Related papers: Principle Based Semantics for HPSG
Incorporating syntax into neural approaches in NLP has a multitude of practical and scientific benefits. For instance, a language model that is syntax-aware is likely to be able to produce better samples; even a discriminative model like…
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…
Formal/symbolic semantics can provide canonical, rigid controllability and interpretability to sentence representations due to their \textit{localisation} or \textit{composition} property. How can we deliver such property to the current…
Distributed representations of meaning are a natural way to encode covariance relationships between words and phrases in NLP. By overcoming data sparsity problems, as well as providing information about semantic relatedness which is not…
Conditionals are useful for modelling, but are not always sufficiently expressive for capturing information accurately. In this paper we make the case for a form of conditional that is situation-based. These conditionals are more expressive…
We present a novel approach to sentence simplification which departs from previous work in two main ways. First, it requires neither hand written rules nor a training corpus of aligned standard and simplified sentences. Second, sentence…
Neural language models (LMs) perform well on tasks that require sensitivity to syntactic structure. Drawing on the syntactic priming paradigm from psycholinguistics, we propose a novel technique to analyze the representations that enable…
This note clarifies the concept of syntax and semantics and their relationships. Today, a lot of confusion arises from the fact that the word "semantics" is used in different meanings. We discuss a general approach at defining semantics…
In this paper, we characterize the properties of a direct interpretation of HPSG and present the advantages of this approach. High-level programming languages constitute in this perspective an efficient solution: we show how a…
We study the problem of entity-relation extraction in the presence of symbolic domain knowledge. Such knowledge takes the form of an ontology defining relations and their permissible arguments. Previous approaches set out to integrate such…
We are concerned with dependency-oriented morphosyntactic parsing of running text. While a parsing grammar should avoid introducing structurally unresolvable distinctions in order to optimise on the accuracy of the parser, it also is…
Non-sentential utterances (NSUs) are utterances that lack a complete sentential form but whose meaning can be inferred from the dialogue context, such as "OK", "where?", "probably at his apartment". The interpretation of non-sentential…
We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer's recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence.…
Manifestly and logically displaying the line of reasoning from evidence to answer is significant to explainable question answering (QA). The entailment tree exhibits the lines structurally, which is different from the self-explanation…
Syntactic theory has traditionally adopted a constructivist approach, in which a set of atomic elements are manipulated by combinatory operations to yield derived, complex elements. Syntactic structure is thus seen as the result or discrete…
We present a device for specifying and reasoning about syntax for datatypes, programming languages, and logic calculi. More precisely, we study a notion of "signature" for specifying syntactic constructions. In the spirit of Initial…
We introduce a neural semantic parser that converts natural language utterances to intermediate representations in the form of predicate-argument structures, which are induced with a transition system and subsequently mapped to target…
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…
Sentences are important semantic units of natural language. A generic, distributional representation of sentences that can capture the latent semantics is beneficial to multiple downstream applications. We observe a simple geometry of…
Without the assumption of complete, shared awareness, it is necessary to consider communication between agents who may entertain different representations of the world. A syntactic (language-based) approach provides powerful tools to…