Related papers: Features and Agreement
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…
A unified theory of language combines a Bayesian cognitive linguistic model of language processing, with the proposal that language evolved by sexual selection for the display of intelligence. The theory accounts for the major facts of…
The derivation trees of a tree adjoining grammar provide a first insight into the sentence semantics, and are thus prime targets for generation systems. We define a formalism, feature-based regular tree grammars, and a translation from…
In this paper, we assess the complexity results of formalisms that describe the feature theories used in computational linguistics. We show that from these complexity results no immediate conclusions can be drawn about the complexity of the…
In-context learning (ICL) is an important paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs) to new tasks, but the generalization behavior of ICL remains poorly understood. We investigate the inductive biases of ICL from the perspective of…
A usage-based Construction Grammar (CxG) posits that slot-constraints generalize from common exemplar constructions. But what is the best model of constraint generalization? This paper evaluates competing frequency-based and…
A new family of categorial grammars is proposed, defined by enriching basic categorial grammars with a conjunction operation. It is proved that the formalism obtained in this way has the same expressive power as conjunctive grammars, that…
We investigate language interpretations of two extensions of the Lambek calculus: with additive conjunction and disjunction and with additive conjunction and the unit constant. For extensions with additive connectives, we show that…
Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the…
In this paper we show that an account for coordination can be constructed using the derivation structures in a lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). We present a notion of derivation in LTAGs that preserves the notion of fixed…
This paper presents \tdl, a typed feature-based representation language and inference system. Type definitions in \tdl\ consist of type and feature constraints over the boolean connectives. \tdl\ supports open- and closed-world reasoning…
The long-distance agreement, evidence for syntactic structure, is increasingly used to assess the syntactic generalization of Neural Language Models. Much work has shown that transformers are capable of high accuracy in varied agreement…
This paper defines unification based ID/LP grammars based on typed feature structures as nonterminals and proposes a variant of Earley's algorithm to decide whether a given input sentence is a member of the language generated by a…
Manna and Waldinger's theory of substitutions and unification has been verified using the Cambridge LCF theorem prover. A proof of the monotonicity of substitution is presented in detail, as an example of interaction with LCF. Translating…
This paper provides a model theoretic semantics to feature terms augmented with set descriptions. We provide constraints to specify HPSG style set descriptions, fixed cardinality set descriptions, set-membership constraints, restricted…
Whether language models (LMs) have inductive biases that favor typologically frequent grammatical properties over rare, implausible ones has been investigated, typically using artificial languages (ALs) (White and Cotterell, 2021;…
We advance a novel explanation of similarity-based interference effects in subject-verb and reflexive pronoun agreement processing, grounded in surprisal values computed from a pretrained large-scale Transformer model, GPT-2. Specifically,…
The behavioral specification of an object-oriented grammar model is considered. The model is based on full lexicalization, head-orientation via valency constraints and dependency relations, inheritance as a means for non-redundant lexicon…
It is claimed that a variety of facts concerning ellipsis, event reference, and interclausal coherence can be explained by two features of the linguistic form in question: (1) whether the form leaves behind an empty constituent in the…
This paper uses the Minimum Description Length paradigm to model the complexity of CxGs (operationalized as the encoding size of a grammar) alongside their descriptive adequacy (operationalized as the encoding size of a corpus given a…