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We consider a language together with the subword relation, the cover relation, and regular predicates. For such structures, we consider the extension of first-order logic by threshold- and modulo-counting quantifiers. Depending on the…
In the Python ecosystem, the adoption of idiomatic constructs has been fostered because of their expressiveness, increasing productivity and even efficiency, despite controversial arguments concerning familiarity or understandability…
This chapter provides an introduction to computational linguistics methods, with focus on their applications to the practice and study of translation. It covers computational models, methods and tools for collection, storage, indexing and…
In phylogenetics, a central problem is to infer the evolutionary relationships between a set of species $X$; these relationships are often depicted via a phylogenetic tree -- a tree having its leaves univocally labeled by elements of $X$…
We propose a model of the evolution of a matrix along a phylogenetic tree, in which transformations affect either entire rows or columns of the matrix. This represents the change of both lexical and phonological aspects of linguistic data,…
We present a method of finding and analyzing shifts in grammatical relations found in diachronic corpora. Inspired by the econometric technique of measuring return and volatility instead of relative frequencies, we propose them as a way to…
In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive SWOT analysis of prompt engineering techniques within the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs). Emphasizing linguistic principles, we examine various techniques to identify their strengths,…
Conversational recommender systems have attracted immense attention recently. The most recent approaches rely on neural models trained on recorded dialogs between humans, implementing an end-to-end learning process. These systems are…
Phylogenetics is a widely used concept in evolutionary biology. It is the reconstruction of evolutionary history by building trees that represent branching patterns and sequences. These trees represent shared history, and it is our…
We propose a new method for hierarchical clustering based on the optimisation of a cost function over trees of limited depth, and we derive a message--passing method that allows to solve it efficiently. The method and algorithm can be…
In this paper we examine the usefulness of two classes of algorithms Distance Methods, Discrete Character Methods (Felsenstein and Felsenstein 2003) widely used in genetics, for predicting the family relationships among a set of related…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
The evolution of grammatical systems of syntactic and semantic composition is modeled here with a novel application of reinforcement learning theory. To test the functionalist thesis that speakers' expressive purposes shape their language,…
Latent tree analysis seeks to model the correlations among a set of random variables using a tree of latent variables. It was proposed as an improvement to latent class analysis --- a method widely used in social sciences and medicine to…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…
Sequential dependencies present a fundamental bottleneck in deploying large-scale autoregressive models, particularly for real-time applications. While traditional optimization approaches like pruning and quantization often compromise model…
Given the present state of work in natural language processing, this address argues first, that advance in both science and applications requires a revival of concern about what language is about, broadly speaking the world; and second,…
The problem of reconstructing a string from its error-prone copies, the trace reconstruction problem, was introduced by Vladimir Levenshtein two decades ago. While there has been considerable theoretical work on trace reconstruction,…
It is challenging to translate names and technical terms across languages with different alphabets and sound inventories. These items are commonly transliterated, i.e., replaced with approximate phonetic equivalents. For example, "computer"…
Though linguistic knowledge emerges during large-scale language model pretraining, recent work attempt to explicitly incorporate human-defined linguistic priors into task-specific fine-tuning. Infusing language models with syntactic or…