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The complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures is one of the core design features of human language. Duality of patterning refers for instance to the organization of the meaningful elements in a language at two distinct…
Understanding toxicity in user conversations is undoubtedly an important problem. Addressing "covert" or implicit cases of toxicity is particularly hard and requires context. Very few previous studies have analysed the influence of…
Coffee and tea share many properties, yet they evoke strikingly different situations, atmospheres, and affective associations. These situated dimensions of word meaning are real and systematic, but they remain implicit in most computational…
Speech perception involves storing and integrating sequentially presented items. Recent work in cognitive neuroscience has identified temporal and contextual characteristics in humans' neural encoding of speech that may facilitate this…
In this paper we present a system that detects and tracks objects and agents, computes spatial relations, and communicates those relations to the user using speech. Our system is able to detect multiple objects and agents at 30 frames per…
Simple reference games are of central theoretical and empirical importance in the study of situated language use. Although language provides rich, compositional truth-conditional semantics to facilitate reference, speakers and listeners may…
In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…
Spatial audio reasoning enables machines to interpret auditory scenes by understanding events and their spatial attributes. In this work, we focus on spatial audio understanding with an emphasis on reasoning about moving sources. First, we…
The identity of a speaker influences language comprehension through modulating perception and expectation. This review explores speaker effects and proposes an integrative model of language and speaker processing that integrates distinct…
The named concepts and compositional operators present in natural language provide a rich source of information about the kinds of abstractions humans use to navigate the world. Can this linguistic background knowledge improve the…
Memory is inherently entangled with prediction and planning. Flexible behavior in biological and artificial agents depends on the interplay of learning from the past and predicting the future in ever-changing environments. This chapter…
The linear subspace hypothesis (Bolukbasi et al., 2016) states that, in a language model's representation space, all information about a concept such as verbal number is encoded in a linear subspace. Prior work has relied on auxiliary…
We present a system for generating and understanding of dynamic and static spatial relations in robotic interaction setups. Robots describe an environment of moving blocks using English phrases that include spatial relations such as…
As the foundation of current natural language processing methods, pre-trained language model has achieved excellent performance. However, the black-box structure of the deep neural network in pre-trained language models seriously limits the…
This paper describes an alignment-based model for interpreting natural language instructions in context. We approach instruction following as a search over plans, scoring sequences of actions conditioned on structured observations of text…
Using the frequency of keywords is a classic approach in the formal analysis of text, but has the drawback of glossing over the relationality of word meanings. Word embedding models overcome this problem by constructing a standardized and…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
Discourse signals are often implicit, leaving it up to the interpreter to draw the required inferences. At the same time, discourse is embedded in a social context, meaning that interpreters apply their own assumptions and beliefs when…
Understanding context-dependent variation in word meanings is a key aspect of human language comprehension supported by the lexicon. Lexicographic resources (e.g., WordNet) capture only some of this context-dependent variation; for example,…