Related papers: Is there an aesthetic component of language?
Recent attention to anthropomorphism -- the attribution of human-like qualities to non-human objects or entities -- of language technologies like LLMs has sparked renewed discussions about potential negative impacts of anthropomorphism. To…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it. Assuming such a structure we show that the semantics of various natural language…
Prosodic phrasing is crucial to the naturalness and intelligibility of end-to-end Text-to-Speech (TTS). There exist both linguistic and emotional prosody in natural speech. As the study of prosodic phrasing has been linguistically…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
Why is language vague? Vagueness may be explained and rationalized if it can be shown that vague language is more useful to speaker and hearer than precise language. In a well-known paper, Lipman proposes a game-theoretic account of…
With a growing interest in modeling inherent subjectivity in natural language, we present a linguistically-motivated process to understand and analyze the writing style of individuals from three perspectives: lexical, syntactic, and…
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most…
In the philosophical tradition of `analytic pragmatism', which attempts to account for linguistic meanings in terms of their practices of use, logical expressivism is a theory which offers a distinct perspective on logic. We shed light on…
People in the real world often possess vague knowledge of future payoffs, for which quantification is not feasible or desirable. We argue that language, with differing ability to convey vague information, plays an important but less-known…
We propose a cognitively and linguistically motivated set of sorts for lexical semantics in a compositional setting: the classifiers in languages that do have such pronouns. These sorts are needed to include lexical considerations in a…
Over the past 50 years many have debated what representation should be used to capture the meaning of natural language utterances. Recently new needs of such representations have been raised in research. Here I survey some of the…
Verbs play an important role in the understanding of natural language text. This paper studies the problem of abstracting the subject and object arguments of a verb into a set of noun concepts, known as the "argument concepts". This set of…
We describe an algorithm for automatic classification of idiomatic and literal expressions. Our starting point is that words in a given text segment, such as a paragraph, that are highranking representatives of a common topic of discussion…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
Entities in discourse vary in salience: main participants, objects and locations stay prominent, while others are quickly forgotten, raising questions about how humans signal and infer discourse-level salience. Using a graded…
Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…
Given the large variety of existing logical formalisms it is of utmost importance to select the most adequate one for a specific purpose, e.g. for representing the knowledge relevant for a particular application or for using the formalism…
Human languages use a wide range of grammatical categories to constrain which words or phrases can fill certain slots in grammatical patterns and to express additional meanings, such as tense or aspect, through morpho-syntactic means. These…
A group is combable if it can be represented by a language of words satisfying a fellow traveller property; an automatic group has a synchronous combing which is a regular language. This paper gives a systematic analysis of the properties…
Emoji have become a significant part of our informal textual communication. Previous work addressing the societal and linguistic functions of emoji overlook the evolving meaning of the symbol. This evolution could be addressed through the…