Related papers: What is a word?
Paraphrasing is the task of expressing an essential idea or meaning in different words. But how different should the words be in order to be considered an acceptable paraphrase? And can we exclusively use automated metrics to evaluate the…
Word order is an important concept in natural language, and in this work, we study how word order affects the induction of world knowledge from raw text using language models. We use word analogies to probe for such knowledge. Specifically,…
Emergent language is unique among fields within the discipline of machine learning for its open-endedness, not obviously presenting well-defined problems to be solved. As a result, the current research in the field has largely been…
Traditionally, semantics has been seen as a feature of human language. The advent of the information era has led to its widespread redefinition as an information feature. Contrary to this praxis, I define semantics as a special kind of…
Recognizable languages of finite words are part of every computer science cursus, and they are routinely described as a cornerstone for applications and for theory. We would like to briefly explore why that is, and how this word-related…
In semantic technologies, the shared common understanding of the structure of information among artifacts (people or software agents) can be realized by building an ontology. To do this, it is imperative for an ontology builder to answer…
Measuring meaning is a central problem in cultural sociology and word embeddings may offer powerful new tools to do so. But like any tool, they build on and exert theoretical assumptions. In this paper I theorize the ways in which word…
The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…
Simple assumptions represent a decisive reason to prefer one theory to another in everyday scientific praxis. But this praxis has little philosophical justification, since there exist many notions of simplicity, and those that can be…
Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding--namely, that the way something is expressed reflects…
Distributional semantics is the linguistic theory that a word's meaning can be derived from its distribution in natural language (i.e., its use). Language models are commonly viewed as an implementation of distributional semantics, as they…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it. Assuming such a structure we show that the semantics of various natural language…
We develop a qualitative model of decision making with two aims: to describe how people make simple decisions and to enable computer programs to do the same. Current approaches based on Planning or Decisions Theory either ignore uncertainty…
Selection through iterated learning explains no more than other non-functional accounts, such as universal grammar, why language is so well-designed for communicative efficiency. It does not predict several distinctive features of language…
Prediction is a complex notion, and different predictors (such as people, computer programs, and probabilistic theories) can pursue very different goals. In this paper I will review some popular kinds of prediction and argue that the theory…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
Semantic web information is at the extremities of long pipelines held by human beings. They are at the origin of information and they will consume it either explicitly because the information will be delivered to them in a readable way, or…
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…