Related papers: Anaphora and Discourse Structure
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,…
A structural time series model additively decomposes into generative, semantically-meaningful components, each of which depends on a vector of parameters. We demonstrate that considering each generative component together with its vector of…
We present a new framework for compositional distributional semantics in which the distributional contexts of lexemes are expressed in terms of anchored packed dependency trees. We show that these structures have the potential to capture…
Speakers of all human languages make use of grammatical devices to express attributional qualities, feelings, and opinions as well as to provide meta-commentary on topics in discourse. In general, linguists refer to this category as…
Categorical compositional distributional semantics (CCDS) allows one to compute the meaning of phrases and sentences from the meaning of their constituent words. A type-structure carried over from the traditional categorial model of grammar…
We argue that discourse plans must capture the intended causal and decompositional relations between communicative actions. We present a planning algorithm, DPOCL, that builds plan structures that properly capture these relations, and show…
Language models (LMs) trained on large quantities of text have been claimed to acquire abstract linguistic representations. Our work tests the robustness of these abstractions by focusing on the ability of LMs to learn interactions between…
Notional anaphors are pronouns which disagree with their antecedents' grammatical categories for notional reasons, such as plural to singular agreement in: 'the government ... they'. Since such cases are rare and conflict with evidence from…
Dependency syntax represents the structure of a sentence as a tree composed of dependencies, i.e., directed relations between lexical units. While in its more general form any such tree is allowed, in practice many are not plausible or are…
Human beings possess the most sophisticated computational machinery in the known universe. We can understand language of rich descriptive power, and communicate in the same environment with astonishing clarity. Two of the many contributors…
In this paper, we show how game-theoretic work on conversation combined with a theory of discourse structure provides a framework for studying interpretive bias. Interpretive bias is an essential feature of learning and understanding but…
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…
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
We describe a method for analysing the temporal structure of a discourse which takes into account the effects of tense, aspect, temporal adverbials and rhetorical structure and which minimises unnecessary ambiguity in the temporal…
The principle behind algebraic language theory for various kinds of structures, such as words or trees, is to use a compositional function from the structures into a finite set. To talk about compositionality, one needs some way of…
An account of utterance interpretation in discourse needs to face the issue of how the discourse context controls the space of interacting preferences. Assuming a discourse processing architecture that distinguishes the grammar and…
Humans often employ figurative language use in communication, including during interactions with dialog systems. Thus, it is important for real-world dialog systems to be able to handle popular figurative language constructs like metaphor…
We provide a unified account of sentence-level and text-level anaphora within the framework of a dependency-based grammar model. Criteria for anaphora resolution within sentence boundaries rephrase major concepts from GB's binding theory,…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
This paper proves a homomorphism between extensional formal semantics and distributional vector space semantics, demonstrating structural compatibility. Formal semantics models meaning as reference, using logical structures to map…