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Modern language models (LMs) exhibit strong deductive reasoning capabilities, yet standard evaluations emphasize correctness while overlooking a key aspect of reasoning: efficiency. In real-world reasoning scenarios, much of the available…
Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptable instance of their language. Acceptability provides a means of evaluating whether computational language models are processing language in a human-like manner. We test the ability…
AI agents are increasingly deployed and used to make automated decisions that affect our lives on a daily basis. It is imperative to ensure that these systems embed ethical principles and respect human values. We focus on how we can attest…
Semantic parsers map natural language utterances into meaning representations (e.g., programs). Such models are typically bottlenecked by the paucity of training data due to the required laborious annotation efforts. Recent studies have…
Contextual word embeddings obtained from pre-trained language model (PLM) have proven effective for various natural language processing tasks at the word level. However, interpreting the hidden aspects within embeddings, such as syntax and…
Many current NLP systems are built from language models trained to optimize unsupervised objectives on large amounts of raw text. Under what conditions might such a procedure acquire meaning? Our systematic experiments with synthetic data…
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…
We introduce semantic form mid-tuning, an approach for transferring semantic knowledge from semantic meaning representations into transformer-based language encoders. In mid-tuning, we learn to align the text of general sentences -- not…
The grammars of natural languages may be learned by using genetic algorithms that reproduce and mutate grammatical rules and part-of-speech tags, improving the quality of later generations of grammatical components. Syntactic rules are…
Deductive reasoning plays a pivotal role in the formulation of sound and cohesive arguments. It allows individuals to draw conclusions that logically follow, given the truth value of the information provided. Recent progress in the domain…
Existing techniques for training language models can be misaligned with the truth: if we train models with imitation learning, they may reproduce errors that humans make; if we train them to generate text that humans rate highly, they may…
Do LLMs understand the meaning of the texts they generate? Do they possess a semantic grounding? And how could we understand whether and what they understand? I start the paper with the observation that we have recently witnessed a…
Intelligent agents, such as robots, are increasingly deployed in real-world, human-centric environments. To foster appropriate human trust and meet legal and ethical standards, these agents must be able to explain their behavior. However,…
One of the long-standing challenges in lexical semantics consists in learning representations of words which reflect their semantic properties. The remarkable success of word embeddings for this purpose suggests that high-quality…
Recently, incorporating natural language instructions into reinforcement learning (RL) to learn semantically meaningful representations and foster generalization has caught many concerns. However, the semantical information in language…
Natural language has the universal properties of being compositional and grounded in reality. The emergence of linguistic properties is often investigated through simulations of emergent communication in referential games. However, these…
Contextual language models have been trained on Classical languages, including Ancient Greek and Latin, for tasks such as lemmatization, morphological tagging, part of speech tagging, authorship attribution, and detection of scribal errors.…
For natural language processing systems, two kinds of evidence support the use of text representations from neural language models "pretrained" on large unannotated corpora: performance on application-inspired benchmarks (Peters et al.,…
Textual entailment is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Most approaches for solving the problem use only the textual content present in training data. A few approaches have shown that information from external knowledge…
Language models (LLMs) offer potential as a source of knowledge for agents that need to acquire new task competencies within a performance environment. We describe efforts toward a novel agent capability that can construct cues (or…