3,705 research outputs found
Does the Principle of Compositionality Explain Productivity? For a Pluralist View of the Role of Formal Languages as Models
One of the main motivations for having a compositional semantics is the account of the productivity of natural languages. Formal languages are often part of the account of productivity, i.e., of how beings with finite capaci- ties are able to produce and understand a potentially infinite number of sen- tences, by offering a model of this process. This account of productivity con- sists in the generation of proofs in a formal system, that is taken to represent the way speakers grasp the meaning of an indefinite number of sentences. The informational basis is restricted to what is represented in the lexicon. This constraint is considered as a requirement for the account of productivity, or at least of an important feature of productivity, namely, that we can grasp auto- matically the meaning of a huge number of complex expressions, far beyond what can be memorized. However, empirical results in psycholinguistics, and especially particular patterns of ERP, show that the brain integrates informa- tion of different sources very fast, without any felt effort on the part of the speaker. This shows that formal procedures do not explain productivity. How- ever, formal models are still useful in the account of how we get at the seman- tic value of a complex expression, once we have the meanings of its parts, even if there is no formal explanation of how we get at those meanings. A practice-oriented view of modeling gives an adequate interpretation of this re- sult: formal compositional semantics may be a useful model for some ex- planatory purposes concerning natural languages, without being a good model for dealing with other explananda
A Context-theoretic Framework for Compositionality in Distributional Semantics
Techniques in which words are represented as vectors have proved useful in
many applications in computational linguistics, however there is currently no
general semantic formalism for representing meaning in terms of vectors. We
present a framework for natural language semantics in which words, phrases and
sentences are all represented as vectors, based on a theoretical analysis which
assumes that meaning is determined by context.
In the theoretical analysis, we define a corpus model as a mathematical
abstraction of a text corpus. The meaning of a string of words is assumed to be
a vector representing the contexts in which it occurs in the corpus model.
Based on this assumption, we can show that the vector representations of words
can be considered as elements of an algebra over a field. We note that in
applications of vector spaces to representing meanings of words there is an
underlying lattice structure; we interpret the partial ordering of the lattice
as describing entailment between meanings. We also define the context-theoretic
probability of a string, and, based on this and the lattice structure, a degree
of entailment between strings.
We relate the framework to existing methods of composing vector-based
representations of meaning, and show that our approach generalises many of
these, including vector addition, component-wise multiplication, and the tensor
product.Comment: Submitted to Computational Linguistics on 20th January 2010 for
revie
Exploiting Deep Semantics and Compositionality of Natural Language for Human-Robot-Interaction
We develop a natural language interface for human robot interaction that
implements reasoning about deep semantics in natural language. To realize the
required deep analysis, we employ methods from cognitive linguistics, namely
the modular and compositional framework of Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG)
[Feldman, 2009]. Using ECG, robots are able to solve fine-grained reference
resolution problems and other issues related to deep semantics and
compositionality of natural language. This also includes verbal interaction
with humans to clarify commands and queries that are too ambiguous to be
executed safely. We implement our NLU framework as a ROS package and present
proof-of-concept scenarios with different robots, as well as a survey on the
state of the art
Don't Blame Distributional Semantics if it can't do Entailment
Distributional semantics has had enormous empirical success in Computational
Linguistics and Cognitive Science in modeling various semantic phenomena, such
as semantic similarity, and distributional models are widely used in
state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing systems. However, the theoretical
status of distributional semantics within a broader theory of language and
cognition is still unclear: What does distributional semantics model? Can it
be, on its own, a fully adequate model of the meanings of linguistic
expressions? The standard answer is that distributional semantics is not fully
adequate in this regard, because it falls short on some of the central aspects
of formal semantic approaches: truth conditions, entailment, reference, and
certain aspects of compositionality. We argue that this standard answer rests
on a misconception: These aspects do not belong in a theory of expression
meaning, they are instead aspects of speaker meaning, i.e., communicative
intentions in a particular context. In a slogan: words do not refer, speakers
do. Clearing this up enables us to argue that distributional semantics on its
own is an adequate model of expression meaning. Our proposal sheds light on the
role of distributional semantics in a broader theory of language and cognition,
its relationship to formal semantics, and its place in computational models.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on
Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019), Gothenburg, Swede
A Proof-Theoretic Approach to Scope Ambiguity in Compositional Vector Space Models
We investigate the extent to which compositional vector space models can be
used to account for scope ambiguity in quantified sentences (of the form "Every
man loves some woman"). Such sentences containing two quantifiers introduce two
readings, a direct scope reading and an inverse scope reading. This ambiguity
has been treated in a vector space model using bialgebras by (Hedges and
Sadrzadeh, 2016) and (Sadrzadeh, 2016), though without an explanation of the
mechanism by which the ambiguity arises. We combine a polarised focussed
sequent calculus for the non-associative Lambek calculus NL, as described in
(Moortgat and Moot, 2011), with the vector based approach to quantifier scope
ambiguity. In particular, we establish a procedure for obtaining a vector space
model for quantifier scope ambiguity in a derivational way.Comment: This is a preprint of a paper to appear in: Journal of Language
Modelling, 201
Recursive Neural Networks Can Learn Logical Semantics
Tree-structured recursive neural networks (TreeRNNs) for sentence meaning
have been successful for many applications, but it remains an open question
whether the fixed-length representations that they learn can support tasks as
demanding as logical deduction. We pursue this question by evaluating whether
two such models---plain TreeRNNs and tree-structured neural tensor networks
(TreeRNTNs)---can correctly learn to identify logical relationships such as
entailment and contradiction using these representations. In our first set of
experiments, we generate artificial data from a logical grammar and use it to
evaluate the models' ability to learn to handle basic relational reasoning,
recursive structures, and quantification. We then evaluate the models on the
more natural SICK challenge data. Both models perform competitively on the SICK
data and generalize well in all three experiments on simulated data, suggesting
that they can learn suitable representations for logical inference in natural
language
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