Related papers: Anaphora and Discourse Structure
Natural language, although complex in structure, contains considerable detail. All instances of language serve the purpose of making sense of experience and the intent of actors. Language conveys actor's personal reference to goals,…
In dialogical argumentation it is often assumed that the involved parties always correctly identify the intended statements posited by each other, realize all of the associated relations, conform to the three acceptability states (accepted,…
This study investigates the acoustic features of sarcasm and disentangles the interplay between the propensity of an utterance being used sarcastically and the presence of prosodic cues signaling sarcasm. Using a dataset of sarcastic…
We define an inference system to capture explanations based on causal statements, using an ontology in the form of an IS-A hierarchy. We first introduce a simple logical language which makes it possible to express that a fact causes another…
We provide an overview of the hybrid compositional distributional model of meaning, developed in Coecke et al. (arXiv:1003.4394v1 [cs.CL]), which is based on the categorical methods also applied to the analysis of information flow in…
Discourse analysis is an important task because it models intrinsic semantic structures between sentences in a document. Discourse markers are natural representations of discourse in our daily language. One challenge is that the markers as…
We present a hierarchy of natural language understanding abilities and argue for the importance of moving beyond assessments of understanding at the lexical and sentence levels to the discourse level. We propose the task of anaphora…
Distributional semantic models provide vector representations for words by gathering co-occurrence frequencies from corpora of text. Compositional distributional models extend these from words to phrases and sentences. In categorical…
We define two words in a language to be connected if they express similar concepts. The network of connections among the many thousands of words that make up a language is important not only for the study of the structure and evolution of…
The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…
This paper presents an architecture for the generation of spoken monologues with contextually appropriate intonation. A two-tiered information structure representation is used in the high-level content planning and sentence planning stages…
This paper connects a vector-based composition model to a formal semantics, the Dependency-based Compositional Semantics (DCS). We show theoretical evidence that the vector compositions in our model conform to the logic of DCS.…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) we argue that the structure of commonsense knowledge must be discovered, rather than invented; and (ii) we argue that natural language, which is the best known theory of our (shared) commonsense…
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature,…
Formal semantics offers a complete and rigorous definition of a language. It is important to define different semantic models for a language and different models serve different purposes. Building equivalence between different semantic…
The syntactic structures of sentences can be readily read-out from the activations of large language models (LLMs). However, the ``structural probes'' that have been developed to reveal this phenomenon are typically evaluated on an…
Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining…
Research in discourse processing has identified two representational requirements for discourse planning systems. First, discourse plans must adequately represent the intentional structure of the utterances they produce in order to enable a…
Artificial agents have been shown to learn to communicate when needed to complete a cooperative task. Some level of language structure (e.g., compositionality) has been found in the learned communication protocols. This observed structure…