Related papers: Universal Syntactic Structures: Modeling Syntax fo…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Language enables humans to share knowledge, reason about the world, and pass on strategies for survival and innovation across generations. At the heart of this process is not just the ability to communicate but also the remarkable…
The paradigm of large language models in natural language processing (NLP) has also shown promise in modeling biological languages, including proteins, RNA, and DNA. Both the auto-regressive generation paradigm and evaluation metrics have…
All natural languages are structured hierarchically. In humans, this structural restriction is neurologically coded: when two grammars are presented with identical vocabularies, brain areas responsible for language processing are only…
In natural languages, words are used in association to construct sentences. It is not words in isolation, but the appropriate combination of hierarchical structures that conveys the meaning of the whole sentence. Neural networks can capture…
In this paper we provide a first analysis of the research questions that arise when dealing with the problem of communicating pieces of formal argumentation through natural language interfaces. It is a generally held opinion that formal…
A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language…
A central question in psycholinguistics is the timing of syntax in sentence processing. Much of the existing evidence comes from violation paradigms, which conflate two separable processes - syntactic category detection and phrase structure…
Pragmatics is core to natural language, enabling speakers to communicate efficiently with structures like ellipsis and anaphora that can shorten utterances without loss of meaning. These structures require a listener to interpret an…
Understanding how humans process natural language has long been a vital research direction. The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently experienced a surge in the development of powerful language models. These models have…
This paper presents a semantic parsing approach for unrestricted texts. Semantic parsing is one of the major bottlenecks of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems and usually requires building expensive resources not easily portable…
The explicit relationship among perception, communication, and design is being discussed in some detail, in order to relate it to characteristic details of the modeling of the world which defines the scientific and artistic activities of…
The sequential structure of language, and the order of words in a sentence specifically, plays a central role in human language processing. Consequently, in designing computational models of language, the de facto approach is to present…
Temporary syntactic ambiguities arise when the beginning of a sentence is compatible with multiple syntactic analyses. We inspect to which extent neural language models (LMs) exhibit uncertainty over such analyses when processing…
Standard models for syntactic dependency parsing take words to be the elementary units that enter into dependency relations. In this paper, we investigate whether there are any benefits from enriching these models with the more abstract…
The mathematical representation of semantics is a key issue for Natural Language Processing (NLP). A lot of research has been devoted to finding ways of representing the semantics of individual words in vector spaces. Distributional…
What if the patterns hidden within dialogue reveal more about communication than the words themselves? We introduce Conversational DNA, a novel visual language that treats any dialogue -- whether between humans, between human and AI, or…
Transformer-based language models have recently achieved remarkable results in many natural language tasks. However, performance on leaderboards is generally achieved by leveraging massive amounts of training data, and rarely by encoding…
The patterns in which the syntax of different languages converges and diverges are often used to inform work on cross-lingual transfer. Nevertheless, little empirical work has been done on quantifying the prevalence of different syntactic…
Human language can be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and neighboring words in sentences are connected by edges. It was recently found (Ferrer and…