Related papers: Finding Concept-specific Biases in Form--Meaning A…
Attributes of words and relations between two words are central to numerous tasks in Artificial Intelligence such as knowledge representation, similarity measurement, and analogy detection. Often when two words share one or more attributes…
This paper is about pregroup models of natural languages, and how they relate to the explicitly categorical use of pregroups in Compositional Distributional Semantics and Natural Language Processing. These categorical interpretations make…
What have language models (LMs) learned about grammar? This question remains hotly debated, with major ramifications for linguistic theory. However, since probability and grammaticality are distinct notions in linguistics, it is not obvious…
Natural language processing models learn word representations based on the distributional hypothesis, which asserts that word context (e.g., co-occurrence) correlates with meaning. We propose that $n$-grams composed of random character…
This paper argues that an interlingual representation must explicitly represent some parts of the meaning of a situation as possibilities (or preferences), not as necessary or definite components of meaning (or constraints). Possibilities…
Meaning can be generated when information is related at a systemic level. Such a system can be an observer, but also a discourse, for example, operationalized as a set of documents. The measurement of semantics as similarity in patterns…
The human ability to flexibly reason using analogies with domain-general content depends on mechanisms for identifying relations between concepts, and for mapping concepts and their relations across analogs. Building on a recent model of…
The purpose of this study is to find evidence for supporting the hypothesis that language is the mirror of our thinking, our prejudices and cultural stereotypes. In this analysis, a questionnaire was administered to 537 people. The answers…
The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation…
We present a cross-linguistic study that aims to quantify vowel harmony using data-driven computational modeling. Concretely, we define an information-theoretic measure of harmonicity based on the predictability of vowels in a natural…
Language models often show a preference for using information from specific positions in the input regardless of semantic relevance. While positional bias has been studied in various contexts, from attention sinks to task performance…
There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a…
While there is a large amount of research in the field of Lexical Semantic Change Detection, only few approaches go beyond a standard benchmark evaluation of existing models. In this paper, we propose a shift of focus from change detection…
For humans learning to categorize and distinguish parts of the world, the set of assumptions (overhypotheses) they hold about potential category structures is directly related to their learning process. In this work we examine the effects…
This paper introduces new methods based on exponential families for modeling the correlations between words in text and speech. While previous work assumed the effects of word co-occurrence statistics to be constant over a window of several…
Language model (LM) agents are increasingly used as autonomous decision-makers which need to actively gather information to guide their decisions. A crucial cognitive skill for such agents is the efficient exploration and understanding of…
Most words are ambiguous--i.e., they convey distinct meanings in different contexts--and even the meanings of unambiguous words are context-dependent. Both phenomena present a challenge for NLP. Recently, the advent of contextualized word…
Cross-lingual representation learning is an important step in making NLP scale to all the world's languages. Recent work on bilingual lexicon induction suggests that it is possible to learn cross-lingual representations of words based on…
Recognizing semantically similar sentences or paragraphs across languages is beneficial for many tasks, ranging from cross-lingual information retrieval and plagiarism detection to machine translation. Recently proposed methods for…
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…