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Formal language

About: Formal language is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5763 publications have been published within this topic receiving 154114 citations.


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Proceedings ArticleDOI
12 May 1992
TL;DR: The authors analyze the most commonly used form of constraint languages for assembly planning: mating constraint languages, and it is proven that some of these forms, such as those based on less-than relations and thosebased on more-than-or-equal-to relations, are equivalent.
Abstract: The authors analyze the most commonly used form of constraint languages for assembly planning: mating constraint languages. These constraints are typically composed of relations asserting that a certain pair of parts must be mated before some other pair of parts may be mated. However there are many significant differences between the forms of these constraints used by different authors. It is proven that some of these forms, such as those based on less-than relations and those based on less-than-or-equal-to relations, are equivalent. A variety of theorems that address which kinds of mating constraint languages are able to represent which kinds of sets of plans are included. >

37 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: A number of representative studies in each category are reviewed, including systematic manipulation of input to neural networks and the impact on their performance, and testing whether interpretable knowledge can be decoded from intermediate representations acquired by neural networks.
Abstract: The EMNLP 2018 workshop BlackboxNLP was dedicated to resources and techniques specifically developed for analyzing and understanding the inner-workings and representations acquired by neural models of language. Approaches included: systematic manipulation of input to neural networks and investigating the impact on their performance, testing whether interpretable knowledge can be decoded from intermediate representations acquired by neural networks, proposing modifications to neural network architectures to make their knowledge state or generated output more explainable, and examining the performance of networks on simplified or formal languages. Here we review a number of representative studies in each category.

37 citations

Book ChapterDOI
TL;DR: In the future no linguist, logician or philosopher should use the notion of scope without having first cleared up its meaning, and the concept will even turn out to be worthless as a primitive notion.
Abstract: One of the most frequently used notions in linguistics, logical analysis of language, and in logic itself is the notion of scope. The scopes of quantifiers and of other logically active expressions are one of the most important determinants of the logical form of the sentences of both formal and natural languages. Yet in the way this notion is currently employed, it embodies a confusion which makes its use viciously misleading. The first aim of this paper is to expose the flaw in question. In the future no linguist, logician or philosopher should use the notion of scope without having first cleared up its meaning. In linguistics, the concept will even turn out to be worthless as a primitive notion.

37 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Mar 1997
TL;DR: This paper represents a family of formal representation languages obtained as an interval-based temporal extension of description logics and illustrates the expressiveness of these formalisms in representing time-dependent concepts with respect to standard descriptionlogics and other extensions.
Abstract: A time-dependent concept is a conceptual entity that is defined in terms of temporal relationships with other entities. For example, the concept of an action is defined in terms of a set of temporal relationships among states of a system. The concept of “widow”, in natural language, is defined in terms of events that have occurred in the past. Time-dependent concepts appear in several application areas, from natural language to diagnosis, from planning to data mining. An interesting issue in knowledge representation is how to formally represent and reason with these concepts. In this paper, we represent a family of formal representation languages obtained as an interval-based temporal extension of description logics . We illustrate the expressiveness of these formalisms in representing time-dependent concepts with respect to standard description logics and other extensions. We give some complexity results for reasoning problems and we propose approximate algorithms to compute subsumption among time-dependent concepts.

37 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A typed formal language is designed for encoding natural language expressions that can cope with phenomena such as under-specification and granularity change and be used to answer a wide range of time-related queries.
Abstract: Automatic extraction and reasoning over temporal properties in natural language discourse has not had wide use in practical systems due to its demand for a rich and compositional, yet inference-friendly, representation of time. Motivated by our study of temporal expressions from the Penn Treebank corpora, we address the problem by proposing a two-level constraint-based framework for processing and reasoning over temporal information in natural language. Within this framework, temporal expressions are viewed as partial assignments to the variables of an underlying calendar constraint system, and multiple expressions together describe a temporal constraint-satisfaction problem (TCSP). To support this framework, we designed a typed formal language for encoding natural language expressions. The language can cope with phenomena such as under-specification and granularity change. The constraint problems can be solved using various constraint propagation and search methods, and the solutions can then be used to answer a wide range of time-related queries.

37 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20237
202237
2021113
2020175
2019173
2018142