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Words of estimative probability (WEPs), such as ''maybe'' or ''probably not'' are ubiquitous in natural language for communicating estimative uncertainty, compared with direct statements involving numerical probability. Human estimative…

Language models (LM) are capable of remarkably complex linguistic tasks; however, numerical reasoning is an area in which they frequently struggle. An important but rarely evaluated form of reasoning is understanding probability…

_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…

Language models (LMs) are statistical models trained to assign probability to human-generated text. As such, it is reasonable to question whether they approximate linguistic variability exhibited by humans well. This form of statistical…

Language models (LMs) estimate a probability distribution over strings in a natural language; these distributions are crucial for computing perplexity and surprisal in linguistics research. While we are usually concerned with measuring…

Inferring the probability distribution of sentences or word sequences is a key process in natural language processing. While word-level language models (LMs) have been widely adopted for computing the joint probabilities of word sequences,…

A controversial test for Large Language Models concerns the ability to discern possible from impossible language. While some evidence attests to the models' sensitivity to what crosses the limits of grammatically impossible language, this…

Automated reasoning about uncertain knowledge has many applications. One difficulty when developing such systems is the lack of a completely satisfactory integration of logic and probability. We address this problem directly. Expressive…

In many applications of natural language processing (NLP) it is necessary to determine the likelihood of a given word combination. For example, a speech recognizer may need to determine which of the two word combinations ``eat a peach'' and…

How predictable a word is can be quantified in two ways: using human responses to the cloze task or using probabilities from language models (LMs).When used as predictors of processing effort, LM probabilities outperform probabilities…

Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptable instance of their language. Acceptability provides a means of evaluating whether computational language models are processing language in a human-like manner. We test the ability…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks but remain vulnerable to hallucinations, generating factually incorrect or misleading outputs. Uncertainty estimation, often…

Reasoning is key to many decision making processes. It requires consolidating a set of rule-like premises that are often associated with degrees of uncertainty and observations to draw conclusions. In this work, we address both the case…

Spoken communication occurs in a "noisy channel" characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input,…

Much like sentences are composed of words, words themselves are composed of smaller units. For example, the English word questionably can be analyzed as question+able+ly. However, this structural decomposition of the word does not directly…

Word complexity is defined in a number of different ways. Psycholinguistic, morphological and lexical proxies are often used. Human ratings are also used. The problem here is that these proxies do not measure complexity directly, and human…

This dissertation presents several new methods of supervised and unsupervised learning of word sense disambiguation models. The supervised methods focus on performing model searches through a space of probabilistic models, and the…

Predictions of word-by-word conditional probabilities from Transformer-based language models are often evaluated to model the incremental processing difficulty of human readers. In this paper, we argue that there is a confound posed by the…

Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) trained for next-word prediction have demonstrated remarkable proficiency at producing coherent text. But are they equally adept at forming coherent probability judgments? We use probabilistic…

Entities and events are crucial to natural language reasoning and common in procedural texts. Existing work has focused either exclusively on entity state tracking (e.g., whether a pan is hot) or on event reasoning (e.g., whether one would…