Related papers: Predicting Declension Class from Form and Meaning
Morphological declension, which aims to inflect nouns to indicate number, case and gender, is an important task in natural language processing (NLP). This research proposal seeks to address the degree to which Recurrent Neural Networks…
In derivational morphology, what mechanisms govern the variation in form-meaning relations between words? The answers to this type of questions are typically based on intuition and on observations drawn from limited data, even when a wide…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change of human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or \textbf{semantic changes} of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning…
How much meaning influences gender assignment across languages is an active area of research in linguistics and cognitive science. We can view current approaches as aiming to determine where gender assignment falls on a spectrum, from being…
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…
The interpretation of the lexical aspect of verbs in English plays a crucial role for recognizing textual entailment and learning discourse-level inferences. We show that two elementary dimensions of aspectual class, states vs. events, and…
Acquiring lexical information is a complex problem, typically approached by relying on a number of contexts to contribute information for classification. One of the first issues to address in this domain is the determination of such…
Many natural languages assign grammatical gender also to inanimate nouns in the language. In such languages, words that relate to the gender-marked nouns are inflected to agree with the noun's gender. We show that this affects the word…
This study investigates the relationship between the phonological and morphological structure of Polish words and their meanings using Distributional Semantics. In the present analysis, we ask whether there is a relationship between the…
In inductive inference, we investigate the learnability of classes of formal languages. We are interested in what classes of languages are learnable in certain learning settings. A class of languages is learnable, if there is a learner that…
Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female…
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…
The concept of inflection classes is an abstraction used by linguists, and provides a means to describe patterns in languages that give an analogical base for deducing previously unencountered forms. This ability is an important part of…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
Does the grammatical gender of a language interfere when measuring the semantic gender information captured by its word embeddings? A number of anomalous gender bias measurements in the embeddings of gendered languages suggest this…
One of the most intriguing features of language is its constant change, with ongoing shifts in how meaning is expressed. Despite decades of research, the factors that determine how and why meanings evolve remain only partly understood.…
Selectional preference learning methods have usually focused on word-to-class relations, e.g., a verb selects as its subject a given nominal class. This papers extends previous statistical models to class-to-class preferences, and presents…
Much like sentences are composed of words, words themselves are composed of smaller units. For example, the English word questionably can be analyzed as question+able+ly. However, this structural decomposition of the word does not directly…
This paper investigates biases of Large Language Models (LLMs) through the lens of grammatical gender. Drawing inspiration from seminal works in psycholinguistics, particularly the study of gender's influence on language perception, we…