Related papers: Universal Syntactic Structures: Modeling Syntax fo…
Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component in spoken dialogue systems. Classic NLG can be divided into two phases: (1) sentence planning: deciding on the overall sentence structure, (2) surface realization: determining…
Responses in task-oriented dialogue systems often realize multiple propositions whose ultimate form depends on the use of sentence planning and discourse structuring operations. For example a recommendation may consist of an explicitly…
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…
Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive rule systems and statistical learning to explain our ability to learn new concepts from just a few examples. The aim of most…
Syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman, 1990) is the hypothesis that children use the syntactic environments in which a verb occurs to learn its meaning. In this paper, we examine whether large language models exhibit a similar behavior. We do…
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited considerable cross-lingual generalization abilities, whereby they implicitly transfer knowledge across languages. However, the transfer is not equally successful for all languages, especially for…
Particularly in the structure of global discourse, coherence plays a pivotal role in human text comprehension and is a hallmark of high-quality text. This is especially true for persuasive texts, where coherent argument structures support…
Large language models (LLMs) have complicated internal dynamics, but induce representations of words and phrases whose geometry we can study. Human language processing is also opaque, but neural response measurements can provide (noisy)…
The meaning of a natural language utterance is largely determined from its syntax and words. Additionally, there is evidence that humans process an utterance by separating knowledge about the lexicon from syntax knowledge. Theories from…
Disentangling the encodings of neural models is a fundamental aspect for improving interpretability, semantic control and downstream task performance in Natural Language Processing. Currently, most disentanglement methods are unsupervised…
Although there are more than 6,500 languages in the world, the pronunciations of many phonemes sound similar across the languages. When people learn a foreign language, their pronunciation often reflects their native language's…
We study methods for learning sentence embeddings with syntactic structure. We focus on methods of learning syntactic sentence-embeddings by using a multilingual parallel-corpus augmented by Universal Parts-of-Speech tags. We evaluate the…
Matrix syntax is a formal model of syntactic relations in language. The purpose of this paper is to explain its mathematical foundations, for an audience with some formal background. We make an axiomatic presentation, motivating each axiom…
Neural network models of language have long been used as a tool for developing hypotheses about conceptual representation in the mind and brain. For many years, such use involved extracting vector-space representations of words and using…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
This paper describes a process for combining patterns and features, to guide a search process and make predictions. It is based on the functionality that a human brain might have, which is a highly distributed network of simple neuronal…
Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLM) have stirred up global attention, and the research has been accelerating non-stop since then. Philosophers and psychologists have also been researching the structure of language for…
Bilingual word embeddings have been widely used to capture the similarity of lexical semantics in different human languages. However, many applications, such as cross-lingual semantic search and question answering, can be largely benefited…
What does it mean to know language? Since the Chomskian revolution, one popular answer to this question has been: to possess a generative grammar that exclusively licenses certain syntactic structures. Decades later, not even an…
Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…