Related papers: Asymptotic Approximation by Regular Languages
This paper proposes a simple test for compositionality (i.e., literal usage) of a word or phrase in a context-specific way. The test is computationally simple, relying on no external resources and only uses a set of trained word vectors.…
In formal language theory, one of the most fundamental tools, known as pumping lemmas, is extremely useful for regular and context-free languages. However, there are natural properties for which the pumping lemmas are of little use. One of…
Generating text from structured data is challenging because it requires bridging the gap between (i) structure and natural language (NL) and (ii) semantically underspecified input and fully specified NL output. Multilingual generation…
Although current large language models are complex, the most basic specifications of the underlying language generation problem itself are simple to state: given a finite set of training samples from an unknown language, produce valid new…
Meta-evaluation of automatic evaluation metrics -- assessing evaluation metrics themselves -- is crucial for accurately benchmarking natural language processing systems and has implications for scientific inquiry, production model…
We explore language semantics for automata combining probabilistic and nondeterministic behavior. We first show that there are precisely two natural semantics for probabilistic automata with nondeterminism. For both choices, we show that…
Much of the power of probabilistic methods in modelling language comes from their ability to compare several derivations for the same string in the language. An important starting point for the study of such cross-derivational properties is…
In this paper, we introduce a new and simple method for comparing speech utterances without relying on text transcripts. Our speech-to-speech comparison metric utilizes state-of-the-art speech2unit encoders like HuBERT to convert speech…
Large language models (LLMs) trained purely on text ostensibly lack any direct perceptual experience, yet their internal representations are implicitly shaped by multimodal regularities encoded in language. We test the hypothesis that…
With the advent of large language models (LLMs), the trend in NLP has been to train LLMs on vast amounts of data to solve diverse language understanding and generation tasks. The list of LLM successes is long and varied. Nevertheless,…
Analogous to regular string and tree languages, regular languages of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are defined in the literature. Although called regular, those DAG-languages are more powerful and, consequently, standard problems have a…
According to Futrell and Mahowald [arXiv:2501.17047], both infants and language models (LMs) find attested languages easier to learn than impossible languages that have unnatural structures. We review the literature and show that LMs often…
A language $L$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is suffix-convex if, for any words $x,y,z\in\Sigma^*$, whenever $z$ and $xyz$ are in $L$, then so is $yz$. Suffix-convex languages include three special cases: left-ideal, suffix-closed, and…
Current syntactic theory limits the range of grammatical variation so severely that the logical problem of grammar learning is trivial. Yet, children exhibit characteristic stages in syntactic development at least through their sixth year.…
A new class of languages of infinite words is introduced, called the max-regular languages, extending the class of $\omega$-regular languages. The class has two equivalent descriptions: in terms of automata (a type of deterministic counter…
Precisely controlling the length of generated text is a common requirement in real-world applications. However, despite significant advancements in following human instructions, Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with this task. In…
Finite chase, or alternatively chase termination, is an important condition to ensure the decidability of existential rule languages. In the past few years, a number of rule languages with finite chase have been studied. In this work, we…
In this document we achieve exact and asymptotic enumeration of words, compositions over a finite group, and/or integer compositions characterized by local restrictions and, separately, subsequence pattern avoidance. We also count…
The syntactic complexity of a regular language is the cardinality of its syntactic semigroup. The syntactic complexity of a subclass of regular languages is the maximal syntactic complexity of languages in that subclass, taken as a function…
In connection with the work of Anscombe, Macpherson, Steinhorn and the present author in [1] we investigate the notion of a multidimensional exact class ($R$-mec), a special kind of multidimensional asymptotic class ($R$-mac) with measuring…