Related papers: Probabilistic Automata for Computing with Words

Word embeddings have been found to capture a surprisingly rich amount of syntactic and semantic knowledge. However, it is not yet sufficiently well-understood how the relational knowledge that is implicitly encoded in word embeddings can be…

Probabilistic programming is the idea of writing models from statistics and machine learning using program notations and reasoning about these models using generic inference engines. Recently its combination with deep learning has been…

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…

Several abstract machines that operate on symbolic input alphabets have been proposed in the last decade, for example, symbolic automata or lattice automata. Applications of these types of automata include software security analysis and…

Many representation schemes combining first-order logic and probability have been proposed in recent years. Progress in unifying logical and probabilistic inference has been slower. Existing methods are mainly variants of lifted variable…

PRISM is an extension of Prolog with probabilistic predicates and built-in support for expectation-maximization learning. Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is a high-level programming language based on multi-headed multiset rewrite rules. In…

Modern language models define distributions over strings, but downstream tasks often require different output formats. For instance, a model that generates byte-pair strings does not directly produce word-level predictions, and a DNA model…

Much of the power of probabilistic methods in modelling language comes from their ability to compare several derivations for the same string in the language. An important starting point for the study of such cross-derivational properties is…

We present a probabilistic model for constraint-based grammars and a method for estimating the parameters of such models from incomplete, i.e., unparsed data. Whereas methods exist to estimate the parameters of probabilistic context-free…

Monte Carlo inference has asymptotic guarantees, but can be slow when using generic proposals. Handcrafted proposals that rely on user knowledge about the posterior distribution can be efficient, but are difficult to derive and implement.…

We describe a framework for inducing probabilistic grammars from corpora of positive samples. First, samples are {\em incorporated} by adding ad-hoc rules to a working grammar; subsequently, elements of the model (such as states or…

Since their appearance in the 1950s, computational models capable of performing probabilistic choices have received wide attention and are nowadays pervasive in almost every areas of computer science. Their development was also inextricably…

We present new results on the relation between purely symbolic context-free parsing strategies and their probabilistic counter-parts. Such parsing strategies are seen as constructions of push-down devices from grammars. We show that…

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…

Probabilistic programming languages have recently gained a lot of attention, in particular due to their applications in domains such as machine learning and differential privacy. To establish invariants of interest, many such languages…

We present a semantics of a probabilistic while-language with soft conditioning and continuous distributions which handles programs diverging with positive probability. To this end, we extend the probabilistic guarded command language…

Grammar-based compression is a widely-accepted model of string compression that allows for efficient and direct manipulations on the compressed data. Most, if not all, such manipulations rely on the primitive \emph{random access} queries, a…

Words of estimative probability (WEP) are expressions of a statement's plausibility (probably, maybe, likely, doubt, likely, unlikely, impossible...). Multiple surveys demonstrate the agreement of human evaluators when assigning numerical…

Weighted automata over the nonnegative reals form a fundamental model for quantitative languages. We show that, up to scaling, this model collapses to probabilistic automata. Concretely, we prove that every weighted automaton whose…

Though there is a strong consensus that word length and frequency are the most important single-word features determining visual-orthographic access to the mental lexicon, there is less agreement as how to best capture syntactic and…