Related papers: Linguistic Paradoxes and Tautologies
Foundations of formal languages, as subfield of theoretical computer science, are part of typical upper secondary education curricula. There is very little research on the potential difficulties that students at this level have with this…
Ontologies can be a powerful tool for structuring knowledge, and they are currently the subject of extensive research. Updating the contents of an ontology or improving its interoperability with other ontologies is an important but…
Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the…
This paper enlarges classical syllogistic logic with assertions having to do with comparisons between the sizes of sets. So it concerns a logical system whose sentences are of the following forms: {\sf All $x$ are $y$} and {\sf Some $x$ are…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Classical logic has a serious limitation in that it cannot cope with the issues of vagueness and uncertainty into which fall most modes of human reasoning. In order to provide a foundation for human knowledge representation and reasoning in…
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…
Topological statistical theory provides the foundation for a modern mathematical reformulation of classical statistical theory: Structural Statistics emphasizes the structural assumptions that accompany distribution families and the set of…
This paper evaluates global-scale dialect identification for 14 national varieties of English as a means for studying syntactic variation. The paper makes three main contributions: (i) introducing data-driven language mapping as a method…
We propose a categorial grammar based on classical multiplicative linear logic. This can be seen as an extension of abstract categorial grammars (ACG) and is at least as expressive. However, constituents of {\it linear logic grammars (LLG)}…
With the increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) for planning in natural language, understanding their behaviors becomes an important research question. This work conducts a systematic investigation of LLMs' ability to…
This article is an introduction to formal languages from the point of view of combinatorial group theory. Group theoretic applications are included and language classes are defined algebraically.
Human cognition exhibits systematic compositionality, the algebraic ability to generate infinite novel combinations from finite learned components, which is the key to understanding and reasoning about complex logic. In this work, we…
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…
Over the last two decades, there has been an extensive study on logical formalisms for specifying and verifying real-time systems. Temporal logics have been an important research subject within this direction. Although numerous logics have…
The study of linguistic typology is rooted in the implications we find between linguistic features, such as the fact that languages with object-verb word ordering tend to have post-positions. Uncovering such implications typically amounts…
The dissertation addresses the design of parsing grammars for automatic surface-syntactic analysis of unconstrained English text. It consists of a summary and three articles. {\it Morphological disambiguation} documents a grammar for…
We developed a type-theoretical framework for natural lan- guage semantics that, in addition to the usual Montagovian treatment of compositional semantics, includes a treatment of some phenomena of lex- ical semantic: coercions, meaning,…
In a lexicalized grammar formalism such as Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG), each lexical item is associated with at least one elementary structure (supertag) that localizes syntactic and semantic dependencies. Thus a parser for a…
Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In…