Related papers: Subject islands do not reduce to construction-spec…
Natural language often combines multiple ideas into complex sentences. Atomic sentence extraction, the task of decomposing complex sentences into simpler sentences that each express a single idea, improves performance in information…
Large Language Models produce sequences learned as statistical patterns from large corpora. In order not to reproduce corpus biases, after initial training models must be aligned with human values, preferencing certain continuations over…
Large language models can be prompted to produce text. They can also be prompted to produce "explanations" of their output. But these are not really explanations, because they do not accurately reflect the mechanical process underlying the…
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…
In this paper we summarized a framework for designing grammar-based procedure for the automatic extraction of the semantic content from spoken queries. Starting with a case study and following an approach which combines the notions of…
Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In…
Language models often show a preference for using information from specific positions in the input regardless of semantic relevance. While positional bias has been studied in various contexts, from attention sinks to task performance…
We show that language models hallucinate not because they fail to detect uncertainty, but because of a failure to integrate it into output generation. Across architectures, uncertain inputs are reliably identified, occupying…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform reasoning tasks such as deduction has been widely investigated in recent years. Yet, their capacity to generate proofs-faithful, human-readable explanations of why conclusions…
LLMs have made significant progress in the field of mathematical reasoning, but whether they have true the mathematical understanding ability is still controversial. To explore this issue, we propose a new perturbation framework to evaluate…
In this article we present a multivariate model for determining the different syntactic, semantic, and form (surface-structure) processes underlying the comprehension of simple phrases. This model is applied to EEG signals recorded during a…
Opinion polarization is on the rise, causing concerns for the openness of public debates. Additionally, extreme opinions on different topics often show significant correlations. The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions…
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be modeled as a tree where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between words. It is well-known that those edges normally do not cross when drawn over the sentence. Here a…
Isomorphisms allow human cognition to transcribe a potentially unsolvable problem from one domain to a different domain where the problem might be more easily addressed. Current approaches only focus on transcribing structural information…
Is aesthetic impact different from beauty? Is visual salience a reflection of its capacity for effective communication? We present Impressions, a novel dataset through which to investigate the semiotics of images, and how specific visual…
Under surprisal theory, linguistic representations affect processing difficulty only through the bottleneck of surprisal. Our best estimates of surprisal come from large language models, which have no explicit representation of structural…
Linear sequences of words are implicitly represented in our brains by hierarchical structures that organize the composition of words in sentences. Linguists formalize different frameworks to model this hierarchy; two of the most common…
This paper has three aims: (1) to generalize a computational account of the discourse process called {\sc centering}, (2) to apply this account to discourse processing in Japanese so that it can be used in computational systems for machine…
From an inconsistent database non-trivial arguments may be constructed both for a proposition, and for the contrary of that proposition. Therefore, inconsistency in a logical database causes uncertainty about which conclusions to accept.…