Related papers: Decision Problems on Copying and Shuffling
We observe that current conversational language models often waver in their judgments when faced with follow-up questions, even if the original judgment was correct. This wavering presents a significant challenge for generating reliable…
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…
Human readers can efficiently comprehend scrambled words, a phenomenon known as Typoglycemia, primarily by relying on word form; if word form alone is insufficient, they further utilize contextual cues for interpretation. While advanced…
The downward closure of a language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of every language is regular. Moreover, recent results show that downward closures are…
This article studies the complexity of the word problem in groups of automorphisms of subshifts. We show in particular that for any Turing degree, there exists a subshift whose automorphism group contains a subgroup whose word problem has…
Ambiguity is ubiquitous in natural language. Resolving ambiguous meanings is especially important in information retrieval tasks. While word embeddings carry semantic information, they fail to handle ambiguity well. Transformer models have…
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between context-free grammars and normal ordering problem, and then to explore various extensions of the Stirling grammar. We present grammatical characterizations of several well…
We explore a natural class of semigroups that have word problem decidable by finite state automata. Among the main results are invariance of this property under change of generators, invariance under basic algebraic constructions and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse contexts to support decision-making. While existing evaluations effectively probe latent model capabilities, they often overlook the impact of context framing on…
A language L is prefix-free if, whenever words u and v are in L and u is a prefix of v, then u=v. Suffix-, factor-, and subword-free languages are defined similarly, where "subword" means "subsequence". A language is bifix-free if it is…
An F-system is a computational model that performs a folding operation on words of a given language, following directions coded on words of another given language. This paper considers the case in which both given languages are regular, and…
Static word embeddings encode word associations, extensively utilized in downstream NLP tasks. Although prior studies have discussed the nature of such word associations in terms of biases and lexical regularities captured, the variation in…
As neural language models approach human performance on NLP benchmark tasks, their advances are widely seen as evidence of an increasingly complex understanding of syntax. This view rests upon a hypothesis that has not yet been empirically…
The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We…
A language $L$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is suffix-convex if, for any words $x,y,z\in\Sigma^*$, whenever $z$ and $xyz$ are in $L$, then so is $yz$. Suffix-convex languages include three special cases: left-ideal, suffix-closed, and…
Crossword puzzles are popular word games that require not only a large vocabulary, but also a broad knowledge of topics. Answering each clue is a natural language task on its own as many clues contain nuances, puns, or counter-intuitive…
Conformant planning is the problem of finding a sequence of actions for achieving a goal in the presence of uncertainty in the initial state or action effects. The problem has been approached as a path-finding problem in belief space where…
As transformers have gained prominence in natural language processing, some researchers have investigated theoretically what problems they can and cannot solve, by treating problems as formal languages. Exploring such questions can help…
While NLP models often seek to capture cognitive states via language, the validity of predicted states is determined by comparing them to annotations created without access the cognitive states of the authors. In behavioral sciences,…
Performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on multiple-choice tasks differs markedly between symbol-based and cloze-style evaluation formats. The observed discrepancies are systematically attributable to task characteristics: natural…