Related papers: Sloppy Identity
We present a new method for characterizing the interpretive possibilities generated by elliptical constructions in natural language. Unlike previous analyses, which postulate ambiguity of interpretation or derivation in the full clause…
We formalize an interpretational error that is common in statistical causal inference, termed identity slippage. This formalism is used to describe historically-recognized fallacies, and analyse a fast-growing literature in statistics and…
I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of…
Successful predictions are among the most compelling validations of any model. Extracting falsifiable predictions from nonlinear multiparameter models is complicated by the fact that such models are commonly sloppy, possessing sensitivities…
The interpretation of anaphors depends on their antecedents as the semantic value that an anaphor eventually conveys is co-specified by the value of its antecedent. Interestingly, when occurring in a given syntactic position, different…
Text embeddings are a fundamental component in many NLP tasks, including classification, regression, clustering, and semantic search. However, despite their ubiquitous application, challenges persist in interpreting embeddings and…
Slang is a predominant form of informal language making flexible and extended use of words that is notoriously hard for natural language processing systems to interpret. Existing approaches to slang interpretation tend to rely on context…
The paper adresses the problem of reasoning with ambiguities. Semantic representations are presented that leave scope relations between quantifiers and/or other operators unspecified. Truth conditions are provided for these representations…
Ambiguity is an critical component of language that allows for more effective communication between speakers, but is often ignored in NLP. Recent work suggests that NLP systems may struggle to grasp certain elements of human language…
Word sense disambiguation assumes word senses. Within the lexicography and linguistics literature, they are known to be very slippery entities. The paper looks at problems with existing accounts of `word sense' and describes the various…
I review evidence for the claim that syntactic ambiguities are resolved on the basis of the meaning of the competing analyses, not their structure. I identify a collection of ambiguities that do not yet have a meaning-based account and…
We provide a general account of parallelism in discourse, and apply it to the special case of resolving possible readings for instances of VP ellipsis. We show how several problematic examples are accounted for in a natural and…
We give a systematic treatment to the concept of hypoellipticity, putting it into an abstract form which allows us to deal with several different notions within the same framework. We then investigate when a notion of hypoellipticity…
Temporary syntactic ambiguities arise when the beginning of a sentence is compatible with multiple syntactic analyses. We inspect to which extent neural language models (LMs) exhibit uncertainty over such analyses when processing…
Shallow syntax provides an approximation of phrase-syntactic structure of sentences; it can be produced with high accuracy, and is computationally cheap to obtain. We investigate the role of shallow syntax-aware representations for NLP…
Centering theory posits a discourse center, a distinguished discourse entity that is the topic of a discourse. A simplified version of this theory is developed in a Dynamic Semantics framework. In the resulting system, the mechanism of…
The use of mathematical models in the sciences often involves the estimation of unknown parameter values from data. Sloppiness provides information about the uncertainty of this task. In this paper, we develop a precise mathematical…
In this paper, we discuss the question whether phrasal comparatives should be given a direct interpretation, or require an analysis as elliptic constructions, and answer it with Yes and No. The most adequate analysis of wide reading…
Crisp and lattice-valued ambiguous representations of one continuous semilattice in another one are introduced and operation of taking pseudo-inverse of the above relations is defined. It is shown that continuous semilattices and their…
Sloppy models are complex nonlinear models with outcomes that are significantly affected by only a small subset of parameter combinations. Despite forming an important universality class and arising frequently in practice, formal and…