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Recent conditional language models are able to continue any kind of text source in an often seemingly fluent way. This fact encouraged research in the area of open-domain conversational systems that are based on powerful language models and…
Causal inference is a key research area in machine learning, yet confusion reigns over the tools needed to tackle it. There are prevalent claims in the machine learning literature that you need a bespoke causal framework or notation to…
A graphical model is a structured representation of the data generating process. The traditional method to reason over random variables is to perform inference in this graphical model. However, in many cases the generating process is only a…
Matching two texts is a fundamental problem in many natural language processing tasks. An effective way is to extract meaningful matching patterns from words, phrases, and sentences to produce the matching score. Inspired by the success of…
When parsing unrestricted language, wide-covering grammars often undergenerate. Undergeneration can be tackled either by sentence correction, or by grammar correction. This thesis concentrates upon automatic grammar correction (or machine…
In complex inferential tasks like question answering, machine learning models must confront two challenges: the need to implement a compositional reasoning process, and, in many applications, the need for this reasoning process to be…
Large language models are able to perform a task by conditioning on a few input-output demonstrations - a paradigm known as in-context learning. We show that language models can explicitly infer an underlying task from a few demonstrations…
While sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models achieve state-of-the-art performance in many natural language processing tasks, they can be too slow for real-time applications. One performance bottleneck is predicting the most likely next token…
We study the assessment of semiparametric and other highly-parametrised models from the perspective of foundational principles of parametric statistical inference. In doing so, we highlight the possibility of avoiding the usual…
This paper addresses the problem of mapping natural language sentences to lambda-calculus encodings of their meaning. We describe a learning algorithm that takes as input a training set of sentences labeled with expressions in the lambda…
How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers.…
Acoustics-to-word models are end-to-end speech recognizers that use words as targets without relying on pronunciation dictionaries or graphemes. These models are notoriously difficult to train due to the lack of linguistic knowledge. It is…
A plausible definition of "reasoning" could be "algebraically manipulating previously acquired knowledge in order to answer a new question". This definition covers first-order logical inference or probabilistic inference. It also includes…
Humans have the capacity to draw common-sense inferences from natural language: various things that are likely but not certain to hold based on established discourse, and are rarely stated explicitly. We propose an evaluation of automated…
Deep neural networks have proven remarkably effective at solving many classification problems, but have been criticized recently for two major weaknesses: the reasons behind their predictions are uninterpretable, and the predictions…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
Reasoning is an important task for large language models (LLMs). Among all the reasoning paradigms, inductive reasoning is one of the fundamental types, which is characterized by its particular-to-general thinking process and the…
Data noising is an effective technique for regularizing neural network models. While noising is widely adopted in application domains such as vision and speech, commonly used noising primitives have not been developed for discrete…
A recurrent neural network model of phonological pattern learning is proposed. The model is a relatively simple neural network with one recurrent layer, and displays biases in learning that mimic observed biases in human learning.…
We have recently begun a project to develop a more effective and efficient way to marshal inferences from background knowledge to facilitate deep natural language understanding. The meaning of a word is taken to be the entities,…