Related papers: Practical experiments with regular approximation o…
For any context-free grammar, we build a transition diagram, that is, a finite directed graph with labeled arcs, which describes the work of the grammar. This approach is new, and it is different from previously known graph models. We…
Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…
Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances into machine-readable meaning representations. Currently, most semantic parsing methods are not able to utilize contextual information (e.g. dialogue and comments…
Probabilistic context-free grammars have a long-term record of use as generative models in machine learning and symbolic regression. When used for symbolic regression, they generate algebraic expressions. We define the latter as equivalence…
This article is a sketch of ideas that were once intended to appear in the author's famous series, "The Art of Computer Programming". He generalizes the notion of a context-free language from a set to a multiset of words over an alphabet.…
Neural sequence-to-sequence systems deliver state-of-the-art performance for automatic speech recognition. When using appropriate modeling units, e.g., byte-pair encoding, these systems are in principle open vocabulary systems. In practice,…
The minimal deterministic finite automaton is generally used to determine regular languages equality. Antimirov and Mosses proposed a rewrite system for deciding regular expressions equivalence of which Almeida et al. presented an improved…
Cross-lingual alignment in pretrained language models enables knowledge transfer across languages. Similar alignment has been reported in Whisper-style speech encoders, based on spoken translation retrieval using representational…
We define a notion of randomness for individual and collections of formal languages based on automatic martingales acting on sequences of words from some underlying domain. An automatic martingale bets if the incoming word belongs to the…
The wayward quality of continuous prompts stresses the importance of their interpretability as unexpected and unpredictable behaviors appear following training, especially in the context of large language models automating people-sensitive…
The prosody of a spoken word is determined by its surrounding context. In incremental text-to-speech synthesis, where the synthesizer produces an output before it has access to the complete input, the full context is often unknown which can…
Large language models are capable of in-context learning, the ability to perform new tasks at test time using a handful of input-output examples, without parameter updates. We develop a universal approximation theory to elucidate how…
In this paper, an application of automated theorem proving techniques to computational semantics is considered. In order to compute the presuppositions of a natural language discourse, several inference tasks arise. Instead of treating…
We explore various methods for computing sentence representations from pre-trained word embeddings without any training, i.e., using nothing but random parameterizations. Our aim is to put sentence embeddings on more solid footing by 1)…
Recently, pretrained language models (PLMs) have had exceptional success in language generation. To leverage the rich knowledge encoded by PLMs, a simple yet powerful paradigm is to use prompts in the form of either discrete tokens or…
End-to-end acoustic-to-word speech recognition models have recently gained popularity because they are easy to train, scale well to large amounts of training data, and do not require a lexicon. In addition, word models may also be easier to…
Large, human-annotated datasets are central to the development of natural language processing models. Collecting these datasets can be the most challenging part of the development process. We address this problem by introducing a general…
Most Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses explore the duality between computation models to recognize words in a language and computation models to generate words in a language. For students unaccustomed to formal statements, these…
The remarkable success of pretrained language models has motivated the study of what kinds of knowledge these models learn during pretraining. Reformulating tasks as fill-in-the-blanks problems (e.g., cloze tests) is a natural approach for…
Neural language models (LMs) have been shown to capture complex linguistic patterns, yet their utility in understanding human language and more broadly, human cognition, remains debated. While existing work in this area often evaluates…