Related papers: Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity
My doctoral research focuses on understanding semantic knowledge in neural network models trained solely to predict natural language (referred to as language models, or LMs), by drawing on insights from the study of concepts and categories…
One major problem in Natural Language Processing is the automatic analysis and representation of human language. Human language is ambiguous and deeper understanding of semantics and creating human-to-machine interaction have required an…
Distributed representations of words have been shown to capture lexical semantics, as demonstrated by their effectiveness in word similarity and analogical relation tasks. But, these tasks only evaluate lexical semantics indirectly. In this…
Understanding the semantic relationships between terms is a fundamental task in natural language processing applications. While structured resources that can express those relationships in a formal way, such as ontologies, are still scarce,…
Human beings possess the most sophisticated computational machinery in the known universe. We can understand language of rich descriptive power, and communicate in the same environment with astonishing clarity. Two of the many contributors…
The author describes a conceptual study towards mapping grounded natural language discourse representation structures to instances of controlled language statements. This can be achieved via a pipeline of preexisting state of the art…
The dissertation addresses the design of parsing grammars for automatic surface-syntactic analysis of unconstrained English text. It consists of a summary and three articles. {\it Morphological disambiguation} documents a grammar for…
In this paper, we propose a fresh perspective on argumentation semantics, to view them as a relational database. It offers encapsulation of the underlying argumentation graph, and allows us to understand argumentation semantics under a…
Semantic parsing aims to map natural language utterances onto machine interpretable meaning representations, aka programs whose execution against a real-world environment produces a denotation. Weakly-supervised semantic parsers are trained…
Lexical ambiguities naturally arise in languages. We present Lamb, a lexical analyzer that produces a lexical analysis graph describing all the possible sequences of tokens that can be found within the input string. Parsers can process such…
We introduce a neural semantic parser that converts natural language utterances to intermediate representations in the form of predicate-argument structures, which are induced with a transition system and subsequently mapped to target…
Automated reasoning about uncertain knowledge has many applications. One difficulty when developing such systems is the lack of a completely satisfactory integration of logic and probability. We address this problem directly. Expressive…
Real-world arguments in text and dialogues are normally enthymemes (i.e. some of their premises and/or claims are implicit). Natural language processing (NLP) methods for handling enthymemes can potentially identify enthymemes in text but…
Inferential relations govern our concept use. In order to understand a concept it has to be located in a space of implications. There are different kinds of conditions for statements, i.e. that the conditions represent different kinds of…
We present a setup for training, evaluating and interpreting neural language models, that uses artificial, language-like data. The data is generated using a massive probabilistic grammar (based on state-split PCFGs), that is itself derived…
We introduce the task of cross-lingual semantic parsing: mapping content provided in a source language into a meaning representation based on a target language. We present: (1) a meaning representation designed to allow systems to target…
The language of epistemic specifications and epistemic logic programs extends disjunctive logic programs under the stable model semantics with modal constructs called subjective literals. Using subjective literals, it is possible to check…
A lively ongoing debate is taking place, since the extraordinary emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with regards to their capability to understand the world and capture the meaning of the dialogues in which they are involved.…
This paper argues that an interlingual representation must explicitly represent some parts of the meaning of a situation as possibilities (or preferences), not as necessary or definite components of meaning (or constraints). Possibilities…
Systems for language understanding have become remarkably strong at overcoming linguistic imperfections in tasks involving phrase matching or simple reasoning. Yet, their accuracy drops dramatically as the number of reasoning steps…