Related papers: From compositional to systematic semantics
Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain neural model behaviour by reverse-engineering learned computational structure into human-understandable components. Without a formal framework, however, mechanistic explanations cannot be…
Compositionality is believed to be fundamental to intelligence. In humans, it underlies the structure of thought, language, and higher-level reasoning. In AI, compositional representations can enable a powerful form of out-of-distribution…
The mechanisms of comprehension during language processing remains an open question. Classically, building the meaning of a linguistic utterance is said to be incremental, step-by-step, based on a compositional process. However, many…
Categorical compositional distributional semantics provide a method to derive the meaning of a sentence from the meaning of its individual words: the grammatical reduction of a sentence automatically induces a linear map for composing the…
We present a metagrammatical formalism, {\em generic rules}, to give a default interpretation to grammar rules. Our formalism introduces a process of {\em dynamic binding} interfacing the level of pure grammatical knowledge representation…
The classical propositional logic is known to be sound and complete with respect to the set semantics that interprets connectives as set operations. The paper extends propositional language by a new binary modality that corresponds to…
We present a framework which constructs an event-style dis- course semantics. The discourse dynamics are encoded in continuation semantics and various rhetorical relations are embedded in the resulting interpretation of the framework. We…
Despite ample evidence that our concepts, our cognitive architecture, and mathematics itself are all deeply compositional, few models take advantage of this structure. We therefore propose a radically compositional approach to computational…
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…
When the meaning of a phrase cannot be inferred from the individual meanings of its words (e.g., hot dog), that phrase is said to be non-compositional. Automatic compositionality detection in multi-word phrases is critical in any…
The neural architectures of language models are becoming increasingly complex, especially that of Transformers, based on the attention mechanism. Although their application to numerous natural language processing tasks has proven to be very…
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…
A new family of categorial grammars is proposed, defined by enriching basic categorial grammars with a conjunction operation. It is proved that the formalism obtained in this way has the same expressive power as conjunctive grammars, that…
It is useful to have a criterion for when the predictions of an operational theory should be considered classically explainable. Here we take the criterion to be that the theory admits of a generalized-noncontextual ontological model.…
This survey presents in some detail the main advances that have been recently taking place in Computational Linguistics towards the unification of the two prominent semantic paradigms: the compositional formal semantics view and the…
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…
Compositionality is one of the fundamental abilities of the human reasoning process, that allows to decompose a complex problem into simpler elements. Such property is crucial also for neural networks, especially when aiming for a more…
Various concepts of grammatical compositionality arise in many theories of both natural and artificial languages, and often play a key role in accounts of the syntax-semantics interface. We propose that many instances of compositionality…
Suppose we want to build a system that answers a natural language question by representing its semantics as a logical form and computing the answer given a structured database of facts. The core part of such a system is the semantic parser…
This paper summarises the current state-of-the art in the study of compositionality in distributional semantics, and major challenges for this area. We single out generalised quantifiers and intensional semantics as areas on which to focus…