Related papers: Probabilistic modeling of rational communication w…
We extend two kinds of causal models, structural equation models and simulation models, to infinite variable spaces. This enables a semantics for conditionals founded on a calculus of intervention, and axiomatization of causal reasoning for…
The black-box nature of neural models has motivated a line of research that aims to generate natural language rationales to explain why a model made certain predictions. Such rationale generation models, to date, have been trained on…
The idea of preserving conditional beliefs emerged recently as a new paradigm apt to guide the revision of epistemic states. Conditionals are substantially different from propositional beliefs and need specific treatment. In this paper, we…
We study a natural variant of the implicational fragment of propositional logic. Its formulas are pairs of conjunctions of positive literals, related together by an implicational-like connective; the semantics of this sort of implication is…
We discuss conditionalisation for Accept-Desirability models in an abstract decision-making framework, where uncertain rewards live in a general linear space, and events are special projection operators on that linear space. This abstract…
We give a finite-sample analysis of predictive inference procedures after model selection in regression with random design. The analysis is focused on a statistically challenging scenario where the number of potentially important…
In this paper, we derive a notion of 'word meaning in context' that characterizes meaning as both intensional and conceptual. We introduce a framework for specifying local as well as global constraints on word meaning in context, together…
To operate intelligently in the world, an agent must reason about its actions. The consequences of an action are a function of both the state of the world and the action itself. Many aspects of the world are inherently stochastic, so a…
We present a model of pragmatic referring expression interpretation in a grounded communication task (identifying colors from descriptions) that draws upon predictions from two recurrent neural network classifiers, a speaker and a listener,…
One of the necessary extensions to the centering model is a mechanism to handle pronouns with intrasentential antecedents. Existing centering models deal only with discourses consisting of simple sentences. It leaves unclear how to delimit…
The handling of probabilities in the form of uncertainty or partial information is an essential task for LLMs in many settings and applications. A common approach to evaluate an LLM's probabilistic reasoning capabilities is to assess its…
Bayesian inference systems should be able to explain their reasoning to users, translating from numerical to natural language. Previous empirical work has investigated the correspondence between absolute probabilities and linguistic…
Concept-based explanation methods aim at making machine learning models more transparent by finding the most important semantic features of an input (e.g., colors, patterns, shapes) for a given prediction task. However, these methods…
Recently, topic modeling has been widely used to discover the abstract topics in text corpora. Most of the existing topic models are based on the assumption of three-layer hierarchical Bayesian structure, i.e. each document is modeled as a…
The ability to robustly identify causal relationships is essential for autonomous decision-making and adaptation to novel scenarios. However, accurately inferring causal structure requires integrating both world knowledge and abstract…
All scientific interpretations of statistical outputs depend on background (auxiliary) assumptions that are rarely delineated or explicitly interrogated. These include not only the usual modeling assumptions, but also deeper assumptions…
Research in the social sciences and psychology has shown that the persuasiveness of an argument depends not only the language employed, but also on attributes of the source/communicator, the audience, and the appropriateness and strength of…
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
The features of a logically sound approach to a theory of statistical reasoning are discussed. A particular approach that satisfies these criteria is reviewed. This is seen to involve selection of a model, model checking, elicitation of a…
We present a domain-theoretic framework for probabilistic programming that provides a constructive definition of conditional probability and addresses computability challenges previously identified in the literature. We introduce a novel…