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Dependency syntax represents the structure of a sentence as a tree composed of dependencies, i.e., directed relations between lexical units. While in its more general form any such tree is allowed, in practice many are not plausible or are…
The ability to mimic human notions of semantic distance has widespread applications. Some measures rely only on raw text (distributional measures) and some rely on knowledge sources such as WordNet. Although extensive studies have been…
Contextuality is usually defined as absence of a joint distribution for a set of measurements (random variables) with known joint distributions of some of its subsets. However, if these subsets of measurements are not disjoint,…
A reverse dictionary takes the description of a target word as input and outputs the target word together with other words that match the description. Existing reverse dictionary methods cannot deal with highly variable input queries and…
Sememes are minimum semantic units of concepts in human languages, such that each word sense is composed of one or multiple sememes. Words are usually manually annotated with their sememes by linguists, and form linguistic common-sense…
Linguistic evaluations of how well LMs generalize to produce or understand language often implicitly take for granted that natural languages are generated by symbolic rules. According to this perspective, grammaticality is determined by…
Chinese idioms (Chengyu) are concise four-character expressions steeped in history and culture, whose literal translations often fail to capture their full meaning. This complexity makes them challenging for language models to interpret and…
Idioms pose a fundamental challenge for language models, as their meaning cannot be inferred from surface form alone. Understanding such expressions, therefore, requires semantic abstraction beyond lexical overlap. We introduce IdioLink, a…
Traditional sentiment analysis often uses sentiment dictionary to extract sentiment information in text and classify documents. However, emerging informal words and phrases in user generated content call for analysis aware to the context.…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
As text processing systems expand in scope, they will require ever larger lexicons along with a parsing capability for discriminating among many senses of a word. Existing systems do not incorporate such subtleties in meaning for their…
Neural language models learn, to varying degrees of accuracy, the grammatical properties of natural languages. In this work, we investigate whether there are systematic sources of variation in the language models' accuracy. Focusing on…
Chinese idioms are special fixed phrases usually derived from ancient stories, whose meanings are oftentimes highly idiomatic and non-compositional. The Chinese idiom prediction task is to select the correct idiom from a set of candidate…
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…
Sarcasm, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is the use of words by someone who means the opposite of what he is trying to say. In the field of sentimental analysis of Natural Language Processing, the ability to correctly identify sarcasm is…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
While large language models (LLMs) are generally considered proficient in generating language, how similar their language usage is to that of humans remains understudied. In this paper, we test whether models exhibit linguistic convergence,…
When using a third language to construct a bilingual dictionary, it is necessary to discriminate equivalencies from inappropriate words derived as a result of ambiguity in the third language. We propose a method to treat this by utilizing…
Riddles based on simple puns can be classified according to the patterns of word, syllable or phrase similarity they depend upon. We have devised a formal model of the semantic and syntactic regularities underlying some of the simpler types…
Word similarity has many applications to social science and cultural analytics tasks like measuring meaning change over time and making sense of contested terms. Yet traditional similarity methods based on cosine similarity between word…