Related papers: A Model-Theoretic Framework for Theories of Syntax
This paper introduces an abstract notion of fragments of monadic second-order logic. This concept is based on purely syntactic closure properties. We show that over finite words, every logical fragment defines a lattice of languages with…
We consider the problem of parsing natural language descriptions into source code written in a general-purpose programming language like Python. Existing data-driven methods treat this problem as a language generation task without…
Large language models (LLMs) offer a new empirical setting in which long-standing theories of linguistic meaning can be examined. This paper contrasts two broad approaches: social constructivist accounts associated with language games, and…
Many complex generative systems use languages to create structured objects. We consider a model of random languages, defined by weighted context-free grammars. As the distribution of grammar weights broadens, a transition is found from a…
Recent years have seen an increasing need of high-level specification languages and tools generating code from specifications. In this paper, we introduce a specification language, {\splname}, which is tailored to the writing of syntactic…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become capable of generating highly fluent text in certain languages, without modules specially designed to capture grammar or semantic coherence. What does this mean for the future of linguistic expertise…
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…
Grammar refers to the system of rules that governs the structural organization and the semantic relations among linguistic units such as sentences, phrases, and words within a given language. In natural language processing, there remains a…
Theories of natural language and concepts have been unable to model the flexibility, creativity, context-dependence, and emergence, exhibited by words, concepts and their combinations. The mathematical formalism of quantum theory has…
In the talk at the workshop my aim was to demonstrate the usefulness of graph techniques for tackling problems that have been studied predominantly as problems on the term level: increasing sharing in functional programs, and addressing…
Accurate syntactic representations are essential for robust generalization in natural language. Recent work has found that pre-training can teach language models to rely on hierarchical syntactic features - as opposed to incorrect linear…
Refinement types sharpen systems of simple and dependent types by offering expressive means to more precisely classify well-typed terms. We present a system of refinement types for LF in the style of recent formulations where only canonical…
This paper describes an abstract machine for linguistic formalisms that are based on typed feature structures, such as HPSG. The core design of the abstract machine is given in detail, including the compilation process from a high-level…
Topic modeling is a well-established technique for exploring text corpora. Conventional topic models (e.g., LDA) represent topics as bags of words that often require "reading the tea leaves" to interpret; additionally, they offer users…
Humans can learn structural properties about a word from minimal experience, and deploy their learned syntactic representations uniformly in different grammatical contexts. We assess the ability of modern neural language models to reproduce…
NLP is deeply intertwined with the formal study of language, both conceptually and historically. Arguably, this connection goes all the way back to Chomsky's Syntactic Structures in 1957. It also still holds true today, with a strand of…
Syntax connects words to each other in very specific ways. Two words are syntactically connected if they depend directly on each other. Syntactic connections usually happen within a sentence. Gathering all those connection across several…
Large language models follow a lineage of many NLP applications that were directly inspired by distributional semantics, but do not seem to be closely related to it anymore. In this paper, we propose to employ the distributional theory of…
Logical reasoning remains a challenge for natural language processing, but it can be improved by training language models to mimic theorem provers on procedurally generated problems. Previous work used domain-specific proof generation…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming language sciences. However, their widespread deployment currently suffers from methodological fragmentation and a lack of systematic soundness. This study proposes two comprehensive…