Related papers: Indexed Languages and Unification Grammars

Controlled natural languages (CNLs) are effective languages for knowledge representation and reasoning. They are designed based on certain natural languages with restricted lexicon and grammar. CNLs are unambiguous and simple as opposed to…

Circular splicing systems are a formal model of a generative mechanism of circular words, inspired by a recombinant behaviour of circular DNA. Some unanswered questions are related to the computational power of such systems, and finding a…

This paper explores the fine-grained structure of classes of regular languages maintainable in fragments of first-order logic within the dynamic descriptive complexity framework of Patnaik and Immerman. A result by Hesse states that the…

A rewb is a regular expression extended with a feature called backreference. It is broadly known that backreference is a practical extension of regular expressions, and is supported by most modern regular expression engines, such as those…

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…

Indian languages are inflectional and agglutinative and typically follow clause-free word order. The structure of sentences across most major Indian languages are similar when their dependency parse trees are considered. While some…

In historical linguistics, the affiliation of languages to a common language family is traditionally carried out using a complex workflow that relies on manually comparing individual languages. Large-scale standardized collections of…

In this paper we consider block languages, namely sets of words having the same length, and study the deterministic and nondeterministic state complexity of several operations on these languages. Being a subclass of finite languages, the…

An extension to classical unification, called {\em graded unification} is presented. It is capable of combining contradictory information. An interactive processing paradigm and parser based on this new operator are also presented.

Categories provide a coarse grained description of the world. A fundamental question is whether categories simply mirror an underlying structure of nature, or instead come from the complex interactions of human beings among themselves and…

Language models (LMs) are said to be exhibiting reasoning, but what does this entail? We assess definitions of reasoning and how key papers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) use the notion and argue that the definitions…

The notion of Kolmogorov complexity (=the minimal length of a program that generates some object) is often useful as a kind of language that allows us to reformulate some notions and therefore provide new intuition. In this survey we…

An {\omega}-language is a set of infinite words over a finite alphabet X. We consider the class of recursive {\omega}-languages, i.e. the class of {\omega}-languages accepted by Turing machines with a B\"uchi acceptance condition, which is…

We study a pumping lemma for the word/tree languages generated by higher-order grammars. Pumping lemmas are known up to order-2 word languages (i.e., for regular/context-free/indexed languages), and have been used to show that a given…

With approximately 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, current large language models (LLMs) support only a small subset. Prior research indicates LLMs can learn new languages for certain tasks without supervised data. We extend this…

In this paper we explore a new hierarchy of classes of languages and infinite words and its connection with complexity classes. Namely, we say that a language belongs to the class $L_k$ if it is a subset of the catenation of $k$ languages…

These are lecture notes on the algebraic approach to regular languages. The classical algebraic approach is for finite words; it uses semigroups instead of automata. However, the algebraic approach can be extended to structures beyond…

Formal, Distributional, and Grounded theories of computational semantics each have their uses and their drawbacks. There has been a shift to ground models of language by adding visual knowledge, and there has been a call to enrich models of…

We present a generalization of first-order unification to a term algebra where variable indexing is part of the object language. We exploit variable indexing by associating some sequences of variables ($X_0,\ X_1,\ X_2,\dots$) with a…

Chomsky and others have very directly claimed that large language models (LLMs) are equally capable of learning languages that are possible and impossible for humans to learn. However, there is very little published experimental evidence to…