Related papers: Delimited continuations in natural language: quant…
"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and…
We study expression learning problems with syntactic restrictions and introduce the class of finite-aspect checkable languages to characterize symbolic languages that admit decidable learning. The semantics of such languages can be defined…
We present a novel approach to construction of a formal semantics for a programming language. Our approach, using a parametric denotational semantics, allows the semantics to be easily extended to support new language features, and…
We present a novel, type-logical analysis of_polarity sensitivity_: how negative polarity items (like "any" and "ever") or positive ones (like "some") are licensed or prohibited. It takes not just scopal relations but also linear order into…
Computer programs are often factored into pure components -- simple, total functions from inputs to outputs -- and components that may have side effects -- errors, changes to memory, parallel threads, abortion of the current loop, etc. We…
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…
An interesting line of research in natural language processing (NLP) aims to incorporate linguistic typology to bridge linguistic diversity and assist the research of low-resource languages. While most works construct linguistic similarity…
We study the semantic foundation of expressive probabilistic programming languages, that support higher-order functions, continuous distributions, and soft constraints (such as Anglican, Church, and Venture). We define a metalanguage (an…
In the quest to give a formal compositional semantics to natural languages, semanticists have started turning their attention to phenomena that have been also considered as parts of pragmatics (e.g., discourse anaphora and presupposition…
Regular synchronization languages can be used to define rational relations of finite words, and to characterize subclasses of rational relations, like automatic or recognizable relations. We provide a systematic study of the decidability of…
"Natural languages are programming languages for minds." Can we or should we take this slogan seriously? If so, how? Can answers be found by looking at the various "dynamic" treatments of natural language developed over the last decade or…
Automatic differentiation plays a prominent role in scientific computing and in modern machine learning, often in the context of powerful programming systems. The relation of the various embodiments of automatic differentiation to the…
Distributional semantics is the linguistic theory that a word's meaning can be derived from its distribution in natural language (i.e., its use). Language models are commonly viewed as an implementation of distributional semantics, as they…
Logic languages based on the theory of rational, possibly infinite, trees have much appeal in that rational trees allow for faster unification (due to the safe omission of the occurs-check) and increased expressivity (cyclic terms can…
A systematic way of defining variants of a modeling language is useful for adopting the language to domain or project specific needs. Variants can be obtained by adopting the syntax or semantics of the language. In this paper, we take a…
This papers develops a logical language for representing probabilistic causal laws. Our interest in such a language is twofold. First, it can be motivated as a fundamental study of the representation of causal knowledge. Causality has an…
Formal languages are essential for computer programming and are constructed to be easily processed by computers. In contrast, natural languages are much more challenging and instigated the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). One…
Many formalisms combining ontology languages with uncertainty, usually in the form of probabilities, have been studied over the years. Most of these formalisms, however, assume that the probabilistic structure of the knowledge remains…
Representation of linguistic phenomena in computational language models is typically assessed against the predictions of existing linguistic theories of these phenomena. Using the notion of polarity as a case study, we show that this is not…
In this article we undertake a study of extension complexity from the perspective of formal languages. We define a natural way to associate a family of polytopes with binary languages. This allows us to define the notion of extension…