Related papers: Centering theory and the Italian pronominal system
Relying entirely on an attention mechanism, the Transformer introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017) achieves state-of-the-art results for machine translation. In contrast to recurrent and convolutional neural networks, it does not explicitly…
Transformers underlie almost all state-of-the-art language models in computational linguistics, yet their cognitive adequacy as models of human sentence processing remains disputed. In this work, we use a surprisal-based linking mechanism…
Zero pronouns (ZPs) are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages, but should be recalled in non-pro-drop languages. This discourse phenomenon poses a significant challenge for machine translation (MT) when translating texts from pro-drop to…
This thesis is dedicated to developing a dilation theory for semigroups of completely positive maps. The first part treats two-parameter semigroups, and contains also contributions to dilation theory of product system representations. The…
Unlike literal expressions, idioms' meanings do not directly follow from their parts, posing a challenge for neural machine translation (NMT). NMT models are often unable to translate idioms accurately and over-generate compositional,…
For many years I have taught an advanced statistical inference course for master's students using the text of Casella and Berger (2002). The book gives a comprehensive treatment of the core topics at a level that avoids measure theory while…
Two types of consonant gemination characterize Italian: lexical and syntactic. Italian lexical gemination is contrastive, so that two words may differ by only one geminated consonant. In contrast, syntactic gemination occurs across word…
We present our systems and findings on unsupervised lexical semantic change for the Italian language in the DIACR-Ita shared-task at EVALITA 2020. The task is to determine whether a target word has evolved its meaning with time, only…
I think that the main reason why we do not understand the general principles of how knowledge works (and probably also the reason why we have not yet designed and built efficient machines capable of artificial intelligence), is not the…
Models for question answering, dialogue agents, and summarization often interpret the meaning of a sentence in a rich context and use that meaning in a new context. Taking excerpts of text can be problematic, as key pieces may not be…
Causality has been often confused with the notion of determinism. It is mandatory to separate the two notions in view of the debate about quantum foundations. Quantum theory provides an example of causal not-deterministic theory. Here we…
This paper provides a complete suite of axioms for a version of set theory that I call Explication. Explication borrows from the two most prominent existing systems of set theory. Explication starts with class variables. After several…
Lectures notes (in italian) of some arguments of classical analysis, with exercises. A particular emphasis to functional analysis and elementary operator algebra theory is given, by means of exercises and examples.
We prove that the theory of the extensional compositional truth predicate for the language of arithmetic with $\Delta_0$-induction scheme for the truth predicate and the full arithmetical induction scheme is not conservative over Peano…
Default logic can be regarded as a mechanism to represent families of belief sets of a reasoning agent. As such, it is inherently second-order. In this paper, we study the problem of representability of a family of theories as the set of…
Attention is a key component of the now ubiquitous pre-trained language models. By learning to focus on relevant pieces of information, these Transformer-based architectures have proven capable of tackling several tasks at once and…
Many of the kinds of language model used in speech understanding suffer from imperfect modeling of intra-sentential contextual influences. I argue that this problem can be addressed by clustering the sentences in a training corpus…
The `pet fish' phenomenon is often cited as a paradigm example of the `non-compositionality' of human concept use. We show here how this phenomenon is naturally accommodated within a compositional distributional model of meaning. This model…
In this note we present a characterisation of all unary and binary patterns that do not only contain variables, but also reversals of their instances. These types of variables were studied recently in either more general or particular…
Our aim in this set of lectures is to give an introduction to critical phenomena that emphasizes the emergence of and the role played by diverging length-scales. It is now accepted that renormalization group gives the basic understanding of…