@inproceedings{silva-de-carvalho-etal-2025-montague,
title = "{M}ontague semantics and modifier consistency measurement in neural language models",
author = "Silva de Carvalho, Danilo and
Manino, Edoardo and
Rozanova, Julia and
Cordeiro, Lucas and
Freitas, Andr{\'e}",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.370/",
pages = "5515--5529",
abstract = "This work proposes a novel methodology for measuring compositional behavior in contemporary language embedding models. Specifically, we focus on adjectival modifier phenomena in adjective-noun phrases. In recent years, distributional language representation models have demonstrated great practical success. At the same time, the need for interpretability has elicited questions on their intrinsic properties and capabilities. Crucially, distributional models are often inconsistent when dealing with compositional phenomena in natural language, which has significant implications for their safety and fairness. Despite this, most current research on compositionality is directed towards improving their performance on similarity tasks only. This work takes a different approach, introducing three novel tests of compositional behavior inspired by Montague semantics. Our experimental results indicate that current neural language models do not behave according to the expected linguistic theories. This indicates that current language models may lack the capability to capture the semantic properties we evaluated on limited context, or that linguistic theories from Montagovian tradition may not match the expected capabilities of distributional models."
}
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Montague semantics and modifier consistency measurement in neural language models
%A Silva de Carvalho, Danilo
%A Manino, Edoardo
%A Rozanova, Julia
%A Cordeiro, Lucas
%A Freitas, André
%Y Rambow, Owen
%Y Wanner, Leo
%Y Apidianaki, Marianna
%Y Al-Khalifa, Hend
%Y Eugenio, Barbara Di
%Y Schockaert, Steven
%S Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
%D 2025
%8 January
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Abu Dhabi, UAE
%F silva-de-carvalho-etal-2025-montague
%X This work proposes a novel methodology for measuring compositional behavior in contemporary language embedding models. Specifically, we focus on adjectival modifier phenomena in adjective-noun phrases. In recent years, distributional language representation models have demonstrated great practical success. At the same time, the need for interpretability has elicited questions on their intrinsic properties and capabilities. Crucially, distributional models are often inconsistent when dealing with compositional phenomena in natural language, which has significant implications for their safety and fairness. Despite this, most current research on compositionality is directed towards improving their performance on similarity tasks only. This work takes a different approach, introducing three novel tests of compositional behavior inspired by Montague semantics. Our experimental results indicate that current neural language models do not behave according to the expected linguistic theories. This indicates that current language models may lack the capability to capture the semantic properties we evaluated on limited context, or that linguistic theories from Montagovian tradition may not match the expected capabilities of distributional models.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.370/
%P 5515-5529
Markdown (Informal)
[Montague semantics and modifier consistency measurement in neural language models](https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.370/) (Silva de Carvalho et al., COLING 2025)
ACL