Related papers: On Descriptive Complexity, Language Complexity, an…
We continue our study of ordered context-free grammars, a grammar formalism that places an order on the parse trees produced by the corresponding context-free grammar. In particular, we simplify our previous definition of a derivation of a…
We investigate models for learning the class of context-free and context-sensitive languages (CFLs and CSLs). We begin with a brief discussion of some early hardness results which show that unrestricted language learning is impossible, and…
Despite their impressive performance, large language models (LMs) still struggle with reliably generating complex output structures when not finetuned to follow the required output format exactly. To address this issue, grammar-constrained…
Transformer-based language models are effective but complex, and understanding their inner workings and reasoning mechanisms is a significant challenge. Previous research has primarily explored how these models handle simple tasks like name…
In this paper we present a fully lexicalized grammar formalism as a particularly attractive framework for the specification of natural language grammars. We discuss in detail Feature-based, Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (FB-LTAGs), a…
This paper studies the computational complexity of disambiguation under probabilistic tree-grammars and context-free grammars. It presents a proof that the following problems are NP-hard: computing the Most Probable Parse (MPP) from a…
We study the problem of fitting ontologies and constraints to positive and negative examples that take the form of a finite relational structure. As ontology and constraint languages, we consider the description logics $\mathcal{E\mkern-2mu…
By virtue of linguistic compositionality, few syntactic rules and a finite lexicon can generate an unbounded number of sentences. That is, language, though seemingly high-dimensional, can be explained using relatively few degrees of…
This paper introduces derivation trees for general grammars. Within these trees, it defines context-dependent pairs of nodes, corresponding to rewriting two neighboring symbols using a non context-free rule. It proves that the language…
So far, a very large amount of work in Natural Language Processing (NLP) rely on trees as the core mathematical structure to represent linguistic informations (e.g. in Chomsky's work). However, some linguistic phenomena do not cope properly…
Large language models (LLMs) have mastered abundant simple and explicit commonsense knowledge through pre-training, enabling them to achieve human-like performance in simple commonsense reasoning. Nevertheless, LLMs struggle to reason with…
The paper investigates the power of the dynamic complexity classes DynFO, DynQF and DynPROP over string languages. The latter two classes contain problems that can be maintained using quantifier-free first-order updates, with and without…
Different from other sequential data, sentences in natural language are structured by linguistic grammars. Previous generative conversational models with chain-structured decoder ignore this structure in human language and might generate…
A dichotomy result of Sevenster (2014) completely classified the quantifier prefixes of regular Independence-Friendly (IF) logic according to the patterns of quantifier dependence they contain. On one hand, prefixes that contain "Henkin" or…
In this thesis, we present two approaches to a rigorous mathematical and algorithmic foundation of quantitative and statistical inference in constraint-based natural language processing. The first approach, called quantitative constraint…
We consider language modelling (LM) as a multi-label structured prediction task by re-framing training from solely predicting a single ground-truth word to ranking a set of words which could continue a given context. To avoid annotating…
Causality is essential for understanding complex systems, such as the economy, the brain, and the climate. Constructing causal graphs often relies on either data-driven or expert-driven approaches, both fraught with challenges. The former…
Natural language is characterized by compositionality: the meaning of a complex expression is constructed from the meanings of its constituent parts. To facilitate the evaluation of the compositional abilities of language processing…
We consider logic-based argumentation in which an argument is a pair (Fi,al), where the support Fi is a minimal consistent set of formulae taken from a given knowledge base (usually denoted by De) that entails the claim al (a formula). We…
We analyse the pseudofinite monadic second order theory of words over a fixed finite alphabet. In particular we present an axiomatisation of this theory, working in a one-sorted first order framework. The analysis hinges on the fact that…