Psycholinguistic experiments reveal that efficiency of human language use is founded on predictions at both syntactic and lexical levels. Previous models of human prediction exploiting LLMs have used an information theoretic measure called surprisal, with success on naturalistic text in a wide variety of languages, but under-performance on challenging text such as garden path sentences. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines the lexical predictions of an LLM with the syntactic structures provided by a dependency parser. The framework gives rise to an Incompatibility Fraction. When tested on two garden path datasets, it correlated well with human reading times, distinguished between easy and hard garden path, and outperformed surprisal.

Verbs describe the dynamics of interactions between people, objects, and their environments. They play a crucial role in language formation and understanding. Nonetheless, recent vision-language models like CLIP predominantly rely on nouns and have a limited account of verbs. This limitation affects their performance in tasks requiring action recognition and scene understanding. In this work, we introduce VerbCLIP, a verb-centric vision-language model which learns meanings of verbs based on a compositional approach to statistical machine learning. Our methods significantly outperform CLIP in zero-shot performance on the VALSE, VL-Checklist, and SVO-Probes datasets, with improvements of +2.38%, +3.14%, and +1.47%, without fine-tuning. Fine-tuning resulted in further improvements, with gains of +2.85% and +9.2% on the VALSE and VL-Checklist datasets.

Language is contextual as meanings of words are dependent on their contexts. Contextuality is, concomitantly, a well-defined concept in quantum mechanics where it is considered a major resource for quantum computations. We investigate whether natural language exhibits any of the quantum mechanics’ contextual features. We show that meaning combinations in ambiguous phrases can be modelled in the sheaf-theoretic framework for quantum contextuality, where they can become possibilistically contextual. Using the framework of Contextuality-by-Default (CbD), we explore the probabilistic variants of these and show that CbD-contextuality is also possible.

Recent work in compositional distributional semantics showed how bialgebras model generalised quantifiers of natural language. That technique requires working with vector space over power sets of bases, and therefore is computationally costly. It is possible to overcome the computational hurdles by working with fuzzy generalised quantifiers. In this paper, we show that the compositional notion of semantics of natural language, guided by a grammar, extends from a binary to a many valued setting and instantiate in it the fuzzy computations. We import vector representations of words and predicates, learnt from large scale compositional distributional semantics, interpret them as fuzzy sets, and analyse their performance on a toy inference dataset.

This paper is about learning word representations using grammatical type information. We use the syntactic types of Combinatory Categorial Grammar to develop multilinear representations, i.e. maps with n arguments, for words with different functional types. The multilinear maps of words compose with each other to form sentence representations. We extend the skipgram algorithm from vectors to multi- linear maps to learn these representations and instantiate it on unary and binary maps for transitive verbs. These are evaluated on verb and sentence similarity and disambiguation tasks and a subset of the SICK relatedness dataset. Our model performs better than previous type- driven models and is competitive with state of the art representation learning methods such as BERT and neural sentence encoders.

Ellipsis is a natural language phenomenon where part of a sentence is missing and its information must be recovered from its surrounding context, as in “Cats chase dogs and so do foxes.”. Formal semantics has different methods for resolving ellipsis and recovering the missing information, but the problem has not been considered for distributional semantics, where words have vector embeddings and combinations thereof provide embeddings for sentences. In elliptical sentences these combinations go beyond linear as copying of elided information is necessary. In this paper, we develop different models for embedding VP-elliptical sentences. We extend existing verb disambiguation and sentence similarity datasets to ones containing elliptical phrases and evaluate our models on these datasets for a variety of non-linear combinations and their linear counterparts. We compare results of these compositional models to state of the art holistic sentence encoders. Our results show that non-linear addition and a non-linear tensor-based composition outperform the naive non-compositional baselines and the linear models, and that sentence encoders perform well on sentence similarity, but not on verb disambiguation.

According to the distributional inclusion hypothesis, entailment between words can be measured via the feature inclusions of their distributional vectors. In recent work, we showed how this hypothesis can be extended from words to phrases and sentences in the setting of compositional distributional semantics. This paper focuses on inclusion properties of tensors; its main contribution is a theoretical and experimental analysis of how feature inclusion works in different concrete models of verb tensors. We present results for relational, Frobenius, projective, and holistic methods and compare them to the simple vector addition, multiplication, min, and max models. The degrees of entailment thus obtained are evaluated via a variety of existing word-based measures, such as Weed’s and Clarke’s, KL-divergence, APinc, balAPinc, and two of our previously proposed metrics at the phrase/sentence level. We perform experiments on three entailment datasets, investigating which version of tensor-based composition achieves the highest performance when combined with the sentence-level measures.

Compositional distributional models of meaning (CDMs) provide a function that produces a vectorial representation for a phrase or a sentence by composing the vectors of its words. Being the natural evolution of the traditional and well-studied distributional models at the word level, CDMs are steadily evolving to a popular and active area of NLP. This COLING 2016 tutorial aims at providing a concise introduction to this emerging field, presenting the different classes of CDMs and the various issues related to them in sufficient detail.