Related papers: Semantics drives analogical change in Germanic str…
Verbs are important in semantic understanding of natural language. Traditional verb representations, such as FrameNet, PropBank, VerbNet, focus on verbs' roles. These roles are too coarse to represent verbs' semantics. In this paper, we…
Ambiguity is a natural language phenomenon occurring at different levels of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It is widely studied; in Psycholinguistics, for instance, we have a variety of competing studies for the human disambiguation…
Verbs occur in different syntactic environments, or frames. We investigate whether artificial neural networks encode grammatical distinctions necessary for inferring the idiosyncratic frame-selectional properties of verbs. We introduce five…
Recent years have witnessed a surge of publications aimed at tracing temporal changes in lexical semantics using distributional methods, particularly prediction-based word embedding models. However, this vein of research lacks the cohesion,…
German and French football language display tense-aspect-mood (TAM) forms which differ from the TAM use in other genres. In German football talk, the present indicative may replace the pluperfect subjunctive. In French reports of football…
The statistical over-representation of phonological features in the basic vocabulary of languages is often interpreted as reflecting potentially universal sound symbolic patterns. However, most of those results have not been tested…
Neural morphological generation systems often achieve high aggregate accuracy on benchmark datasets, yet such performance can conceal systematic errors concentrated in rare morphological subclasses. We examine Japanese past-tense verb…
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…
I describe a very simple HPSG analysis for partial verb phrase fronting. I will argue that the presented account is more adequate than others made during the past years because it allows the description of constituents in fronted positions…
Can pretrained language models (PLMs) generate derivationally complex words? We present the first study investigating this question, taking BERT as the example PLM. We examine BERT's derivational capabilities in different settings, ranging…
Word embeddings allow natural language processing systems to share statistical information across related words. These embeddings are typically based on distributional statistics, making it difficult for them to generalize to rare or unseen…
Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the `descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages,…
Historical linguists have identified regularities in the process of historic sound change. The comparative method utilizes those regularities to reconstruct proto-words based on observed forms in daughter languages. Can this process be…
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…
Transformer-based language models achieve high performance on various tasks, but we still lack understanding of the kind of linguistic knowledge they learn and rely on. We evaluate three models (BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT), testing their…
We present a probabilistic language model for time-stamped text data which tracks the semantic evolution of individual words over time. The model represents words and contexts by latent trajectories in an embedding space. At each moment in…
We investigate the extent to which modern, neural language models are susceptible to structural priming, the phenomenon whereby the structure of a sentence makes the same structure more probable in a follow-up sentence. We explore how…
The present study uses a computational approach to examine the role of semantic constraints in normal reading. This methodology avoids confounds inherent in conventional measures of predictability, allowing for theoretically deeper accounts…
In computational argumentation, gradual semantics are fine-grained alternatives to extension-based and labelling-based semantics . They ascribe a dialectical strength to (components of) arguments sanctioning their degree of acceptability.…
Dialects exhibit a substantial degree of variation due to the lack of a standard orthography. At the same time, the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to process dialects remains largely understudied. To address this gap, we use…