Related papers: Probabilistic Parsing Strategies
Syntactic structures used to play a vital role in natural language processing (NLP), but since the deep learning revolution, NLP has been gradually dominated by neural models that do not consider syntactic structures in their design. One…
This report explores the use of paragraph break probability estimates to help predict the location of sentence breaks in English natural language text. We show that a sentence break predictor based almost solely on paragraph break…
After presenting a novel O(n^3) parsing algorithm for dependency grammar, we develop three contrasting ways to stochasticize it. We propose (a) a lexical affinity model where words struggle to modify each other, (b) a sense tagging model…
We propose and study a novel supervised approach to learning statistical semantic relatedness models from subjectively annotated training examples. The proposed semantic model consists of parameterized co-occurrence statistics associated…
Large language models generate text through probabilistic sampling from high-dimensional distributions, yet how this process reshapes the structural statistical organization of language remains incompletely characterized. Here we show that…
We spell out the paradigm of exact conditioning as an intuitive and powerful way of conditioning on observations in probabilistic programs. This is contrasted with likelihood-based scoring known from languages such as Stan. We study exact…
We develop a technique for generalising from data in which models are samplers represented as program text. We establish encouraging empirical results that suggest that Markov chain Monte Carlo probabilistic programming inference techniques…
We propose a probabilistic approach to select a subset of a \textit{target domain representative keywords} from a candidate set, contrasting with a context domain. Such a task is crucial for many downstream tasks in natural language…
This paper introduces distribution-based prediction, a novel approach to using Large Language Models (LLMs) as predictive tools by interpreting output token probabilities as distributions representing the models' learned representation of…
The combination of argumentation and probability paves the way to new accounts of qualitative and quantitative uncertainty, thereby offering new theoretical and applicative opportunities. Due to a variety of interests, probabilistic…
In recent years there has been a spate of papers describing systems for probabilisitic reasoning which do not use numerical probabilities. In some cases the simple set of values used by these systems make it impossible to predict how a…
In this paper, we study the linear transformation model in the most general setup. This model includes many important and popular models in statistics and econometrics as special cases. Although it has been studied for many years, the…
Neuro-symbolic AI bridges the gap between purely symbolic and neural approaches to learning. This often requires maximizing the likelihood of a symbolic constraint w.r.t the neural network's output distribution. Such output distributions…
Prompt-based methods have been used extensively across NLP to build zero- and few-shot label predictors. Many NLP tasks are naturally structured: that is, their outputs consist of multiple labels which constrain each other. Annotating data…
Most expressivity results for transformers treat them as language recognizers -- devices that accept or reject strings -- rather than as they are used in practice: as language models that generate strings autoregressively and…
In this paper, we propose a semantic communication approach based on probabilistic graphical model (PGM). The proposed approach involves constructing a PGM from a training dataset, which is then shared as common knowledge between the…
In this thesis, we present two approaches to a rigorous mathematical and algorithmic foundation of quantitative and statistical inference in constraint-based natural language processing. The first approach, called quantitative constraint…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…
Probabilistic programming has emerged as a powerful paradigm in statistics, applied science, and machine learning: by decoupling modelling from inference, it promises to allow modellers to directly reason about the processes generating…
We propose a new unsupervised method for lexical substitution using pre-trained language models. Compared to previous approaches that use the generative capability of language models to predict substitutes, our method retrieves substitutes…