Related papers: Ambiguity is the last thing you need

In this work, we study a critical research problem regarding the trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs): how LLMs behave when encountering ambiguous narrative text, with a particular focus on Chinese textual ambiguity. We created a…

I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of…

Standard models of multi-agent modal logic do not capture the fact that information is often \emph{ambiguous}, and may be interpreted in different ways by different agents. We propose a framework that can model this, and consider different…

Pervasive personal communication technologies offer the potential for important social benefits for individual users, but also the potential for significant social difficulties and costs. In research on face-to-face social interaction,…

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…

This paper explores how ambiguity affects communication. We consider a cheap talk model in which the receiver evaluates the sender's message with respect to its worst-case expected payoff generated by multiplier preferences. We characterize…

Ambiguous words or underspecified references require interlocutors to resolve them, often by relying on shared context and commonsense knowledge. Therefore, we systematically investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can leverage…

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…

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…

The paper adresses the problem of reasoning with ambiguities. Semantic representations are presented that leave scope relations between quantifiers and/or other operators unspecified. Truth conditions are provided for these representations…

User queries are often underspecified and may admit multiple valid interpretations. Rather than silently making assumptions about the user's intent, a helpful assistant should surface such ambiguity by asking a clarifying question. Doing so…

This is a long paper, an essay, on ambiguity, pragmatics, legal ecosystems, and the expressive function of law. It is divided into two parts and fifteen sections. The first part (Pragmatics) addresses ambiguity from the perspective of…

This paper argues that an interlingual representation must explicitly represent some parts of the meaning of a situation as possibilities (or preferences), not as necessary or definite components of meaning (or constraints). Possibilities…

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…

Word sense disambiguation has developed as a sub-area of natural language processing, as if, like parsing, it was a well-defined task which was a pre-requisite to a wide range of language-understanding applications. First, I review earlier…

When using a third language to construct a bilingual dictionary, it is necessary to discriminate equivalencies from inappropriate words derived as a result of ambiguity in the third language. We propose a method to treat this by utilizing…

People in the real world often possess vague knowledge of future payoffs, for which quantification is not feasible or desirable. We argue that language, with differing ability to convey vague information, plays an important but less-known…

Ambiguity is ubiquitous in natural language. Resolving ambiguous meanings is especially important in information retrieval tasks. While word embeddings carry semantic information, they fail to handle ambiguity well. Transformer models have…

With language models becoming increasingly ubiquitous, it has become essential to address their inequitable treatment of diverse demographic groups and factors. Most research on evaluating and mitigating fairness harms has been concentrated…

Communication is rarely perfect, but rather prone to error of transmission and reception. Often the origin of these errors cannot be properly quantified and is thus imprecisely known. We analyze the impact of an ambiguous noise which may…