Related papers: Explaining vague language
Systems for language understanding have become remarkably strong at overcoming linguistic imperfections in tasks involving phrase matching or simple reasoning. Yet, their accuracy drops dramatically as the number of reasoning steps…
This thesis investigates how the sub-structure of words can be accounted for in probabilistic models of language. Such models play an important role in natural language processing tasks such as translation or speech recognition, but often…
This note shows that the value of ambiguous persuasion characterized in Beauchene, Li and Li(2019) can be given by a concavification program as in Bayesian persuasion (Kamenica and Gentzkow, 2011). In addition, it implies that an ambiguous…
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition,…
A framework for consensus modelling is introduced using Kleene's three valued logic as a means to express vagueness in agents' beliefs. Explicitly borderline cases are inherent to propositions involving vague concepts where sentences of a…
Machines are being increasingly used in decision-making processes, resulting in the realization that decisions need explanations. Unfortunately, an increasing number of these deployed models are of a 'black-box' nature where the reasoning…
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…
Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language…
An automaton is unambiguous if for every input it has at most one accepting computation. An automaton is k-ambiguous (for k > 0) if for every input it has at most k accepting computations. An automaton is boundedly ambiguous if it is…
Knowing the truth is rarely enough -- we also seek out reasons why the fact is true. While much is known about how we explain contingent truths, we understand less about how we explain facts, such as those in mathematics, that are true as a…
Senders of messages prefer to communicate uncertainty verbally (e.g., something is likely to happen) rather than numerically (such as 75%), leaving receivers with imprecise information. While it is well established that receivers translate…
In order to design strong paradigms for isolating lexical access and semantics, we need to know what a word is. Surprisingly few linguists and philosophers have a clear model of what a word is, even though words impact basically every…
Human users increasingly communicate with large language models (LLMs), but LLMs suffer from frequent overconfidence in their output, even when its accuracy is questionable, which undermines their trustworthiness and perceived legitimacy.…
We provide a syntactic construction of correlated equilibrium. For any finite game, we study how players coordinate their play on a signal by means of a public strategy whose instructions are expressed in some natural language. Language can…
In this paper, we show how game-theoretic work on conversation combined with a theory of discourse structure provides a framework for studying interpretive bias. Interpretive bias is an essential feature of learning and understanding but…
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…
Recent work in cognitive science has uncovered a diversity of explanatory values, or dimensions along which we judge explanations as better or worse. We propose a Bayesian account of how these values fit together to guide explanation. The…
Given a specific discourse, which discourse properties trigger the use of metaphorical language, rather than using literal alternatives? For example, what drives people to say "grasp the meaning" rather than "understand the meaning" within…
Ambiguity remains a fundamental challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to the inherent complexity and flexibility of human language. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing ambiguity has become even more…
Language models and conversational systems are growing increasingly advanced, creating outputs that may be mistaken for humans. Consumers may thus be misled by advertising, media reports, or vagueness regarding the role of automation in the…