Related papers: Predicting Declension Class from Form and Meaning
Predicting the structure of a discourse is challenging because relations between discourse segments are often implicit and thus hard to distinguish computationally. I extend previous work to classify implicit discourse relations by…
Distributional models learn representations of words from text, but are criticized for their lack of grounding, or the linking of text to the non-linguistic world. Grounded language models have had success in learning to connect concrete…
The mechanisms of comprehension during language processing remains an open question. Classically, building the meaning of a linguistic utterance is said to be incremental, step-by-step, based on a compositional process. However, many…
We present results of two methods for assessing the event profile of news articles as a function of verb type. The unique contribution of this research is the focus on the role of verbs, rather than nouns. Two algorithms are presented and…
Word order, an essential property of natural languages, is injected in Transformer-based neural language models using position encoding. However, recent experiments have shown that explicit position encoding is not always useful, since some…
We show that the mutual information between two symbols, as a function of the number of symbols between the two, decays exponentially in any probabilistic regular grammar, but can decay like a power law for a context-free grammar. This…
Progress in pre-trained language models has led to a surge of impressive results on downstream tasks for natural language understanding. Recent work on probing pre-trained language models uncovered a wide range of linguistic properties…
Though English sentences are typically inflexible vis-\`a-vis word order, constituents often show far more variability in ordering. One prominent theory presents the notion that constituent ordering is directly correlated with constituent…
With a growing interest in modeling inherent subjectivity in natural language, we present a linguistically-motivated process to understand and analyze the writing style of individuals from three perspectives: lexical, syntactic, and…
In settings from fact-checking to question answering, we frequently want to know whether a collection of evidence (premises) entails a hypothesis. Existing methods primarily focus on the end-to-end discriminative version of this task, but…
Words can be represented by composing the representations of subword units such as word segments, characters, and/or character n-grams. While such representations are effective and may capture the morphological regularities of words, they…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
In an effort to better understand meaning from natural language texts, we explore methods aimed at organizing lexical objects into contexts. A number of these methods for organization fall into a family defined by word ordering. Unlike…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
Internet-based economies and societies are drowning in deceptive attacks. These attacks take many forms, such as fake news, phishing, and job scams, which we call ``domains of deception.'' Machine-learning and natural-language-processing…
Text messaging is the most widely used form of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Previous findings have shown that linguistic factors can reliably indicate messages as deceptive. For example, users take longer and use more words to…
Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of…
In order to generate cohesive discourse, many of the relations holding between text segments need to be signalled to the reader by means of cue words, or {\em discourse markers}. Programs usually do this in a simplistic way, e.g., by using…
Intrinsic evaluation metrics for conditional language models, such as perplexity or bits-per-character, are widely used in both mono- and multilingual settings. These metrics are rather straightforward to use and compare in monolingual…
The objective of this paper is to predict (A) whether a sentence in a written text expresses an emotion, (B) the mode(s) in which it is expressed, (C) whether it is basic or complex, and (D) its emotional category. One of our major…