Related papers: Systematicity between Forms and Meanings across La…
Human beings possess the most sophisticated computational machinery in the known universe. We can understand language of rich descriptive power, and communicate in the same environment with astonishing clarity. Two of the many contributors…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross-linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim…
Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches to meaning. More specifically, proposals have been put forward to augment formal semantic machinery with…
Neural language models learn, to varying degrees of accuracy, the grammatical properties of natural languages. In this work, we investigate whether there are systematic sources of variation in the language models' accuracy. Focusing on…
We develop a system that formally represents spatial semantics concepts within natural language descriptions of spatial arrangements. The system builds on a model of spatial semantics representation according to which words in a sentence…
Grammatical features such as number and gender serve two central functions in human languages. While they encode salient semantic attributes like numerosity and animacy, they also offload sentence processing cost by predictably linking…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
Human lexicons contain many different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., "purple" or "magenta" for the same shade of color. On the one hand, studies on language use have explored how speakers adapt their…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
The nouns of our language refer to either concrete entities (like a table) or abstract concepts (like justice or love), and cognitive psychology has established that concreteness influences how words are processed. Accordingly,…
We propose a grounded approach to meaning in language typology. We treat data from perceptual modalities, such as images, as a language-agnostic representation of meaning. Hence, we can quantify the function--form relationship between…
Machines have achieved a broad and growing set of linguistic competencies, thanks to recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Psychologists have shown increasing interest in such models, comparing their output to psychological…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
Grammar refers to the system of rules that governs the structural organization and the semantic relations among linguistic units such as sentences, phrases, and words within a given language. In natural language processing, there remains a…
Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…
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…