Related papers: Finding Variants for Construction-Based Dialectome…
Recent progress in deep learning and natural language processing has given rise to powerful models that are primarily trained on a cloze-like task and show some evidence of having access to substantial linguistic information, including some…
We present a method for learning large-scale, broad-coverage construction grammars from corpora of language use. Starting from utterances annotated with constituency structure and semantic frames, the method facilitates the learning of…
In this paper we introduce a method for visually analyzing contextualized embeddings produced by deep neural network-based language models. Our approach is inspired by linguistic probes for natural language processing, where tasks are…
Natural language understanding (NLU) is an essential branch of natural language processing, which relies on representations generated by pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, PLMs primarily focus on acquiring lexico-semantic…
To model behavioral and neural correlates of language comprehension in naturalistic environments researchers have turned to broad-coverage tools from natural-language processing and machine learning. Where syntactic structure is explicitly…
This paper presents a novel treebank-driven approach to comparing syntactic structures in speech and writing using dependency-parsed corpora. Adopting a fully inductive, bottom-up method, we define syntactic structures as delexicalized…
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…
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.…
We present a qualitative analysis of the (potentially erroneous) outputs of contextualized embedding-based methods for detecting diachronic semantic change. First, we introduce an ensemble method outperforming previously described…
Language is dynamic, constantly evolving and adapting with respect to time, domain or topic. The adaptability of language is an active research area, where researchers discover social, cultural and domain-specific changes in language using…
The patterns in which the syntax of different languages converges and diverges are often used to inform work on cross-lingual transfer. Nevertheless, little empirical work has been done on quantifying the prevalence of different syntactic…
Large language models respond well in high-resource languages like English but struggle in low-resource languages. It may arise from the lack of high-quality instruction following data in these languages. Directly translating English…
Word embeddings provide an unsupervised way to understand differences in word usage between discursive communities. A number of recent papers have focused on identifying words that are used differently by two or more communities. But word…
Despite a multitude of empirical studies, little consensus exists on whether neural networks are able to generalise compositionally, a controversy that, in part, stems from a lack of agreement about what it means for a neural model to be…
The dissertation addresses the design of parsing grammars for automatic surface-syntactic analysis of unconstrained English text. It consists of a summary and three articles. {\it Morphological disambiguation} documents a grammar for…
Cross-lingual word embeddings encode the meaning of words from different languages into a shared low-dimensional space. An important requirement for many downstream tasks is that word similarity should be independent of language - i.e.,…
The paper presents methods for evaluating the accuracy of alignments between transcriptions and audio recordings. The methods have been applied to the Spoken British National Corpus, which is an extensive and varied corpus of natural…
This paper measures similarity both within and between 84 language varieties across nine languages. These corpora are drawn from digital sources (the web and tweets), allowing us to evaluate whether such geo-referenced corpora are reliable…
This paper uses computational experiments to explore the role of exposure in the emergence of construction grammars. While usage-based grammars are hypothesized to depend on a learner's exposure to actual language use, the mechanisms of…
The project aims to provide a semi-supervised approach to identify Multiword Expressions in a multilingual context consisting of English and most of the major Indian languages. Multiword expressions are a group of words which refers to some…