Related papers: Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity

Temporary syntactic ambiguities arise when the beginning of a sentence is compatible with multiple syntactic analyses. We inspect to which extent neural language models (LMs) exhibit uncertainty over such analyses when processing…

Word sense disambiguation assumes word senses. Within the lexicography and linguistics literature, they are known to be very slippery entities. The paper looks at problems with existing accounts of `word sense' and describes the various…

In neural network models of language, words are commonly represented using context-invariant representations (word embeddings) which are then put in context in the hidden layers. Since words are often ambiguous, representing the…

The use of terms from natural and social scientific titles and abstracts is studied from the perspective of sublanguages and their specialized dictionaries. Different notions of sublanguage distinctiveness are explored. Objective methods…

Ambiguity remains a fundamental challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to the inherent complexity and flexibility of human language. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing ambiguity has become even more…

Ontologies formalise how the concepts from a given domain are interrelated. Despite their clear potential as a backbone for explainable AI, existing ontologies tend to be highly incomplete, which acts as a significant barrier to their more…

Semantic subtyping is an approach to define subtyping relations for type systems featuring union and intersection type connectives. It has been studied only for strict languages, and it is unsound for non-strict semantics. In this work, we…

Formal languages are essential for computer programming and are constructed to be easily processed by computers. In contrast, natural languages are much more challenging and instigated the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). One…

A growing effort in NLP aims to build datasets of human explanations. However, the term explanation encompasses a broad range of notions, each with different properties and ramifications. Our goal is to provide an overview of diverse types…

In this work, we study a critical research problem regarding the trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs): how LLMs behave when encountering ambiguous narrative text, with a particular focus on Chinese textual ambiguity. We created a…

Ambiguous words or underspecified references require interlocutors to resolve them, often by relying on shared context and commonsense knowledge. Therefore, we systematically investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can leverage…

This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…

Ambiguity in natural language poses significant challenges to Large Language Models (LLMs) used for open-domain question answering. LLMs often struggle with the inherent uncertainties of human communication, leading to misinterpretations,…

Many current NLP systems are built from language models trained to optimize unsupervised objectives on large amounts of raw text. Under what conditions might such a procedure acquire meaning? Our systematic experiments with synthetic data…

Contextualized word embeddings in language models have given much advance to NLP. Intuitively, sentential information is integrated into the representation of words, which can help model polysemy. However, context sensitivity also leads to…

Standard models of multi-agent modal logic do not capture the fact that information is often \emph{ambiguous}, and may be interpreted in different ways by different agents. We propose a framework that can model this, and consider different…

This dissertation explores the linguistic and computational aspects of the meaning relations that can hold between two or more complex linguistic expressions (phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs). In particular, it focuses on…

This survey paper proposes a clearer view of natural language reasoning in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, we provide a distinct definition for natural language reasoning in…

Although sloppy interpretation is usually accounted for by theories of ellipsis, it often arises in non-elliptical contexts. In this paper, a theory of sloppy interpretation is provided which captures this fact. The underlying idea is that…

Lexical ambiguity -- where a single wordform takes on distinct, context-dependent meanings -- serves as a useful tool to compare across different language models' (LMs') ability to form distinct, contextualized representations of the same…