Related papers: Is there an aesthetic component of language?
Natural language reasoning plays an increasingly important role in improving language models' ability to solve complex language understanding tasks. An interesting use case for reasoning is the resolution of context-dependent ambiguity. But…
Categories provide a coarse grained description of the world. A fundamental question is whether categories simply mirror an underlying structure of nature, or instead come from the complex interactions of human beings among themselves and…
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…
Musicians produce individualized, expressive performances by manipulating parameters such as dynamics, tempo and articulation. This manipulation of expressive parameters is informed by elements of score information such as pitch, meter, and…
Aesthetic preferences are considered highly subjective resulting in inherently noisy judgements of aesthetic objects, yet certain aspects of aesthetic judgement display convergent trends over time. This paper present a study that uses…
Identifying linguistic differences between dialects of a language often requires expert knowledge and meticulous human analysis. This is largely due to the complexity and nuance involved in studying various dialects. We present a novel…
We propose a linguistic interpretation of three-way decisions, where the regions of acceptance, rejection, and non-commitment are constructed by using the so-called evaluative linguistic expressions, which are expressions of natural…
The language for expressing comparisons is often complex and nuanced, making supporting natural language-based visual comparison a non-trivial task. To better understand how people reason about comparisons in natural language, we explore a…
Motivated by old and new applications, we investigate Datalog as a language for sequence databases. We reconsider classical features of Datalog programs, such as negation, recursion, intermediate predicates, and relations of higher arities.…
A distinguishing property of human intelligence is the ability to flexibly use language in order to communicate complex ideas with other humans in a variety of contexts. Research in natural language dialogue should focus on designing…
While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a…
Speech and language are valuable for interacting with technology. It would be ideal to be able to decouple their use from anthropomorphization, which has recently met an important moment of reckoning. In the world of folktales, language is…
We introduce the task of expressive speech retrieval, where the goal is to retrieve speech utterances spoken in a given style based on a natural language description of that style. While prior work has primarily focused on performing speech…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
The objective of this paper is to predict (A) whether a sentence in a written text expresses an emotion, (B) the mode(s) in which it is expressed, (C) whether it is basic or complex, and (D) its emotional category. One of our major…
Questions related to the evolution of language have recently known an impressive increase of interest (Briscoe, 2002). This short paper aims at questioning the scientific status of these models and their relations to attested data. We show…
Words play a central role in how we express ourselves. Lexicons of word-emotion associations are widely used in research and real-world applications for sentiment analysis, tracking emotions associated with products and policies, studying…
Explanation constitutes an archetypal feature of human rationality, underpinning learning and generalisation, and representing one of the media supporting scientific discovery and communication. Due to the importance of explanations in…
It is claimed that a variety of facts concerning ellipsis, event reference, and interclausal coherence can be explained by two features of the linguistic form in question: (1) whether the form leaves behind an empty constituent in the…
The interpretation of the lexical aspect of verbs in English plays a crucial role for recognizing textual entailment and learning discourse-level inferences. We show that two elementary dimensions of aspectual class, states vs. events, and…