Related papers: Understanding Natural Language Understanding Syste…
In this talk, I argue that there are certain pragmatic features of natural language (that I will call 'productivity' and 'malleability', on top of syntactical generativity and semantical compositionality), which are not only hard, but even…
Natural Language Generation tools, such as chatbots that can generate human-like conversational text, are becoming more common both for personal and professional use. However, there are concerns about their trustworthiness and ethical…
Machines have achieved a broad and growing set of linguistic competencies, thanks to recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Psychologists have shown increasing interest in such models, comparing their output to psychological…
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) aims to extract the semantics frame of user queries, which is a core component in a task-oriented dialog system. With the burst of deep neural networks and the evolution of pre-trained language models,…
This book provides a broad overview of Natural Language Generation (NLG), including technology, user requirements, evaluation, and real-world applications. The focus is on concepts and insights which hopefully will remain relevant for many…
Natural Language Processing is one of the leading application areas in the current resurgence of Artificial Intelligence, spearheaded by Artificial Neural Networks. We show that despite their many successes at performing linguistic tasks,…
In the field of Artificial (General) Intelligence (AI), the several recent advancements in Natural language processing (NLP) activities relying on Large Language Models (LLMs) have come to encourage the adoption of LLMs as scientific models…
For natural language understanding (NLU) technology to be maximally useful, both practically and as a scientific object of study, it must be general: it must be able to process language in a way that is not exclusively tailored to any one…
Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) is crucial for the practical adoption of AI, but has been a longstanding research challenge. While human evaluation is considered the de-facto standard, it is expensive and lacks scalability.…
Recent advances in neural network-based generative modeling have reignited the hopes in having computer systems capable of seamlessly conversing with humans and able to understand natural language. Neural architectures have been employed to…
Natural Language Processing prides itself to be an empirically-minded, if not outright empiricist field, and yet lately it seems to get itself into essentialist debates on issues of meaning and measurement ("Do Large Language Models…
For the next step in human to machine interaction, Artificial Intelligence (AI) should interact predominantly using natural language because, if it worked, it would be the fastest way to communicate. Facebook's toy tasks (bAbI) provide a…
Humans understand language by extracting information (meaning) from sentences, combining it with existing commonsense knowledge, and then performing reasoning to draw conclusions. While large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT…
Recent years have seen important advances in the quality of state-of-the-art models, but this has come at the expense of models becoming less interpretable. This survey presents an overview of the current state of Explainable AI (XAI),…
In modular dialogue systems, natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) are two critical components, where NLU extracts the semantics from the given texts and NLG is to construct corresponding natural…
We survey a current, heated debate in the AI research community on whether large pre-trained language models can be said to "understand" language -- and the physical and social situations language encodes -- in any important sense. We…
The success of deep learning in natural language processing raises intriguing questions about the nature of linguistic meaning and ways in which it can be processed by natural and artificial systems. One such question has to do with subword…
In the last five years, there has been a significant focus in Natural Language Processing (NLP) on developing larger Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and introducing benchmarks such as SuperGLUE and SQuAD to measure their abilities in…
Large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their capability in performing NLP tasks. However, deeper semantic understanding, contextual coherence, and more subtle reasoning are still difficult to obtain. The paper discusses…
Good quality explanations of artificial intelligence (XAI) reasoning must be written (and evaluated) for an explanatory purpose, targeted towards their readers, have a good narrative and causal structure, and highlight where uncertainty and…