Related papers: Subject islands do not reduce to construction-spec…
We show that adsorbates on surfaces can form islands even if there are no attractive interactions. Instead strong repulsion between adsorbates at short distances can lead to islands, because such islands increase the entropy of the…
The paper presents a constraint based semantic formalism for HPSG. The syntax-semantics interface directly implements syntactic conditions on quantifier scoping and distributivity. The construction of semantic representations is guided by…
Language sciences rely less and less on formal syntax as their base. The reason is probably its lack of psychological reality, knowingly avoided. Philosophers of science call for a paradigm shift in which explanations are by mechanisms, as…
We study semantic construal in grammatical constructions using large language models. First, we project contextual word embeddings into three interpretable semantic spaces, each defined by a different set of psycholinguistic feature norms.…
Why do some things succeed in the marketplace of ideas? While some argue that content drives success, others suggest that style, or the way ideas are presented, also plays an important role. To provide a stringent test of style's…
Grammatical rules in natural languages are often characterized by exceptions. How do language learners learn these exceptions to otherwise general patterns? Here, we study this question through the case study of English passivization. While…
As speakers turn their thoughts into sentences, they maintain a balance between the complexity of words and syntax. However, it is unclear whether this syntax-lexicon tradeoff is unique to the spoken language production that is under the…
Artificial neural networks can generalize productively to novel contexts. Can they also learn exceptions to those productive rules? We explore this question using the case of restrictions on English passivization (e.g., the fact that "The…
Grammaticality and likelihood are distinct notions in human language. Pretrained language models (LMs), which are probabilistic models of language fitted to maximize corpus likelihood, generate grammatically well-formed text and…
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature,…
The relationship between language and thought remains an unresolved philosophical issue. Existing viewpoints can be broadly categorized into two schools: one asserting their independence, and another arguing that language constrains…
The abductive natural language inference task ($\alpha$NLI) is proposed to infer the most plausible explanation between the cause and the event. In the $\alpha$NLI task, two observations are given, and the most plausible hypothesis is asked…
Getting machines to generate text perceived as creative is a long-pursued goal. A growing body of research directs this goal towards augmenting the creative writing abilities of human authors. In this paper, we pursue this objective by…
The mechanisms of comprehension during language processing remains an open question. Classically, building the meaning of a linguistic utterance is said to be incremental, step-by-step, based on a compositional process. However, many…
Most definitions of ontology, viewed as a "specification of a conceptualization", agree on the fact that if an ontology can take different forms, it necessarily includes a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning in…
A well-known approach to treating syntactic island constraints in the setting of Lambek grammars consists in adding specific bracket modalities to the logic. We adapt this approach to abstract categorial grammars (ACG). Thus we define…
LSTM-based recurrent neural networks are the state-of-the-art for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Despite their performance, it is unclear whether, or how, LSTMs learn structural features of natural languages such as…
Independence -- the study of what is relevant to a given problem of reasoning -- has received an increasing attention from the AI community. In this paper, we consider two basic forms of independence, namely, a syntactic one and a semantic…
Properties expressed as the provability of a first-order sentence can be disproved by just finding a model of the negation of the sentence. This fact, however, is meaningful in restricted cases only, depending on the shape of the sentence…
Distributed representations of sentences have been developed recently to represent their meaning as real-valued vectors. However, it is not clear how much information such representations retain about the polarity of sentences. To study…