Related papers: The syntax-lexicon tradeoff in writing
Sentence simplification is the task of rewriting texts so they are easier to understand. Recent research has applied sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models to this task, focusing largely on training-time improvements via reinforcement…
I review evidence for the claim that syntactic ambiguities are resolved on the basis of the meaning of the competing analyses, not their structure. I identify a collection of ambiguities that do not yet have a meaning-based account and…
Syntactic structures used to play a vital role in natural language processing (NLP), but since the deep learning revolution, NLP has been gradually dominated by neural models that do not consider syntactic structures in their design. One…
Translations between different nonmonotonic formalisms always have been an important topic in the field, in particular to understand the knowledge-representation capabilities those formalisms offer. We provide such an investigation in terms…
Propositional Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is a popular formalism for specifying desirable requirements and security and privacy policies for software, networks, and systems. Yet expressing such requirements and policies in LTL remains…
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…
Language model architectures are predominantly first created for English and subsequently applied to other languages. It is an open question whether this architectural bias leads to degraded performance for languages that are structurally…
In this paper, we study the effect of preferences in abstract argumentation under a claim-centric perspective. Recent work has revealed that semantical and computational properties can change when reasoning is performed on claim-level…
Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin…
The syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity: dependencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. We investigate two competing explanations. The traditional hypothesis is that this trend arises from an…
Text generation rarely considers the control of lexical complexity, which limits its more comprehensive practical application. We introduce a novel task of lexical complexity controlled sentence generation, which aims at keywords to…
Recognizing visual entities in a natural language sentence and arranging them in a 2D spatial layout require a compositional understanding of language and space. This task of layout prediction is valuable in text-to-image synthesis as it…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Targeted syntactic evaluations of language models ask whether models show stable preferences for syntactically acceptable content over minimal-pair unacceptable inputs. Most targeted syntactic evaluation datasets ask models to make these…
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…
Humans exhibit garden path effects: When reading sentences that are temporarily structurally ambiguous, they slow down when the structure is disambiguated in favor of the less preferred alternative. Surprisal theory (Hale, 2001; Levy,…
Writers generally rely on plans or sketches to write long stories, but most current language models generate word by word from left to right. We explore coarse-to-fine models for creating narrative texts of several hundred words, and…
Complex network theory is used to investigate the structure of meaningful concepts in written texts of individual authors. Networks have been constructed after a two phase filtering, where words with less meaning contents are eliminated,…
This paper includes a reflection on the role of networks in the study of English language acquisition, as well as a collection of practical criteria to annotate free-speech corpora from children utterances. At the theoretical level, the…
Matrix syntax is a formal model of syntactic relations in language. The purpose of this paper is to explain its mathematical foundations, for an audience with some formal background. We make an axiomatic presentation, motivating each axiom…