Related papers: Compositionality, Synonymy, and the Systematic Rep…
We prove a theorem stating that any semantics can be encoded as a compositional semantics, which means that, essentially, the standard definition of compositionality is formally vacuous. We then show that when compositional semantics is…
Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain neural model behaviour by reverse-engineering learned computational structure into human-understandable components. Without a formal framework, however, mechanistic explanations cannot be…
In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…
Different from previous surveys in semantic parsing (Kamath and Das, 2018) and knowledge base question answering(KBQA)(Chakraborty et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2019; Hoffner et al., 2017) we try to takes a different perspective on the study of…
We present a non-vacuous definition of compositionality. It is based on the idea of combining the minimum description length principle with the original definition of compositionality (that is, that the meaning of the whole is a function of…
Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the expression.…
This thesis is about the problem of compositionality in distributional semantics. Distributional semantics presupposes that the meanings of words are a function of their occurrences in textual contexts. It models words as distributions over…
Semantics of logic programs has been given by proof theory, model theory and by fixpoint of the immediate-consequence operator. If clausal logic is a programming language, then it should also have a compositional semantics. Compositional…
Compositionality is believed to be fundamental to intelligence. In humans, it underlies the structure of thought, language, and higher-level reasoning. In AI, compositional representations can enable a powerful form of out-of-distribution…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
Conceptual combination performs a fundamental role in creating the broad range of compound phrases utilized in everyday language. This article provides a novel probabilistic framework for assessing whether the semantics of conceptual…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
Rewriting logic is naturally concurrent: several subterms of the state term can be rewritten simultaneously. But state terms are global, which makes compositionality difficult to achieve. Compositionality here means being able to decompose…
This survey presents in some detail the main advances that have been recently taking place in Computational Linguistics towards the unification of the two prominent semantic paradigms: the compositional formal semantics view and the…
One of the greatest problems in philosophy is that of meaning. The turning point in thinking on meaning was Tarski's definition of truth, and the rapid development of logical semantics and model theory was a consequence of this achievement.…
Compositionality, the phenomenon where the meaning of a phrase can be derived from its constituent parts, is a hallmark of human language. At the same time, many phrases are non-compositional, carrying a meaning beyond that of each part in…
Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches to meaning. More specifically, proposals have been put forward to augment formal semantic machinery with…
Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of larger units given the meanings of their parts. Meanings are often assumed to combine…
Tarski gave a general semantics for deductive reasoning: a formula a may be deduced from a set A of formulas iff a holds in all models in which each of the elements of A holds. A more liberal semantics has been considered: a formula a may…
Compositionality has traditionally been understood as a major factor in productivity of language and, more broadly, human cognition. Yet, recently, some research started to question its status, showing that artificial neural networks are…