Related papers: Linguistic Paradoxes and Tautologies
While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic…
Explanation constitutes an archetypal feature of human rationality, underpinning learning and generalisation, and representing one of the media supporting scientific discovery and communication. Due to the importance of explanations in…
We present a dataset for evaluating the grammaticality of the predictions of a language model. We automatically construct a large number of minimally different pairs of English sentences, each consisting of a grammatical and an…
This paper presents a plausible reasoning system to illustrate some broad issues in knowledge representation: dualities between different reasoning forms, the difficulty of unifying complementary reasoning styles, and the approximate nature…
A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today, all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these languages…
This paper is the first in a series whose goal is to develop a fundamentally new way of constructing theories of physics. The motivation comes from a desire to address certain deep issues that arise when contemplating quantum theories of…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
Constraint logic grammars provide a powerful formalism for expressing complex logical descriptions of natural language phenomena in exact terms. Describing some of these phenomena may, however, require some form of graded distinctions which…
Logics closed under classes of substitutions broader than class of uniform substitutions are known as hyperformal logics. This paper extends known results about hyperformal logics in two ways. First: we examine a very powerful form of…
The paper relates two variants of semantic models for natural language, logical functional models and compositional distributional vector space models, by transferring the logic and reasoning from the logical to the distributional models.…
Consider the following story: A teacher announces to her students a test for the following week, such that the test will be ``surprising''. The students use this as the basis for a ``logical derivation'' and reach a contradiction, which…
Predicate logic is the premier choice for specifying classes of relational structures. Homomorphisms are key to describing correspondences between relational structures. Questions concerning the interdependencies between these two means of…
We propose an integration of possibility theory into non-classical logics. We obtain many formal results that generalize the case where possibility and necessity functions are based on classical logic. We show how useful such an approach is…
This paper explores the kinds of probabilistic relations that are important in syntactic disambiguation. It proposes that two widely used kinds of relations, lexical dependencies and structural relations, have complementary disambiguation…
The interpretation of parasitic gaps is an ostensible case of non-linearity in natural language composition. Existing categorial analyses, both in the typelogical and in the combinatory traditions, rely on explicit forms of syntactic…
Statistics pedagogy values using a variety of examples. Thanks to text resources on the Web, and since statistical packages have the ability to analyze string data, it is now easy to use language-based examples in a statistics class. Three…
We explore the ability of word embeddings to capture both semantic and morphological similarity, as affected by the different types of linguistic properties (surface form, lemma, morphological tag) used to compose the representation of each…
This document describes a sizable grammar of English written in the TAG formalism and implemented for use with the XTAG system. This report and the grammar described herein supersedes the TAG grammar described in an earlier 1995 XTAG…
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…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…