Related papers: Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity
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…
Distributional semantics provides multi-dimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown in a large body of work in computational linguistics;…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to make sense of ambiguous, open-textured, value-laden terms. Platforms routinely rely on LLMs for content moderation, asking them to label text based on disputed concepts like "hate…
Speech emotion recognition plays an important role in various applications. However, most existing approaches predict a single emotion label, oversimplifying the inherently ambiguous nature of human emotional expression. Recent large…
There has been a considerable amount of work on uncertainty in knowledge-based systems. This work has generally been concerned with uncertainty arising from the strength of inferences and the weight of evidence. In this paper we discuss…
Distributional semantics is the linguistic theory that a word's meaning can be derived from its distribution in natural language (i.e., its use). Language models are commonly viewed as an implementation of distributional semantics, as they…
We investigate the problem of determining a compact underspecified semantical representation for sentences that may be highly ambiguous. Due to combinatorial explosion, the naive method of building semantics for the different syntactic…
Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In…
Most words are ambiguous--i.e., they convey distinct meanings in different contexts--and even the meanings of unambiguous words are context-dependent. Both phenomena present a challenge for NLP. Recently, the advent of contextualized word…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
Semantic web information is at the extremities of long pipelines held by human beings. They are at the origin of information and they will consume it either explicitly because the information will be delivered to them in a readable way, or…
Human knowledge is subject to uncertainties, imprecision, incompleteness and inconsistencies. Moreover, the meaning of many everyday terms is dependent on the context. That poses a huge challenge for the Semantic Web. This paper introduces…
Structured reasoning over natural language inputs remains a core challenge in artificial intelligence, as it requires bridging the gap between unstructured linguistic expressions and formal logical representations. In this paper, we propose…
In this paper we investigate the relationships between a multipreferential semantics for defeasible reasoning in knowledge representation and a multilayer neural network model. Weighted knowledge bases for a simple description logic with…
A growing interest in tasks involving language understanding by the NLP community has led to the need for effective semantic parsing and inference. Modern NLP systems use semantic representations that do not quite fulfill the nuanced needs…
Explainability is a topic of growing importance in NLP. In this work, we provide a unified perspective of explainability as a communication problem between an explainer and a layperson about a classifier's decision. We use this framework to…
Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning. We start from…
We have recently begun a project to develop a more effective and efficient way to marshal inferences from background knowledge to facilitate deep natural language understanding. The meaning of a word is taken to be the entities,…
Language models learn and represent language differently than humans; they learn the form and not the meaning. Thus, to assess the success of language model explainability, we need to consider the impact of its divergence from a user's…
This work aims to shine a spotlight on the topic of metalanguage. We first define metalanguage, link it to NLP and LLMs, and then discuss our two labs' metalanguage-centered efforts. Finally, we discuss four dimensions of metalanguage and…