Related papers: Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity
Distributional semantics offers new ways to study the semantics of morphology. This study focuses on the semantics of noun singulars and their plural inflectional variants in English. Our goal is to compare two models for the…
The logical negation property (LNP), which implies generating different predictions for semantically opposite inputs, is an important property that a trustworthy language model must satisfy. However, much recent evidence shows that…
The meaning of a sentence is a function of the relations that hold between its words. We instantiate this relational view of semantics in a series of neural models based on variants of relation networks (RNs) which represent a set of…
On the one hand, classical terminological knowledge representation excludes the possibility of handling uncertain concept descriptions involving, e.g., "usually true" concept properties, generalized quantifiers, or exceptions. On the other…
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…
This is the first paper in a series in which we lay down the foundations of the theory of interpretations. We systematically study different types of interpretations and their properties. Some of these interpretations are known, while…
A large-scale conversational agent can suffer from understanding user utterances with various ambiguities such as ASR ambiguity, intent ambiguity, and hypothesis ambiguity. When ambiguities are detected, the agent should engage in a…
We give in this paper a logical characterization for unambiguous Context Free Languages, in the vein of descriptive complexity. A fragment of the logic characterizing context free languages given by Lautemann, Schwentick and Th\'erien [18]…
In this paper, we show how game-theoretic work on conversation combined with a theory of discourse structure provides a framework for studying interpretive bias. Interpretive bias is an essential feature of learning and understanding but…
User queries are often underspecified and may admit multiple valid interpretations. Rather than silently making assumptions about the user's intent, a helpful assistant should surface such ambiguity by asking a clarifying question. Doing so…
Language, as an information medium created by advanced organisms, has always been a concern of neuroscience regarding how it is represented in the brain. Decoding linguistic representations in the evoked brain has shown groundbreaking…
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…
Language models (LMs) are said to be exhibiting reasoning, but what does this entail? We assess definitions of reasoning and how key papers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) use the notion and argue that the definitions…
The issue of word sense ambiguity poses a significant challenge in natural language processing due to the scarcity of annotated data to feed machine learning models to face the challenge. Therefore, unsupervised word sense disambiguation…
Marrying topic models and language models exposes language understanding to a broader source of document-level context beyond sentences via topics. While introducing topical semantics in language models, existing approaches incorporate…
Word embeddings typically represent different meanings of a word in a single conflated vector. Empirical analysis of embeddings of ambiguous words is currently limited by the small size of manually annotated resources and by the fact that…
In traditional Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) the multiple senses of a polysemous word are conflated into a single vector space representation. In this work, we propose a DSM that learns multiple distributional representations of a…
Progress on many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as text classification, is driven by objective, reproducible and scalable evaluation via publicly available benchmarks. However, these are not always representative of…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…
Cognitive decline often surfaces in language years before diagnosis. It is frequently non-experts, such as those closest to the patient, who first sense a change and raise concern. As LLMs become integrated into daily communication and used…