Related papers: Is there an aesthetic component of language?
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 in ordinary language. Assuming the existence of such a structure, we show that the…
In this paper we examine different meaning representations that are commonly used in different natural language applications today and discuss their limits, both in terms of the aspects of the natural language meaning they are modelling and…
Explanations are central to everyday life, and are a topic of growing interest in the AI community. To investigate the process of providing natural language explanations, we leverage the dynamics of the /r/ChangeMyView subreddit to build a…
What do language models (LMs) do with language? Everyone agrees that they can produce sequences of (mostly) coherent strings of English. But do those sentences mean something, or are LMs simply babbling in a convincing simulacrum of…
This position paper looks into the formation of language and shows ties between structural properties of the words in the English language and their polysemy. Using Ollivier-Ricci curvature over a large graph of synonyms to estimate…
Emotion is a crucial phenomenon in the functioning of human beings in society. However, it remains a widely open subject, particularly in its textual manifestations. This paper examines an industrial corpus manually annotated following an…
This study investigates the acoustic features of sarcasm and disentangles the interplay between the propensity of an utterance being used sarcastically and the presence of prosodic cues signaling sarcasm. Using a dataset of sarcastic…
We explore the ability of word embeddings to capture both semantic and morphological similarity, as affected by the different types of linguistic properties (surface form, lemma, morphological tag) used to compose the representation of each…
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…
Compositionality is thought to be a key component of language, and various compositional benchmarks have been developed to empirically probe the compositional generalization of existing sequence processing models. These benchmarks often…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
Referential games and reconstruction games are the most common game types for studying emergent languages. We investigate how the type of the language game affects the emergent language in terms of: i) language compositionality and ii)…
Automatic essay scoring (AES) refers to the process of scoring free text responses to given prompts, considering human grader scores as the gold standard. Writing such essays is an essential component of many language and aptitude exams.…
Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language…
Literature involving preferences of artificial agents or human beings often assume their preferences can be represented using a complete transitive binary relation. Much has been written however on different models of preferences. We review…
A number of concepts are included in the term 'consciousness'. We choose to concentrate here on phenomenal consciousness, the process through which we are able to experience aspects of our environment or of our physical state. We probably…
It is demonstrated that under the hypothesis of boundedness, the semantics appears as a property of spontaneous physical processes. It turns that both semantic structure and semantic meaning have their own physical agents each of which is…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
Learning another language can be a highly emotional process, typically characterized by numerous frustrations and triumphs, big and small. For most learners, language learning does not follow a linear, predictable path, its zigzag course…
Emotional expressiveness captures the extent to which a person tends to outwardly display their emotions through behavior. Due to the close relationship between emotional expressiveness and behavioral health, as well as the crucial role…