Related papers: Compositionality, Synonymy, and the Systematic Rep…
In the concluding remarks of Ontological Promiscuity Hobbs (1985) made what we believe to be a very insightful observation: given that semantics is an attempt at specifying the relation between language and the world, if "one can assume a…
This paper summarises the current state-of-the art in the study of compositionality in distributional semantics, and major challenges for this area. We single out generalised quantifiers and intensional semantics as areas on which to focus…
This paper proposes a simple test for compositionality (i.e., literal usage) of a word or phrase in a context-specific way. The test is computationally simple, relying on no external resources and only uses a set of trained word vectors.…
The mathematical representation of semantics is a key issue for Natural Language Processing (NLP). A lot of research has been devoted to finding ways of representing the semantics of individual words in vector spaces. Distributional…
We introduce a notion of compatibility between constraint encoding and compositional structure. Phrased in the language of category theory, it is given by a "composable constraint encoding". We show that every composable constraint encoding…
Logic has proved essential for formally modeling software based systems. Such formal descriptions, frequently called specifications, have served not only as requirements documentation and formalisation, but also for providing the…
What is sentence meaning and its ideal representation? Much of the expressive power of human language derives from semantic composition, the mind's ability to represent meaning hierarchically & relationally over constituents. At the same…
Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the…
Recent ideas about epistemic modals and indicative conditionals in formal semantics have significant overlap with ideas in modal logic and dynamic epistemic logic. The purpose of this paper is to show how greater interaction between formal…
Multimodal models have been proven to outperform text-based approaches on learning semantic representations. However, it still remains unclear what properties are encoded in multimodal representations, in what aspects do they outperform the…
Stalnaker and Thomason famously proved that the conditional logic \textsf{C2} with first-order quantifiers is complete with respect to a selection function semantics. However, the selection functions used in this completeness result take…
Synonymy and translational equivalence are the relations of sameness of meaning within and across languages. As the principal relations in wordnets and multi-wordnets, they are vital to computational lexical semantics, yet the field suffers…
Algorithms like those for differentiating functional expressions manipulate the syntactic structure of mathematical expressions in a mathematically meaningful way. A formalization of such an algorithm should include a specification of its…
In tasks like semantic parsing, instruction following, and question answering, standard deep networks fail to generalize compositionally from small datasets. Many existing approaches overcome this limitation with model architectures that…
To Rogers (1994) we owe the insight that monadic second order predicate logic with multiple successors (MSO) is well suited in many respects as a realistic formal base for syntactic theorizing. However, the agreeable formal properties of…
Using Butz and Moerdijk's topological groupoid representation of a topos with enough points, a `syntax-semantics' duality for geometric theories is constructed. The emphasis is on a logical presentation, starting with a description of the…
Many machine learning algorithms represent input data with vector embeddings or discrete codes. When inputs exhibit compositional structure (e.g. objects built from parts or procedures from subroutines), it is natural to ask whether this…
I explore the relationships between Prawitz's approach to non-monotonic proof-theoretic validity, which I call reducibility semantics, and some later proof-theoretic approaches, which I call standard base semantics and Sandqvist's base…
Social order cannot be considered as a stable phenomenon because it contains an order of reproduced expectations. When the expectations operate upon one another, they generate a non-linear dynamics that processes meaning. Specific meaning…
Due to the increased complexity of software development projects more and more systems are described by models. The sheer size makes it impractical to describe these systems by a single model. Instead many models are developed that provide…