition changes for different target groups, like children or language learners. This is especially relevant…
According to the principle of polyrepresentation, retrieval accuracy may improve through the combination of multiple and diverse information object representations about e.g. the context of the user, the information sought, or the retrieval…
Polysemy and synonymy are two crucial interrelated facets of lexical ambiguity. While both phenomena are widely documented in lexical resources and have been studied extensively in NLP, leading to dedicated systems, they are often being…
This paper describes a hybrid system for WSD, presented to the English all-words and lexical-sample tasks, that relies on two different unsupervised approaches. The first one selects the senses according to mutual information proximity…
Bayesian inference systems should be able to explain their reasoning to users, translating from numerical to natural language. Previous empirical work has investigated the correspondence between absolute probabilities and linguistic…
Vocabulary learning by children can be characterized by many biases. When encountering a new word, children as well as adults, are biased towards assuming that it means something totally different from the words that they already know. To…
A widely acknowledged shortcoming of WordNet is that it lacks a distinction between word meanings which are systematically related (polysemy), and those which are coincidental (homonymy). Several previous works have attempted to fill this…