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By operations on models we show how to relate completeness with respect to permissive-nominal models to completeness with respect to nominal models with finite support. Models with finite support are a special case of permissive-nominal…
Figures of speech help people express abstract concepts and evoke stronger emotions than literal expressions, thereby making texts more creative and engaging. Due to its pervasive and fundamental character, figurative language understanding…
There are two major classes of natural language grammar -- the dependency grammar that models one-to-one correspondences between words and the constituency grammar that models the assembly of one or several corresponded words. While…
We present theoretical analysis and a suite of tests and procedures for addressing a broad class of redundant and misleading association rules we call \emph{specious rules}. Specious dependencies, also known as \emph{spurious},…
Spurious ambiguity is the phenomenon whereby distinct derivations in grammar may assign the same structural reading, resulting in redundancy in the parse search space and inefficiency in parsing. Understanding the problem depends on…
We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly engaging in moral and ethical reasoning, where criteria for judgment are often unclear, even for humans. While LLM alignment studies cover many areas, one important yet underexplored area is how…
The past years have seen a drastic rise in studies devoted to the investigation of colexification patterns in individual languages families in particular and the languages of the world in specific. Specifically computational studies have…
Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In…
We describe a data-driven approach for automatically explaining new, non-standard English expressions in a given sentence, building on a large dataset that includes 15 years of crowdsourced examples from UrbanDictionary.com. Unlike prior…
While social media offers freedom of self-expression, abusive language carry significant negative social impact. Driven by the importance of the issue, research in the automated detection of abusive language has witnessed growth and…
Counterfactuals refer to minimally edited inputs that cause a model's prediction to change, serving as a promising approach to explaining the model's behavior. Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating English counterfactuals and…
Within the possibilistic approach to uncertainty modeling, the paper presents a modal logical system to reason about qualitative (comparative) statements of the possibility (and necessity) of fuzzy propositions. We relate this qualitative…
The usefulness of part-of-speech tags for parsing has been heavily questioned due to the success of word-contextualized parsers. Yet, most studies are limited to coarse-grained tags and high quality written content; while we know little…
This paper explores the kinds of probabilistic relations that are important in syntactic disambiguation. It proposes that two widely used kinds of relations, lexical dependencies and structural relations, have complementary disambiguation…
We introduce a graph polynomial that distinguishes tree structures to represent dependency grammar and a measure based on the polynomial representation to quantify syntax similarity. The polynomial encodes accurate and comprehensive…
Though English sentences are typically inflexible vis-\`a-vis word order, constituents often show far more variability in ordering. One prominent theory presents the notion that constituent ordering is directly correlated with constituent…
Grammatical rules in natural languages are often characterized by exceptions. How do language learners learn these exceptions to otherwise general patterns? Here, we study this question through the case study of English passivization. While…
Neural sequence-to-sequence models are currently the predominant choice for language generation tasks. Yet, on word-level tasks, exact inference of these models reveals the empty string is often the global optimum. Prior works have…
Foundations of formal languages, as subfield of theoretical computer science, are part of typical upper secondary education curricula. There is very little research on the potential difficulties that students at this level have with this…