相关论文: Subject islands do not reduce to construction-spec…
I review evidence for the claim that syntactic ambiguities are resolved on the basis of the meaning of the competing analyses, not their structure. I identify a collection of ambiguities that do not yet have a meaning-based account and…
The `pet fish' phenomenon is often cited as a paradigm example of the `non-compositionality' of human concept use. We show here how this phenomenon is naturally accommodated within a compositional distributional model of meaning. This model…
Treebanks traditionally treat punctuation marks as ordinary words, but linguists have suggested that a tree's "true" punctuation marks are not observed (Nunberg, 1990). These latent "underlying" marks serve to delimit or separate…
Compositionality, the phenomenon where the meaning of a phrase can be derived from its constituent parts, is a hallmark of human language. At the same time, many phrases are non-compositional, carrying a meaning beyond that of each part in…
Effectful programs interact in ways that go beyond simple input-output, making compositional reasoning challenging. Existing work has shown that when such programs are ``separate'', i.e., when programs do not interfere with each other, it…
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…
The use of causal language in observational studies has raised concerns about overstatement in scientific communication. While some argue that such language should be reserved for randomized controlled trials, others contend that rigorous…
While vector-based language representations from pretrained language models have set a new standard for many NLP tasks, there is not yet a complete accounting of their inner workings. In particular, it is not entirely clear what aspects of…
Subject-verb agreement in the presence of an attractor noun located between the main noun and the verb elicits complex behavior: judgments of grammaticality are modulated by the grammatical features of the attractor. For example, in the…
As language technologies become widespread, it is important to understand how changes in language affect reader perceptions and behaviors. These relationships may be formalized as the isolated causal effect of some focal language-encoded…
Though languages can evolve slowly, they can also react strongly to dramatic world events. By studying the connection between words and events, it is possible to identify which events change our vocabulary and in what way. In this work, we…
Several popular best-practice manifestos for IT design and architecture use terms like `stateful', `stateless', `shared nothing', etc, and describe `fact based' or `functional' descriptions of causal evolution to describe computer…
It remains debated how well any LM understands natural language or generates reliable metalinguistic judgments. Moreover, relatively little work has demonstrated that LMs can represent and respect subtle relationships between form and…
While a great effort has concerned the development of fully integrated modular understanding systems, few researches have focused on the problem of unifying existing linguistic formalisms with cognitive processing models. The Situated…
Language style transfer is the problem of migrating the content of a source sentence to a target style. In many of its applications, parallel training data are not available and source sentences to be transferred may have arbitrary and…
This paper proposes decoupling the dependency tree from word order, such that surface ordering is not determined by traversing the dependency tree. We develop the notion of a \emph{word order domain structure}, which is linked but…
Discourse signals are often implicit, leaving it up to the interpreter to draw the required inferences. At the same time, discourse is embedded in a social context, meaning that interpreters apply their own assumptions and beliefs when…
Word representations induced from models with discrete latent variables (e.g.\ HMMs) have been shown to be beneficial in many NLP applications. In this work, we exploit labeled syntactic dependency trees and formalize the induction problem…
Language models (LMs) have been argued to overlap substantially with human beings in grammaticality judgment tasks. But when humans systematically make errors in language processing, should we expect LMs to behave like cognitive models of…
Islands are combinatorial objects that can be intuitively defined on a board consisting of a finite number of cells. Based on the neighbor relation of the cells, it is a fundamental property that two islands are either containing or…