Related papers: On the Self Shuffle Language
A word is said to be \emph{bordered} if it contains a non-empty proper prefix that is also a suffix. We can naturally extend this definition to pairs of non-empty words. A pair of words $(u,v)$ is said to be \emph{mutually bordered} if…
Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words). Given an infinite…
Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synthetic word-order variants of natural languages. We observe…
Automatic identification of mutiword expressions (MWEs) is a pre-requisite for semantically-oriented downstream applications. This task is challenging because MWEs, especially verbal ones (VMWEs), exhibit surface variability. However, this…
Math word problems (MWPs) is a task that automatically derives solution expression from a giving math problems in text. The previous studies suffer from spurious correlations between input text and output expression. To mitigate this issue,…
Disfluencies (i.e. interruptions in the regular flow of speech), are ubiquitous to spoken discourse. Fillers ("uh", "um") are disfluencies that occur the most frequently compared to other kinds of disfluencies. Yet, to the best of our…
A language L is prefix-free if, whenever words u and v are in L and u is a prefix of v, then u=v. Suffix-, factor-, and subword-free languages are defined similarly, where "subword" means "subsequence". A language is bifix-free if it is…
An abelian square is the concatenation of two words that are anagrams of one another. A word of length $n$ can contain at most $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct factors, and there exist words of length $n$ containing $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct…
We characterize the infinite words determined by indexed languages. An infinite language $L$ determines an infinite word $\alpha$ if every string in $L$ is a prefix of $\alpha$. If $L$ is regular or context-free, it is known that $\alpha$…
Do state-of-the-art natural language understanding models care about word order - one of the most important characteristics of a sequence? Not always! We found 75% to 90% of the correct predictions of BERT-based classifiers, trained on many…
Let $w$ be a word in a free group. A few years ago, Magee and the first named author discovered that the stable commutator length (scl) of $w$, a well-known topological invariant, can also be defined in terms of certain Fourier coefficients…
The block reversal of a word $w$, denoted by $\mathtt{BR}(w)$, is a generalization of the concept of the reversal of a word, obtained by concatenating the blocks of the word in the reverse order. We characterize non-binary and binary words…
We study sorting by queues that can rearrange their content by applying permutations from a predefined set. These new sorting devices are called shuffle queues and we investigate those of them corresponding to sets of permutations defining…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
A word is square-free if it does not contain a nonempty word of the form $XX$ as a factor. A famous 1906 result of Thue asserts that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. We study square-free words with…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…
Context free languages allow one to express data with hierarchical structure, at the cost of losing some of the useful properties of languages recognized by finite automata on words. However, it is possible to restore some of these…
Divergent word usages reflect differences among people. In this paper, we present a novel angle for studying word usage divergence -- word interpretations. We propose an approach that quantifies semantic differences in interpretations among…
Ambiguity is ubiquitous in natural language. Resolving ambiguous meanings is especially important in information retrieval tasks. While word embeddings carry semantic information, they fail to handle ambiguity well. Transformer models have…