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Algorithms of inference in a computer system oriented to input and semantic processing of text information are presented. Such inference is necessary for logical questions when the direct comparison of objects from a question and database…
The ability to robustly identify causal relationships is essential for autonomous decision-making and adaptation to novel scenarios. However, accurately inferring causal structure requires integrating both world knowledge and abstract…
In psycholinguistics, the creation of controlled materials is crucial to ensure that research outcomes are solely attributed to the intended manipulations and not influenced by extraneous factors. To achieve this, psycholinguists typically…
Conditional acceptability refers to how plausible a conditional statement is perceived to be. It plays an important role in communication and reasoning, as it influences how individuals interpret implications, assess arguments, and make…
Large language models achieve strong performance on many language tasks, yet it remains unclear whether they integrate world knowledge with syntactic structure in a human-like, structure-sensitive way during ambiguity resolution. We test…
Static concreteness ratings are widely used in NLP, yet a word's concreteness can shift with context, especially in figurative language such as metaphor, where common concrete nouns can take abstract interpretations. While such shifts are…
Grammatical features across human languages show intriguing correlations often attributed to learning biases in humans. However, empirical evidence has been limited to experiments with highly simplified artificial languages, and whether…
How predictable a word is can be quantified in two ways: using human responses to the cloze task or using probabilities from language models (LMs).When used as predictors of processing effort, LM probabilities outperform probabilities…
Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet their understanding of purely numerical time-series signals remains limited. Existing approaches mainly focus on forecasting or trend…
Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the…
The interpretation of implicit meanings is an integral aspect of human communication. However, this framework may not transfer to interactions with Large Language Models (LLMs). To investigate this, we introduce the task of Implicit…
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks requiring a fine-grained understanding of literal meaning in images and text, such as visual question-answering or visual entailment. However, there has been…
Visual inputs are often assumed to improve language understanding in multimodal models. We examine this assumption by asking whether vision-language models (VLMs) can distinguish useful visual evidence from incidental image context in…
Nonsensical and anomalous sentences have been instrumental in the development of computational models of semantic interpretation. A core challenge is to distinguish between what is merely anomalous (but can be interpreted given a supporting…
Ambiguity is a natural language phenomenon occurring at different levels of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It is widely studied; in Psycholinguistics, for instance, we have a variety of competing studies for the human disambiguation…
Large language models (LLMs) can generate high-level diverse phenomena without explicitly programmed rules. This capability has led to their adoption within different agent-based models (ABMs) and social simulations. Recent studies…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed as powerful tools for several natural language processing (NLP) applications. Recent works show that modern LLMs can generate self-explanations (SEs), which elicit their intermediate reasoning steps…
Entities and events are crucial to natural language reasoning and common in procedural texts. Existing work has focused either exclusively on entity state tracking (e.g., whether a pan is hot) or on event reasoning (e.g., whether one would…
Idioms present a unique challenge for language models due to their non-compositional figurative interpretations, which often strongly diverge from the idiom's literal interpretation. In this paper, we employ causal tracing to systematically…
The ability to process idiomatic or literal multiword expressions is a crucial aspect of understanding and generating any language. The task of generating contextually relevant continuations for narratives containing idiomatic (or literal)…