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Modal verbs (e.g., "can", "should", or "must") occur highly frequently in scientific articles. Decoding their function is not straightforward: they are often used for hedging, but they may also denote abilities and restrictions.…
Documents in scientific newspapers are often marked by attitudes and opinions of the author and/or other persons, who contribute with objective and subjective statements and arguments as well. In this respect, the attitude is often…
Manner and result verbs encode different aspects of event structure and have been discussed in developmental work as a potentially informative distinction for studying early verb learning. However, this distinction remains difficult to…
Language models (LMs) are used for a diverse range of tasks, from question answering to writing fantastical stories. In order to reliably accomplish these tasks, LMs must be able to discern the modal category of a sentence (i.e., whether it…
Commonsense inference to understand and explain human language is a fundamental research problem in natural language processing. Explaining human conversations poses a great challenge as it requires contextual understanding, planning,…
While the task of assessing the plausibility of events such as ''news is relevant'' has been addressed by a growing body of work, less attention has been paid to capturing changes in plausibility as triggered by event modification.…
Multimodal language models (MLMs) increasingly demonstrate human-like communication, yet their use of everyday perspectival words remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we compare humans and MLMs in their use of three word types…
Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is the dominant framework for aligning AI systems to human preferences. However, evaluation protocols for such data were designed for text and have not been validated for speech. We present the…
In recent years, commonsense reasoning has received more and more attention from academic community. We propose a new lexical inference task, Mental and Physical Classification (MPC), to handle commonsense reasoning in a reasoning graph.…
Knowledge probing assesses to which degree a language model (LM) has successfully learned relational knowledge during pre-training. Probing is an inexpensive way to compare LMs of different sizes and training configurations. However,…
Qualitative relationships illustrate how changing one property (e.g., moving velocity) affects another (e.g., kinetic energy) and constitutes a considerable portion of textual knowledge. Current approaches use either semantic parsers to…
In this paper, we present Modality-Importance-Guided Reasoning (MIGR), a framework designed to improve the reliability of reasoning-based multimodal emotion understanding in multimodal large language models. Although existing methods have…
Negators, modals, and degree adverbs can significantly affect the sentiment of the words they modify. Often, their impact is modeled with simple heuristics; although, recent work has shown that such heuristics do not capture the true…
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…
Metaphors are part of everyday language and shape the way in which we conceptualize the world. Moreover, they play a multifaceted role in communication, making their understanding and generation a challenging task for language models (LMs).…
Deduction is the one of the major forms of inferences and commonly used in formal logic. This kind of inference has the feature of monotonicity, which can be problematic. There are different types of inferences that are not monotonic, e.g.…
Vector space models of word meaning all share the assumption that words occurring in similar contexts have similar meanings. In such models, words that are similar in their topical associations but differ in their logical force tend to…
Modality is the linguistic ability to describe events with added information such as how desirable, plausible, or feasible they are. Modality is important for many NLP downstream tasks such as the detection of hedging, uncertainty,…
Emotion recognition is inherently ambiguous, with uncertainty arising both from rater disagreement and from discrepancies across modalities such as speech and text. There is growing interest in modeling rater ambiguity using label…
Intrinsic evaluation metrics for conditional language models, such as perplexity or bits-per-character, are widely used in both mono- and multilingual settings. These metrics are rather straightforward to use and compare in monolingual…