Related papers: Why do objects have many names? A study on word in…

Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…

Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…

Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…

Research in multi-agent cooperation has shown that artificial agents are able to learn to play a simple referential game while developing a shared lexicon. This lexicon is not easy to analyze, as it does not show many properties of a…

Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…

Human explanations of natural language, rationales, form a tool to assess whether models learn a label for the right reasons or rely on dataset-specific shortcuts. Sufficiency is a common metric for estimating the informativeness of…

Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…

Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…

Humans refer to objects in their environments all the time, especially in dialogue with other people. We explore generating and comprehending natural language referring expressions for objects in images. In particular, we focus on…

In the past years, sentiment analysis has increasingly shifted attention to representational frameworks more expressive than semantic polarity (being positive, negative or neutral). However, these richer formats (like Basic Emotions or…

Inferring the abstract relational and causal structure of the world is a major challenge for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents. For humans, language--particularly in the form of explanations--plays a considerable role in overcoming this…

Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the…

The structure of naming systems in natural languages hinges on a trade-off between high informativeness and low complexity. Prior work capitalizes on information theory to formalize these notions; however, these studies generally rely on…

Gibson et al. (2017) argued that color naming is shaped by patterns of communicative need. In support of this claim, they showed that color naming systems across languages support more precise communication about warm colors than cool…

Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…

Contextual influences on language often exhibit substantial cross-lingual regularities; for example, we are more verbose in situations that require finer distinctions. However, these regularities are sometimes obscured by semantic and…

Classical semantics assumes that one can model reference, predication and quantification with respect to a fixed domain of precise referent objects. Non-logical terms and quantification are then interpreted directly in terms of elements and…

While human speakers use a variety of different expressions when describing the same object in an image, giving rise to a distribution of plausible labels driven by pragmatic constraints, the extent to which current Vision & Language Large…

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…

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…