Related papers: Ambiguity resolution in a reductionistic parser
A common standpoint when designing the syntax of programming languages is that the grammar definition has to be unambiguous. However, requiring up front unambiguous grammars can force language designers to make more or less arbitrary…
The paper adresses the problem of reasoning with ambiguities. Semantic representations are presented that leave scope relations between quantifiers and/or other operators unspecified. Truth conditions are provided for these representations…
Spurious ambiguity is the phenomenon whereby distinct derivations in grammar may assign the same structural reading, resulting in redundancy in the parse search space and inefficiency in parsing. Understanding the problem depends on…
Is it possible to specify a grammatical representation (descriptors and their application guidelines) to such a degree that it can be consistently applied by different grammarians e.g. for producing a benchmark corpus for parser evaluation?…
Despite the frequent challenges posed by ambiguity when representing meaning via natural language, it is often ignored or deliberately removed in tasks mapping language to formally-designed representations, which generally assume a…
Natural language reasoning plays an increasingly important role in improving language models' ability to solve complex language understanding tasks. An interesting use case for reasoning is the resolution of context-dependent ambiguity. But…
Generative AI systems have revolutionized human interaction by enabling natural language-based coding and problem solving. However, the inherent ambiguity of natural language often leads to imprecise instructions, forcing users to…
Handling ambiguity and underspecification is an important challenge in natural language interfaces, particularly for tasks like text-to-SQL semantic parsing. We propose a modular approach that resolves ambiguity using natural language…
We describe an efficient bottom-up parser that interleaves syntactic and semantic structure building. Two techniques are presented for reducing search by reducing local ambiguity: Limited left-context constraints are used to reduce local…
We investigate the problem of determining a compact underspecified semantical representation for sentences that may be highly ambiguous. Due to combinatorial explosion, the naive method of building semantics for the different syntactic…
The quality of rationales is essential in the reasoning capabilities of language models. Rationales not only enhance reasoning performance in complex natural language tasks but also justify model decisions. However, obtaining impeccable…
Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation, frustrating users and creating safety risks when that interpretation is wrong. We propose generating a single structured response that…
I review evidence for the claim that syntactic ambiguities are resolved on the basis of the meaning of the competing analyses, not their structure. I identify a collection of ambiguities that do not yet have a meaning-based account and…
Ambiguity is ubiquitous in natural language. Resolving ambiguous meanings is especially important in information retrieval tasks. While word embeddings carry semantic information, they fail to handle ambiguity well. Transformer models have…
Phonetic ambiguity and confusibility are bugbears for any form of bottom-up or data-driven approach to language processing. The question of when an input is ``close enough'' to a target word pervades the entire problem spaces of speech…
The dissertation addresses the design of parsing grammars for automatic surface-syntactic analysis of unconstrained English text. It consists of a summary and three articles. {\it Morphological disambiguation} documents a grammar for…
Spoken language applications in natural dialogue settings place serious requirements on the choice of processing architecture. Especially under adverse phonetic and acoustic conditions parsing procedures have to be developed which do not…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are intended to reflect human linguistic competencies. But humans have access to a broad and embodied context, which is key in detecting and resolving linguistic ambiguities, even in isolated text spans. A…
Specifications for code writing tasks are usually expressed in natural language and may be ambiguous. Programmers must therefore develop the ability to recognize ambiguities in task specifications and resolve them by asking clarifying…
We contemplate the notion of ambiguity in mathematical discourse. We consider a general method of resolving ambiguity and semantic options for sustaining a resolution. The general discussion is applied to the case of `fraction' which is…