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While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures…
Discourse particles are crucial elements that subtly shape the meaning of text. These words, often polyfunctional, give rise to nuanced and often quite disparate semantic/discourse effects, as exemplified by the diverse uses of the particle…
Conceptual combination performs a fundamental role in creating the broad range of compound phrases utilized in everyday language. This article provides a novel probabilistic framework for assessing whether the semantics of conceptual…
Resonances driven by the error field multipoles in the magnets often show themselves as islands in phase plots of the particle motion. In order to be able to measure the strength of the island resonance, and then to correct it, it is…
Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Language has the power to reinforce stereotypes and project social biases onto others. At the core of the challenge is that it is rarely what is stated explicitly, but…
We analyze the syntactic sensitivity of Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems using methods inspired by psycholinguistic research. Specifically, we focus on the generation of intonational phrase boundaries, which can often be predicted by…
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated that systems trained solely on text can acquire extensive world knowledge, develop reasoning capabilities, and internalize abstract semantic concepts--showcasing properties that…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
Automated interpretability pipelines generate natural language descriptions for the concepts represented by features in large language models (LLMs), such as plants or the first word in a sentence. These descriptions are derived using…
In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…
Breaking down a document or a conversation into multiple contiguous segments based on its semantic structure is an important and challenging problem in NLP, which can assist many downstream tasks. However, current works on topic…
Speakers repeat constructions frequently in dialogue. Due to their peculiar information-theoretic properties, repetitions can be thought of as a strategy for cost-effective communication. In this study, we focus on the repetition of…
Particles fullfill several distinct central roles in the Japanese language. They can mark arguments as well as adjuncts, can be functional or have semantic funtions. There is, however, no straightforward matching from particles to…
Language is not only a tool for communication but also a medium for human cognition and reasoning. If, as linguistic relativity suggests, the structure of language shapes cognitive patterns, then large language models (LLMs) trained on…
Recently, topic modeling has been widely used to discover the abstract topics in text corpora. Most of the existing topic models are based on the assumption of three-layer hierarchical Bayesian structure, i.e. each document is modeled as a…
Sentence function is an important linguistic feature indicating the communicative purpose in uttering a sentence. Incorporating sentence functions into conversations has shown improvements in the quality of generated responses. However, the…
One of the challenges of natural language understanding is to deal with the subjectivity of sentences, which may express opinions and emotions that add layers of complexity and nuance. Sentiment analysis is a field that aims to extract and…
The paper presents a constraint based semantic formalism for HPSG. The advantages of the formlism are shown with respect to a grammar for a fragment of German that deals with (i) quantifier scope ambiguities triggered by scrambling and/or…
Storytelling, whether via fables, news reports, documentaries, or memoirs, can be thought of as the communication of interesting and related events that, taken together, form a concrete process. It is desirable to extract the event chains…