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

Implying or implicatingnot bothin declaratives and interrogatives

Both disjunctive assertions and disjunctive questions can imply “not both”, i.e., that only one of the disjuncts is true. For assertions this is known to be part of what the speaker means (e.g., an implicature), whereas for questions this is instead a presupposition. This puzzle is challenging for predominant pragmatic and grammatical accounts of exhaustivity in the literature. This paper outlines a solution based on Attentional Pragmatics combined with (other) general pragmatic principles

Rising declaratives of the quality-suspending kind

The theory of Intonational Compliance Marking (ICM) maintains that speakers of English use final rising intonation to indicate a suspension (potential violation) of a conversational maxim (Westera 2013; 2014). This paper aims to show that a certain kind of rising declarative, one which has been prominent in the literature (e.g., Gunlogson 2008), can be adequately understood in ICM’s terms as involving a suspension of the maxim of Quality. By explicating certain minimal assumptions about pragmatics, this understanding accounts for three core features of such rising declaratives: their question-likeness, the speaker bias they express and their badness out of the blue. In a nutshell, their question-likeness is derived from principles of general cooperative discourse, their bias from the relative importance of the maxim of Quality, and their badness out of the blue from a competition between rising declaratives and interrogatives. The account is compared in detail to various existing accounts of rising declaratives of the relevant sort, highlighting explanatory and empirical differences.This work has benefited from detailed commentary by four anonymous reviewers for Glossa, as well as Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen. Any remaining errors are of course my own. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154)

QUDs, brevity, and the asymmetry of alternatives

Comunicació presentada al Amsterdam Colloquium 2017, celebrat a Amsterdam (Holanda) del 20 a 22 de desembre de 2017Exhaustivity is typically explained in terms of the exclusion of unmentioned alternatives. For this to work, the set of alternatives must be asymmetrical, lest both a proposition and its negation get excluded, yielding a contradiction (the Symmetry Problem). Since exhaustivity is regularly observed, these alternative sets must tend to be asymmetrical, and this requires an explanation. Existing explanations are based on considerations of brevity, but these run into certain problems. A new solution is proposed, explaining the asymmetry of alternatives in terms of the fact that discourse strategies with asymmetrical questions under discussion (Quds) are favored because they allow part of the answer to be communicated implicitly, namely as an exhaustivity implicature.Many thanks to Floris Roelofsen and Jeroen Groenendijk for their comments on many iterations of this work. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154). This paper reflects the authors’ view only, and the EU is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains

Attentional pragmatics: a pragmatic approach to exhaustivity

The neo-Gricean approach to exhaustivity is based on the idea that exhaustivity arises when relevant propositions are not asserted. This paper presents a new pragmatic approach based on the idea that exhaustivity arises when relevant propositions are not mentioned, or more precisely, when the speaker did not intend to draw attention to them. This seemingly subtle shift from information to attention results in different predictions on a range of challenges for the neo-Gricean approach, some of which have been brought up in support of the grammatical approach to exhaustivity. This paper discusses three such challenges: exhaustivity on the hints of a quizmaster, exhaustivity on questions, and exhaustivity without an opinionatedness assumption. The two pragmatic approaches are compared on these puzzles along with the grammatical approach

Rising declaratives of the quality-suspending kind

The theory of Intonational Compliance Marking (ICM) maintains that speakers of English use final rising intonation to indicate a suspension (potential violation) of a conversational maxim (Westera 2013; 2014). This paper aims to show that a certain kind of rising declarative, one which has been prominent in the literature (e.g., Gunlogson 2008), can be adequately understood in ICM’s terms as involving a suspension of the maxim of Quality. By explicating certain minimal assumptions about pragmatics, this understanding accounts for three core features of such rising declaratives: their question-likeness, the speaker bias they express and their badness out of the blue. In a nutshell, their question-likeness is derived from principles of general cooperative discourse, their bias from the relative importance of the maxim of Quality, and their badness out of the blue from a competition between rising declaratives and interrogatives. The account is compared in detail to various existing accounts of rising declaratives of the relevant sort, highlighting explanatory and empirical differences.This work has benefited from detailed commentary by four anonymous reviewers for Glossa, as well as Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen. Any remaining errors are of course my own. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154)

QUDs, brevity, and the asymmetry of alternatives

Comunicació presentada al Amsterdam Colloquium 2017, celebrat a Amsterdam (Holanda) del 20 a 22 de desembre de 2017Exhaustivity is typically explained in terms of the exclusion of unmentioned alternatives. For this to work, the set of alternatives must be asymmetrical, lest both a proposition and its negation get excluded, yielding a contradiction (the Symmetry Problem). Since exhaustivity is regularly observed, these alternative sets must tend to be asymmetrical, and this requires an explanation. Existing explanations are based on considerations of brevity, but these run into certain problems. A new solution is proposed, explaining the asymmetry of alternatives in terms of the fact that discourse strategies with asymmetrical questions under discussion (Quds) are favored because they allow part of the answer to be communicated implicitly, namely as an exhaustivity implicature.Many thanks to Floris Roelofsen and Jeroen Groenendijk for their comments on many iterations of this work. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154). This paper reflects the authors’ view only, and the EU is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains

Asking between the lines: elicitation of evoked questions in text

Comunicació presentada al Amsterdam Colloquium 2019, celebrat del 18 al 20 de desembre de 2019 a Amsterdam, Holanda.We introduce a novel, scalable method aimed at annotating potential and actual Questions Under Discussion (QUDs) in naturalistic discourse. It consists of asking naive participants first what questions a certain portion of the discourse evokes for them and subsequently which of those end up being answered as the discourse proceeds. This paper outlines the method and design decisions that went into it and on characterizing highlevel properties of the resulting data. We highlight ways in which the data gathered via our method could inform our understanding of QUD-driven phenomena and QUD models themselves. We also provide access to a visualization tool for viewing the evoked questions we gathered using this method (N=4765 from 111 crowdsourced annotators).This work was supported in part by a Leverhulme Trust Prize in Languages and Literatures to H. Rohde. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154)

Don’t blame distributional semantics if it can’t do entailment

Comunicació presentada al 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019), celebrat els dies 23 a 27 de maig de 2019 a Göteborg, Suècia.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.This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154), and from the Spanish Ramón y Cajal programme (grant RYC-2015-18907)

A closer look at scalar diversity using contextualized semantic similarity

Comunicació presentada a la 24th Sinn und Bedeutung Conference, SuB24, celebrada del 4 al 6 de setembre de 2019 a la Universitat d'Osnabrück, Alemania.We take a closer look at van Tiel et al.’s (2016) experimental results on diversity in scalar inference rates. In contrast to their finding that semantic similarity had no significant effect on scalar inference rates, we show that a sufficiently fine-grained notion of semantic similarity does have an effect: the more similar the two terms on a scale, the lower the scalar inference rate. Moreover, we show that a context-sensitive notion of semantic similarity (in particular ELMo; Peters et al., 2018) can explain more of the variance in the data, but only modestly, only for stimuli that contain informative context words, and only when the scalar terms themselves are sufficiently context-sensitive.This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154). This paper reflects the authors’ view only, and the EU is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has also received funding from the Ramon y Cajal programme (grant RYC-2015-18907) and from the Catalan government (SGR 2017 1575)