Related papers: Anaphoric Binding: an integrated overview
The meaning of a sentence is a function of the relations that hold between its words. We instantiate this relational view of semantics in a series of neural models based on variants of relation networks (RNs) which represent a set of…
Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Language has the power to reinforce stereotypes and project social biases onto others. At the core of the challenge is that it is rarely what is stated explicitly, but…
The terms 'semantics' and 'ontology' are increasingly appearing together with 'explanation', not only in the scientific literature, but also in organizational communication. However, all of these terms are also being significantly…
The ability of language models to learn a task from a few examples in context has generated substantial interest. Here, we provide a perspective that situates this type of supervised few-shot learning within a much broader spectrum of…
We propose an algorithm to resolve anaphors, tackling mainly the problem of intrasentential antecedents. We base our methodology on the fact that such antecedents are likely to occur in embedded sentences. Sidner's focusing mechanism is…
Metaphors are a distinctive feature of literary language, yet they remain less studied experimentally than everyday metaphors. Moreover, previous psycholinguistic and computational approaches overlooked the temporal dimension, although many…
Conditional acceptability refers to how plausible a conditional statement is perceived to be. It plays an important role in communication and reasoning, as it influences how individuals interpret implications, assess arguments, and make…
We give a theoretical model of conjunctions $E\wedge F$ and implications $E\implies F$ where $F$ is meaningful only when $E$ is true, a situation which is very often encountered in everyday mathematics, and which was already formalized by…
Among the most general structures extending the framework by Dung are the abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs). They come equipped with various types of semantics, with the most prominent - the labeling-based one - analyzed in the context…
We introduce a category-theoreticabstraction of a syntax with auxiliary functions, called an admissiblemonad morphism. Relying on an abstract form of structural recursion,we then design generic tools to construct admissible monad…
Semantic role theory considers roles as a small universal set of unanalyzed entities. It means that formally there are no restrictions on role combinations. We argue that the semantic roles co-occur in verb representations. It means that…
Syntactic theory has traditionally adopted a constructivist approach, in which a set of atomic elements are manipulated by combinatory operations to yield derived, complex elements. Syntactic structure is thus seen as the result or discrete…
Understanding reasoning in large language models is complicated by evaluations that conflate multiple reasoning types. We isolate analogical reasoning, where a model transfers an attribute between entities that share known properties, and…
Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain…
A framework and method are proposed for the study of constituent composition in fMRI. The method produces estimates of neural patterns encoding complex linguistic structures, under the assumption that the contributions of individual…
As an ubiquitous method in natural language processing, word embeddings are extensively employed to map semantic properties of words into a dense vector representation. They capture semantic and syntactic relations among words but the…
We investigate the extent to which modern, neural language models are susceptible to structural priming, the phenomenon whereby the structure of a sentence makes the same structure more probable in a follow-up sentence. We explore how…
This paper presents a general framework for unifying functional interpretations. It is based on families of parameters allowing for different degrees of freedom on the design of the interpretation. In this way we are able to generalise…
Contextual predictability shapes how we choose and encode words in production. The effects of a word's predictability given preceding or past context are generally well-understood in both production and comprehension, but studies of…
Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory, which has attracted attention in recent decades due to its role in higher-order model checking: They are precisely the languages accepted by order-2 pushdown automata. The…