Related papers: Subject islands do not reduce to construction-spec…
Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
Large language models (LLMs) can reliably distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, but how grammatical knowledge is represented within the models remains an open question. We investigate whether different syntactic phenomena…
Semantically non-compositional phrases constitute an intriguing research topic in Natural Language Processing. Semantic non-compositionality --the situation when the meaning of a phrase cannot be derived from the meaning of its components,…
Humans have a remarkable ability to acquire and understand grammatical phenomena that are seen rarely, if ever, during childhood. Recent evidence suggests that language models with human-scale pretraining data may possess a similar ability…
The psycholinguistic theory of communication accommodation accounts for the general observation that participants in conversations tend to converge to one another's communicative behavior: they coordinate in a variety of dimensions…
This thesis focuses on gaining linguistic insights into textual discussions on a word level. It was of special interest to distinguish messages that constructively contribute to a discussion from those that are detrimental to them. Thereby,…
Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of…
This paper is about pregroup models of natural languages, and how they relate to the explicitly categorical use of pregroups in Compositional Distributional Semantics and Natural Language Processing. These categorical interpretations make…
In ordinary gravitational theories, any local bulk operator in an entanglement wedge is accompanied by a long-range gravitational dressing that extends to the asymptotic part of the wedge. Islands are the only known examples of entanglement…
Large-scale language models are rapidly improving, performing well on a wide variety of tasks with little to no customization. In this work we investigate how language models can support science writing, a challenging writing task that is…
Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the expression.…
Children's acquisition of filler-gap dependencies has been argued by some to depend on innate grammatical knowledge, while others suggest that the distributional evidence available in child-directed speech suffices. Unfortunately, the…
Recently, the notions of subjective constraint monotonicity, epistemic splitting, and foundedness have been introduced for epistemic logic programs, with the aim to use them as main criteria respectively intuitions to compare different…
What counts as evidence for syntactic structure? In traditional generative grammar, systematic contrasts in grammaticality such as subject-auxiliary inversion and the licensing of parasitic gaps are taken as evidence for an internal,…
How can children acquire native-level syntax from limited input? According to the Poverty of the Stimulus Hypothesis (PoSH), the linguistic input children receive is insufficient to explain certain generalizations that are robustly learned;…
Targeted syntactic evaluations of language models ask whether models show stable preferences for syntactically acceptable content over minimal-pair unacceptable inputs. Most targeted syntactic evaluation datasets ask models to make these…
We analyze the dynamics of a relativistic particle moving in a uniform magnetic field and perturbed by a standing electrostatic wave. We show that a pulsed wave produces an infinite number of perturbative terms with the same winding number,…
This article proposes a method to extract dependency structures from phrase-structure level parsing with Interaction Grammars. Interaction Grammars are a formalism which expresses interactions among words using a polarity system.…
Natural Language Inference (NLI) is the task of determining the semantic relationship between a premise and a hypothesis. In this paper, we focus on the {\em generation} of hypotheses from premises in a multimodal setting, to generate a…