Related papers: Characterizing Idioms: Conventionality and Conting…
The impressive performance of neural networks on natural language processing tasks attributes to their ability to model complicated word and phrase compositions. To explain how the model handles semantic compositions, we study hierarchical…
There is inherent information captured in the order in which we write words in a list. The orderings of binomials --- lists of two words separated by `and' or `or' --- has been studied for more than a century. These binomials are common…
Content has historically been the primary lens used to study language in online communities. This paper instead focuses on the linguistic style of communities. While we know that individuals have distinguishable styles, here we ask whether…
Metonymy is a figure of speech in which an entity is referred to by another related entity. The task of metonymy detection aims to distinguish metonymic tokens from literal ones. Until now, metonymy detection methods attempt to disambiguate…
Understanding how ideas relate to each other is a fundamental question in many domains, ranging from intellectual history to public communication. Because ideas are naturally embedded in texts, we propose the first framework to…
Current common interactions with language models is through full inference. This approach may not necessarily align with the model's internal knowledge. Studies show discrepancies between prompts and internal representations. Most focus on…
A noncontextual system of random variables may become contextual if one adds to it a set of new variables, even if each of them is obtained by the same context-wise function of the old variables. This fact follows from the definition of…
Psychological research consistently finds that human ratings of words across diverse semantic scales can be reduced to a low-dimensional form with relatively little information loss. We find that the semantic associations encoded in the…
The trigram `I love being' is expected to be followed by positive words such as `happy'. In a sarcastic sentence, however, the word `ignored' may be observed. The expected and the observed words are, thus, incongruous. We model sarcasm…
We define a notion of randomness for individual and collections of formal languages based on automatic martingales acting on sequences of words from some underlying domain. An automatic martingale bets if the incoming word belongs to the…
Results of measurements give legitimacy to a physical theory. What if acquiring these results in the first place necessitates what the same theory considers to be an interaction? In this note, we assume that theories account for…
Over the past century, personality theory and research has successfully identified core sets of characteristics that consistently describe and explain fundamental differences in the way people think, feel and behave. Such characteristics…
Overlapping frequently occurs in paired texts in natural language processing tasks like text editing and semantic similarity evaluation. Better evaluation of the semantic distance between the overlapped sentences benefits the language…
This paper argues that the relationship between lexical identity and prosody -- one well-studied parameter of linguistic variation -- can be characterized using information theory. We predict that languages that use prosody to make lexical…
Patterns of word use both reflect and influence a myriad of human activities and interactions. Like other entities that are reproduced and evolve, words rise or decline depending upon a complex interplay between {their intrinsic properties…
Sentiment analysis is one of the most widely used techniques in text analysis. Recent advancements with Large Language Models have made it more accurate and accessible than ever, allowing researchers to classify text with only a plain…
Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…
Consider a person trying to spread an important message on a social network. He/she can spend hours trying to craft the message. Does it actually matter? While there has been extensive prior work looking into predicting popularity of…
Idioms, are a kind of idiomatic expression in Chinese, most of which consist of four Chinese characters. Due to the properties of non-compositionality and metaphorical meaning, Chinese Idioms are hard to be understood by children and…
A lively ongoing debate is taking place, since the extraordinary emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with regards to their capability to understand the world and capture the meaning of the dialogues in which they are involved.…