Related papers: What Meaning-Form Correlation Has to Compose With
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
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.…
Human beings possess the most sophisticated computational machinery in the known universe. We can understand language of rich descriptive power, and communicate in the same environment with astonishing clarity. Two of the many contributors…
Conceptual combination performs a fundamental role in creating the broad range of compound phrases utilized in everyday language. This article provides a novel probabilistic framework for assessing whether the semantics of conceptual…
Semantically non-compositional phrases constitute an intriguing research topic in Natural Language Processing. Semantic non-compositionality --the situation when the meaning of a phrase cannot be derived from the meaning of its components,…
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…
Natural language allows us to refer to novel composite concepts by combining expressions denoting their parts according to systematic rules, a property known as \emph{compositionality}. In this paper, we study whether the language emerging…
The process of meaning composition, wherein smaller units like morphemes or words combine to form the meaning of phrases and sentences, is essential for human sentence comprehension. Despite extensive neurolinguistic research into the brain…
Compositionality is thought to be a key component of language, and various compositional benchmarks have been developed to empirically probe the compositional generalization of existing sequence processing models. These benchmarks often…
Compositionality, the phenomenon where the meaning of a phrase can be derived from its constituent parts, is a hallmark of human language. At the same time, many phrases are non-compositional, carrying a meaning beyond that of each part in…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. Assuming the existence of such a structure, we show that the…
We present a non-vacuous definition of compositionality. It is based on the idea of combining the minimum description length principle with the original definition of compositionality (that is, that the meaning of the whole is a function of…
Natural language is characterized by compositionality: the meaning of a complex expression is constructed from the meanings of its constituent parts. To facilitate the evaluation of the compositional abilities of language processing…
We propose a grounded approach to meaning in language typology. We treat data from perceptual modalities, such as images, as a language-agnostic representation of meaning. Hence, we can quantify the function--form relationship between…
A longstanding debate in semiotics centers on the relationship between linguistic signs and their corresponding semantics: is there an arbitrary relationship between a word form and its meaning, or does some systematic phenomenon pervade?…
Many machine learning algorithms represent input data with vector embeddings or discrete codes. When inputs exhibit compositional structure (e.g. objects built from parts or procedures from subroutines), it is natural to ask whether this…
Compositionality is considered central to language abilities. As performant language systems, how do large language models (LLMs) do on compositional tasks? We evaluate adjective-noun compositionality in LLMs using two complementary setups:…
Identifying the relations that exist between words (or entities) is important for various natural language processing tasks such as, relational search, noun-modifier classification and analogy detection. A popular approach to represent the…
By virtue of linguistic compositionality, few syntactic rules and a finite lexicon can generate an unbounded number of sentences. That is, language, though seemingly high-dimensional, can be explained using relatively few degrees of…
We prove a theorem stating that any semantics can be encoded as a compositional semantics, which means that, essentially, the standard definition of compositionality is formally vacuous. We then show that when compositional semantics is…