Related papers: Decision Problems on Copying and Shuffling
Recent studies have shown that language models pretrained and/or fine-tuned on randomly permuted sentences exhibit competitive performance on GLUE, putting into question the importance of word order information. Somewhat…
We study infinite words fixed by a morphism and their derived words. A derived word is a coding of return words to a factor. We exhibit two examples of sets of morphisms which are closed under derivation --- any derived word with respect to…
Given a language L and a nondeterministic finite automaton M, we consider whether we can determine efficiently (in the size of M) if M accepts at least one word in L, or infinitely many words. Given that M accepts at least one word in L, we…
In this paper we discuss the following issue: How do we decide whether a certain property of language is a competence property or a performance property? Our claim is that the answer to this question is not given a-priori. The answer…
The square-free word problem relative to a system of two defining relations is decidable.
This paper studies the classes of semigoups and monoids with context-free and deterministic context-free word problem. First, some examples are exhibited to clarify the relationship between these classes and their connection with the…
The word problem for categories with free products and coproducts (sums), SP-categories, is directly related to the problem of determining the equivalence of certain processes. Indeed, the maps in these categories may be directly…
Foundations of formal languages, as subfield of theoretical computer science, are part of typical upper secondary education curricula. There is very little research on the potential difficulties that students at this level have with this…
Though English sentences are typically inflexible vis-\`a-vis word order, constituents often show far more variability in ordering. One prominent theory presents the notion that constituent ordering is directly correlated with constituent…
Scaling existing applications and solutions to multiple human languages has traditionally proven to be difficult, mainly due to the language-dependent nature of preprocessing and feature engineering techniques employed in traditional…
Word class flexibility refers to the phenomenon whereby a single word form is used across different grammatical categories. Extensive work in linguistic typology has sought to characterize word class flexibility across languages, but…
We identify a subclass of the regular commutative languages that is closed under the iterated shuffle, or shuffle closure. In particular, it is regularity-preserving on this subclass. This subclass contains the commutative group languages…
Shortcut learning refers to the phenomenon where models employ simple, non-robust decision rules in practical tasks, which hinders their generalization and robustness. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) in recent…
In this paper, we study a series of algorithmic problems related to the subsequences occurring in the strings of a given language, under the assumption that this language is succinctly represented by a grammar generating it, or an automaton…
We introduce a typology-aware diagnostic for multilingual masked language models that tests reliance on word order versus inflectional form. Using Universal Dependencies, we apply inference-time perturbations: full token scrambling,…
We investigate the class of visibly pushdown languages in the sliding window model. A sliding window algorithm for a language $L$ receives a stream of symbols and has to decide at each time step whether the suffix of length $n$ belongs to…
Selectional restrictions are semantic constraints on forming certain complex types in natural language. The paper gives an overview of modeling selectional restrictions in a relational type system with morphological and syntactic types. We…
We study possibilities for semantic and syntactic rigidity, i.e., the rigidity with respect to automorphism group and with respect to definable closure. Variations of rigidity and their degrees are studied in general case, for special…
We prove that the word problem is undecidable in functionally recursive groups, and that the order problem is undecidable in automata groups, even under the assumption that they are contracting.
In-context learning is a key paradigm in large language models (LLMs) that enables them to generalize to new tasks and domains by simply prompting these models with a few exemplars without explicit parameter updates. Many attempts have been…