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Computer vision often treats human perception as homogeneous: an implicit assumption that visual stimuli are perceived similarly by everyone. This assumption is reflected in the way researchers collect datasets and train vision models. By…
Simple reference games are of central theoretical and empirical importance in the study of situated language use. Although language provides rich, compositional truth-conditional semantics to facilitate reference, speakers and listeners may…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of human languages, often used to express complex ideas in compressed or conventional ways (e.g. eager beaver as a keen and enthusiastic person). However, their interpretations may not be…
Messages often refer to entities such as people, places and events. Correct identification of the intended reference is an essential part of communication. Lack of shared unique names often complicates entity reference. Shared knowledge can…
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…
For general modeling methods applied to diverse languages, a natural question is: how well should we expect our models to work on languages with differing typological profiles? In this work, we develop an evaluation framework for fair…
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most…
People convey their intention and attitude through linguistic styles of the text that they write. In this study, we investigate lexicon usages across styles throughout two lenses: human perception and machine word importance, since words…
Large language models (LLMs) process and predict sequences containing text to answer questions, and address tasks including document summarization, providing recommendations, writing software and solving quantitative problems. We provide a…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
Words can have multiple senses. Compositional distributional models of meaning have been argued to deal well with finer shades of meaning variation known as polysemy, but are not so well equipped to handle word senses that are…
When language models answer open-ended problems, they implicitly make hidden decisions that shape their outputs, leaving users with uncontextualized answers rather than a working map of the problem; drawing on multiverse analysis from…
Communication of information in complex systems can be considered as major driver of systems evolution. What matters is not the communicated information by itself but rather the meaning that is supplied to the information. However…
Prominent questions about the role of sensory vs. linguistic input in the way we acquire and use language have been extensively studied in the psycholinguistic literature. However, the relative effect of various factors in a person's…
Children learn word meanings by tapping into the commonalities across different situations in which words are used and overcome the high level of uncertainty involved in early word learning experiences. We propose a modeling framework to…
The success of neural networks on a diverse set of NLP tasks has led researchers to question how much these networks actually ``know'' about natural language. Probes are a natural way of assessing this. When probing, a researcher chooses a…
Temporal information conveyed by language describes how the world around us changes through time. Events, durations and times are all temporal elements that can be viewed as intervals. These intervals are sometimes temporally related in…
We are proposing a simple, but efficient basic approach for a number of multilingual and cross-lingual language technology applications that are not limited to the usual two or three languages, but that can be applied with relatively little…
Knowing how to use words appropriately has been a key to improving language proficiency. Previous studies typically discuss how students learn receptively to select the correct candidate from a set of confusing words in the…