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We present algorithms for aligning components of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs to spans in English sentences. We leverage unsupervised learning in combination with heuristics, taking the best of both worlds from previous AMR…
Existing question answering systems can only predict answers without explicit reasoning processes, which hinder their explainability and make us overestimate their ability of understanding and reasoning over natural language. In this work,…
We propose a new method for evaluating the readability of simplified sentences through pair-wise ranking. The validity of the method is established through in-corpus and cross-corpus evaluation experiments. The approach correctly identifies…
We consider the problem of learning general-purpose, paraphrastic sentence embeddings based on supervision from the Paraphrase Database (Ganitkevitch et al., 2013). We compare six compositional architectures, evaluating them on annotated…
Systematic generalization remains challenging for current language models, which are known to be both sensitive to semantically similar permutations of the input and to struggle with known concepts presented in novel contexts. Although…
We consider the problem of fully unsupervised learning of grammatical (part-of-speech) categories from unlabeled text. The standard maximum-likelihood hidden Markov model for this task performs poorly, because of its weak inductive bias and…
Corpora and web texts can become a rich language learning resource if we have a means of assessing whether they are linguistically appropriate for learners at a given proficiency level. In this paper, we aim at addressing this issue by…
This paper presents a semantic parsing approach for unrestricted texts. Semantic parsing is one of the major bottlenecks of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems and usually requires building expensive resources not easily portable…
Spoken language recognition (SLR) refers to the automatic process used to determine the language present in a speech sample. SLR is an important task in its own right, for example, as a tool to analyze or categorize large amounts of…
We propose a neural language model capable of unsupervised syntactic structure induction. The model leverages the structure information to form better semantic representations and better language modeling. Standard recurrent neural networks…
Vocabulary use is a fundamental aspect of second language (L2) proficiency. To date, its assessment by automated systems has typically examined the context-independent, or part-of-speech (PoS) related use of words. This paper introduces a…
In this paper we propose and carefully evaluate a sequence labeling framework which solely utilizes sparse indicator features derived from dense distributed word representations. The proposed model obtains (near) state-of-the art…
We introduce a generalization of classic information-theoretic measures of predictive uncertainty in online language processing, based on the simulation of expected continuations of incremental linguistic contexts. Our framework provides a…
Summarizing content contributed by individuals can be challenging, because people make different lexical choices even when describing the same events. However, there remains a significant need to summarize such content. Examples include the…
In this paper, we evaluate the capability of transformer-based language models in making inferences over uncertain text that includes uncertain rules of reasoning. We cover both Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and generative Large…
Human annotation for syntactic parsing is expensive, and large resources are available only for a fraction of languages. A question we ask is whether one can leverage abundant unlabeled texts to improve syntactic parsers, beyond just using…
Grammaticality and likelihood are distinct notions in human language. Pretrained language models (LMs), which are probabilistic models of language fitted to maximize corpus likelihood, generate grammatically well-formed text and…
In a consistent text, many words and phrases are repeatedly used in more than one sentence. When an identical phrase (a set of consecutive words) is repeated in different sentences, the constituent words of those sentences tend to be…
We present an approach for recursively splitting and rephrasing complex English sentences into a novel semantic hierarchy of simplified sentences, with each of them presenting a more regular structure that may facilitate a wide variety of…
Large language models (LLMs) have grown in their usage to provide support for question answering across numerous disciplines. The models on their own have already shown promise for answering basic questions, however fail quickly where…