Related papers: Linear Logic for Meaning Assembly
Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding--namely, that the way something is expressed reflects…
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…
We aim to provide an explanation for how the human brain might connect words for sentence formation. A novel approach to modeling syntactic representation is introduced, potentially showing the existence of universal syntactic structures…
The derivation trees of a tree adjoining grammar provide a first insight into the sentence semantics, and are thus prime targets for generation systems. We define a formalism, feature-based regular tree grammars, and a translation from…
Logical formalisms provide a natural and concise means for specifying and reasoning about preferences. In this paper, we propose lexicographic logic, an extension of classical propositional logic that can express a variety of preferences,…
For building question answering systems and natural language interfaces, semantic parsing has emerged as an important and powerful paradigm. Semantic parsers map natural language into logical forms, the classic representation for many…
In this paper we provide a unifying description of different types of semantics of modal logic found in the literature via the framework of topological categories. In the style of categorical logic, we establish an exact correspondence…
How does language inform our downstream thinking? In particular, how do humans make meaning from language--and how can we leverage a theory of linguistic meaning to build machines that think in more human-like ways? In this paper, we…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. Assuming the existence of such a structure, we show that the…
Human reasoning can be understood as a cooperation between the intuitive, associative "System-1" and the deliberative, logical "System-2". For existing System-1-like methods in visual activity understanding, it is crucial to integrate…
Much like sentences are composed of words, words themselves are composed of smaller units. For example, the English word questionably can be analyzed as question+able+ly. However, this structural decomposition of the word does not directly…
Normative non-functional requirements specify constraints that a system must observe in order to avoid violations of social, legal, ethical, empathetic, and cultural norms. As these requirements are typically defined by non-technical system…
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…
Solving puzzles in natural language poses a long-standing challenge in AI. While large language models (LLMs) have recently shown impressive capabilities in a variety of tasks, they continue to struggle with complex puzzles that demand…
This paper presents a semantic parsing approach for unrestricted texts. Semantic parsing is one of the major bottlenecks of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems and usually requires building expensive resources not easily portable…
Making a linguistic theory is like making a programming language: one typically devises a type system to delineate the acceptable utterances and a denotational semantics to explain observations on their behavior. Via this connection, the…
This paper gives a generative model of the interpretation of formal logic for data-driven logical reasoning. The key idea is to represent the interpretation as likelihood of a formula being true given a model of formal logic. Using the…
Language serves as a vehicle for conveying thought, enabling communication among individuals. The ability to distinguish between diverse concepts, identify fairness and injustice, and comprehend a range of legal notions fundamentally relies…
In this paper, we study a functional programming approach to natural language semantics, allowing us to increase the expressiveness of a more traditional denotation style. We will formalize a category based type and effect system to…
A type theory is presented that combines (intuitionistic) linear types with type dependency, thus properly generalising both intuitionistic dependent type theory and full linear logic. A syntax and complete categorical semantics are…