Related papers: Is there an aesthetic component of language?
Proofs, in Ludics, have an interpretation provided by their counter-proofs, that is the objects they interact with. We follow the same idea by proposing that sentence meanings are given by the counter-meanings they are opposed to in a…
Paraphrasing is the task of expressing an essential idea or meaning in different words. But how different should the words be in order to be considered an acceptable paraphrase? And can we exclusively use automated metrics to evaluate the…
A distinction is sometimes made between "statistical" and "subjective" probabilities. This is based on a distinction between "unique" events and "repeatable" events. We argue that this distinction is untenable, since all events are "unique"…
In this talk, I argue that there are certain pragmatic features of natural language (that I will call 'productivity' and 'malleability', on top of syntactical generativity and semantical compositionality), which are not only hard, but even…
Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a heterogeneous set with a glaring need for classifications. Designing a satisfactory classification involves choosing features. In the case of MWEs, many features are a priori available. Not all features…
Subjective language understanding refers to a broad set of natural language processing tasks where the goal is to interpret or generate content that conveys personal feelings, opinions, or figurative meanings rather than objective facts.…
Linguistic typology studies the range of structures present in human language. The main goal of the field is to discover which sets of possible phenomena are universal, and which are merely frequent. For example, all languages have vowels,…
The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…
Documents in scientific newspapers are often marked by attitudes and opinions of the author and/or other persons, who contribute with objective and subjective statements and arguments as well. In this respect, the attitude is often…
Language, which allows complex ideas to be communicated through symbolic sequences, is a characteristic feature of our species and manifested in a multitude of forms. Using large written corpora for many different languages and scripts, we…
Various concepts of grammatical compositionality arise in many theories of both natural and artificial languages, and often play a key role in accounts of the syntax-semantics interface. We propose that many instances of compositionality…
We argue that language models (LMs) have strong potential as investigative tools for probing the distinction between possible and impossible natural languages and thus uncovering the inductive biases that support human language learning. We…
Researchers are using deep learning models to explore the emergence of language in various language games, where agents interact and develop an emergent language to solve tasks. We focus on the factors that determine the expressivity of…
We study the role of linguistic context in predicting quantifiers (`few', `all'). We collect crowdsourced data from human participants and test various models in a local (single-sentence) and a global context (multi-sentence) condition.…
Emojis are ideograms which are naturally combined with plain text to visually complement or condense the meaning of a message. Despite being widely used in social media, their underlying semantics have received little attention from a…
Within a Music Information Retrieval perspective, the goal of the study presented here is to investigate the impact on sound features of the musician's affective intention, namely when trying to intentionally convey emotional contents via…
Grammatical features such as number and gender serve two central functions in human languages. While they encode salient semantic attributes like numerosity and animacy, they also offload sentence processing cost by predictably linking…
Human use language not just to convey information but also to express their inner feelings and mental states. In this work, we adapt the state-of-the-art language generation models to generate affective (emotional) text. We posit a model…
Formal languages theory is useful for the study of natural language. In particular, it is of interest to study the adequacy of the grammatical formalisms to express syntactic phenomena present in natural language. First, it helps to draw…
This paper introduces Linguistic Style Improvisation, a theory and set of algorithms for improvisation of spoken utterances by artificial agents, with applications to interactive story and dialogue systems. We argue that linguistic style is…