Related papers: Functional Centering
Language understanding (LU) and dialogue policy learning are two essential components in conversational systems. Human-human dialogues are not well-controlled and often random and unpredictable due to their own goals and speaking habits.…
A computational system implemented exclusively through the spiking of neurons was recently shown capable of syntax, that is, of carrying out the dependency parsing of simple English sentences. We address two of the most important questions…
This paper presents the first unsupervised approach to lexical semantic change that makes use of contextualised word representations. We propose a novel method that exploits the BERT neural language model to obtain representations of word…
This position paper provides a critical but constructive discussion of current practices in benchmarking and evaluative practices in the field of formal reasoning and automated theorem proving. We take the position that open code, open…
This paper proposes decoupling the dependency tree from word order, such that surface ordering is not determined by traversing the dependency tree. We develop the notion of a \emph{word order domain structure}, which is linked but…
Understanding the semantic relationships between terms is a fundamental task in natural language processing applications. While structured resources that can express those relationships in a formal way, such as ontologies, are still scarce,…
The neural architectures of language models are becoming increasingly complex, especially that of Transformers, based on the attention mechanism. Although their application to numerous natural language processing tasks has proven to be very…
Dialogue disentanglement aims to detach the chronologically ordered utterances into several independent sessions. Conversation utterances are essentially organized and described by the underlying discourse, and thus dialogue disentanglement…
Causal inference, a critical tool for informing business decisions, traditionally relies heavily on structured data. However, in many real-world scenarios, such data can be incomplete or unavailable. This paper presents a framework that…
Despite the increasing effectiveness of language models, their reasoning capabilities remain underdeveloped. In particular, causal reasoning through counterfactual question answering is lacking. This work aims to bridge this gap. We first…
This paper outlines a general formal framework for reasoning systems, intended to support future analysis of inference architectures across domains. We model reasoning systems as structured tuples comprising phenomena, explanation space,…
In `free word order' languages, every sentence is embedded in its specific context. Among others, the order of constituents is determined by the categories `theme', `rheme' and `contrastive focus'. This paper shows how to recognise and to…
This paper proposes a formal framework for modeling the interaction of causal and (qualitative) epistemic reasoning. To this purpose, we extend the notion of a causal model with a representation of the epistemic state of an agent. On the…
Recent research on conversational search highlights the importance of mixed-initiative in conversations. To enable mixed-initiative, the system should be able to ask clarifying questions to the user. However, the ability of the underlying…
We study the problem of automatic fact-checking, paying special attention to the impact of contextual and discourse information. We address two related tasks: (i) detecting check-worthy claims, and (ii) fact-checking claims. We develop…
Modelling concept representation is a foundational problem in the study of cognition and linguistics. This work builds on the confluence of conceptual tools from G\"ardenfors semantic spaces, categorical compositional linguistics, and…
In this paper, we present a model of anaphor resolution within the framework of the centering model. The consideration of an incremental processing mode introduces the need to manage structural ambiguity at the center level. Hence, the…
This paper examines the discourse functions that different types of subjects perform in Italian within the centering framework. I build on my previous work (COLING90) that accounted for the alternation of null and strong pronouns in subject…
Many studies were recently done for investigating the properties of contextual language models but surprisingly, only a few of them consider the properties of these models in terms of semantic similarity. In this article, we first focus on…
Smart word substitution aims to enhance sentence quality by improving word choices; however current benchmarks rely on human-labeled data. Since word choices are inherently subjective, ground-truth word substitutions generated by a small…