Related papers: Distributional Semantics, Holism, and the Instabil…
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…
Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches to meaning. More specifically, proposals have been put forward to augment formal semantic machinery with…
Distributional semantics has had enormous empirical success in Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science in modeling various semantic phenomena, such as semantic similarity, and distributional models are widely used in…
Distributional semantics provides multi-dimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown in a large body of work in computational linguistics;…
How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major…
Formal Semantics and Distributional Semantics are two important semantic frameworks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Cognitive Semantics belongs to the movement of Cognitive Linguistics, which is based on contemporary cognitive…
A probability model exhibits instability if small changes in a data outcome result in large, and often unanticipated, changes in probability. This instability is a property of the probability model, given by a distributional form and a…
This thesis is about the problem of compositionality in distributional semantics. Distributional semantics presupposes that the meanings of words are a function of their occurrences in textual contexts. It models words as distributions over…
Human language offers a powerful window into our thoughts -- we tell stories, give explanations, and express our beliefs and goals through words. Abundant evidence also suggests that language plays a developmental role in structuring our…
Consider the problem of testing whether the outputs of a large language model (LLM) system change under an arbitrary intervention, such as an input perturbation or changing the model variant. We cannot simply compare two LLM outputs since…
We introduce a method to measure uncertainty in large language models. For tasks like question answering, it is essential to know when we can trust the natural language outputs of foundation models. We show that measuring uncertainty in…
Does Large Language Model (LLM) technology suggest a meta-semantic picture i.e. a picture of how words and complex expressions come to have the meaning that they do? One modest approach explores the assumptions that seem to be built into…
Large language models follow a lineage of many NLP applications that were directly inspired by distributional semantics, but do not seem to be closely related to it anymore. In this paper, we propose to employ the distributional theory of…
Social order cannot be considered as a stable phenomenon because it contains an order of reproduced expectations. When the expectations operate upon one another, they generate a non-linear dynamics that processes meaning. Specific meaning…
Distributional semantic models have become a mainstay in NLP, providing useful features for downstream tasks. However, assessing long-term progress requires explicit long-term goals. In this paper, I take a broad linguistic perspective,…
Reasoning failures in large language models (LLMs) are typically measured only at the end of a generation, yet many failures manifest as a process-level breakdown: the model "loses the thread" mid-reasoning. We study whether such breakdowns…
Language models exhibit strong robustness to paraphrasing, suggesting that semantic information may be encoded through stable internal representations, yet the structure and origin of such invariance remain unclear. We propose a local…
Large language models present challenges for principled uncertainty quantification, in part due to their complexity and the diversity of their outputs. Semantic dispersion, or the variance in the meaning of sampled answers, has been…
Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying…
This work proposes a novel methodology for measuring compositional behavior in contemporary language embedding models. Specifically, we focus on adjectival modifier phenomena in adjective-noun phrases. In recent years, distributional…