Related papers: Explaining vague language
With the rise of voice assistants and an increase in mobile search usage, natural language has become an important query language. So far, most of the current systems are not able to process these queries because of the vagueness and…
Challenges to classical logic have emerged from several sources. According to recent work, the behavior of epistemic modals in natural language motivates weakening classical logic to orthologic, a logic originally discovered by Birkhoff and…
Speakers of all human languages make use of grammatical devices to express attributional qualities, feelings, and opinions as well as to provide meta-commentary on topics in discourse. In general, linguists refer to this category as…
Biased language commonly occurs around topics which are of controversial nature, thus, stirring disagreement between the different involved parties of a discussion. This is due to the fact that for language and its use, specifically, the…
There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a…
This paper introduces a qualitative measure of ambiguity and analyses its relationship with other measures of uncertainty. Probability measures relative likelihoods, while ambiguity measures vagueness surrounding those judgments. Ambiguity…
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…
There has been a considerable amount of work on uncertainty in knowledge-based systems. This work has generally been concerned with uncertainty arising from the strength of inferences and the weight of evidence. In this paper we discuss…
Explaining how to get from A to B can be challenging. It requires mentally simulating what the listener will do based on what they are told. To capture this process, we propose a computational model that converts utterances into action…
We are concerned with dependency-oriented morphosyntactic parsing of running text. While a parsing grammar should avoid introducing structurally unresolvable distinctions in order to optimise on the accuracy of the parser, it also is…
Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of…
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…
Much recent work has argued that the variation in the languages of the world can be explained from the perspective of efficient communication; in particular, languages can be seen as optimally balancing competing pressures to be simple and…
_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…
Explanation methods aim to make neural networks more trustworthy and interpretable. In this paper, we demonstrate a property of explanation methods which is disconcerting for both of these purposes. Namely, we show that explanations can be…
Bayesian networks provide a probabilistic semantics for qualitative assertions about likelihood. A qualitative reasoner based on an algebra over these assertions can derive further conclusions about the influence of actions. While the…
Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and…
There are many examples in the literature that suggest that indistinguishability is intransitive, despite the fact that the indistinguishability relation is typically taken to be an equivalence relation (and thus transitive). It is shown…
Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such "hallucinations" persist even in state-of-the-art systems…
Decisions in organizations are about evaluating alternatives and choosing the one that would best serve organizational goals. To the extent that the evaluation of alternatives could be formulated as a predictive task with appropriate…