Related papers: The Role of Verb Semantics in Hungarian Verb-Objec…
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…
We propose a cognitively and linguistically motivated set of sorts for lexical semantics in a compositional setting: the classifiers in languages that do have such pronouns. These sorts are needed to include lexical considerations in a…
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…
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…
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…
Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synthetic word-order variants of natural languages. We observe…
We present an extended comparison of contextualized language models for Hungarian. We compare huBERT, a Hungarian model against 4 multilingual models including the multilingual BERT model. We evaluate these models through three tasks,…
Languages of the world vary concerning the order of subject, object and verb. The most frequent dominant orders are SOV and SVO, and researchers have tailored models to this fact. However, there are still languages whose dominant order does…
The sequential structure of language, and the order of words in a sentence specifically, plays a central role in human language processing. Consequently, in designing computational models of language, the de facto approach is to present…
The vector representation of words, known as word embeddings, has opened a new research approach in linguistic studies. These representations can capture different types of information about words. The grammatical gender of nouns is a…
Because meaning can often be inferred from lexical semantics alone, word order is often a redundant cue in natural language. For example, the words chopped, chef, and onion are more likely used to convey "The chef chopped the onion," not…
We present a factorized compositional distributional semantics model for the representation of transitive verb constructions. Our model first produces (subject, verb) and (verb, object) vector representations based on the similarity of the…
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…
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…
Children typically learn the meanings of nouns earlier than the meanings of verbs. However, it is unclear whether this asymmetry is a result of complexity in the visual structure of categories in the world to which language refers, the…
This paper will focus on the semantic representation of verbs in computer systems and its impact on lexical selection problems in machine translation (MT). Two groups of English and Chinese verbs are examined to show that lexical selection…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We…
We show that the geometric relations between semantic features in large language models' hidden states closely mirror human psychological associations. We construct feature vectors corresponding to 360 words and project them on 32 semantic…
While cross-linguistic model transfer is effective in many settings, there is still limited understanding of the conditions under which it works. In this paper, we focus on assessing the role of lexical semantics in cross-lingual transfer,…