@inproceedings{calderon-etal-2026-generics,
title = "Generics are not quantificational: A new path from language models to semantic theory",
author = "Calder{\'o}n, Gustavo Cilleruelo and
Almotahari, Mahrad and
Allaway, Emily and
Haddow, Barry and
Birch, Alexandra",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1100/",
pages = "21875--21892",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "Generic sentences express generalizations that tolerate exceptions without explicitly communicating information about quantities. For example, the sentence Ravens are black is true even though there are albino ravens. The sentence doesn{'}t explicitly communicate the number or frequency of black ravens. Whether generics semantically encode information about quantities implicitly is controversial. This work takes a large-scale distributional approach to the semantic debate. It compares thousands of naturally occurring generics and quantificational sentences using language-model probabilities. It shows that language models recover many semantic facts about quantifiers. It also shows that they recover semantic facts about surface distributional differences between generics and their ``quantificational counterparts''. Accordingly, and contrary to dominant views in other fields, we formulate an empirical argument to the effect that generics are not quantificational."
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<abstract>Generic sentences express generalizations that tolerate exceptions without explicitly communicating information about quantities. For example, the sentence Ravens are black is true even though there are albino ravens. The sentence doesn’t explicitly communicate the number or frequency of black ravens. Whether generics semantically encode information about quantities implicitly is controversial. This work takes a large-scale distributional approach to the semantic debate. It compares thousands of naturally occurring generics and quantificational sentences using language-model probabilities. It shows that language models recover many semantic facts about quantifiers. It also shows that they recover semantic facts about surface distributional differences between generics and their “quantificational counterparts”. Accordingly, and contrary to dominant views in other fields, we formulate an empirical argument to the effect that generics are not quantificational.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Generics are not quantificational: A new path from language models to semantic theory
%A Calderón, Gustavo Cilleruelo
%A Almotahari, Mahrad
%A Allaway, Emily
%A Haddow, Barry
%A Birch, Alexandra
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F calderon-etal-2026-generics
%X Generic sentences express generalizations that tolerate exceptions without explicitly communicating information about quantities. For example, the sentence Ravens are black is true even though there are albino ravens. The sentence doesn’t explicitly communicate the number or frequency of black ravens. Whether generics semantically encode information about quantities implicitly is controversial. This work takes a large-scale distributional approach to the semantic debate. It compares thousands of naturally occurring generics and quantificational sentences using language-model probabilities. It shows that language models recover many semantic facts about quantifiers. It also shows that they recover semantic facts about surface distributional differences between generics and their “quantificational counterparts”. Accordingly, and contrary to dominant views in other fields, we formulate an empirical argument to the effect that generics are not quantificational.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1100/
%P 21875-21892
Markdown (Informal)
[Generics are not quantificational: A new path from language models to semantic theory](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1100/) (Calderón et al., Findings 2026)
ACL