Bayesian Inference Semantics: A Modelling System and A Test Suite

Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Rasmus Blanck, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Shalom Lappin, Aleksandre Maskharashvili


Abstract
We present BIS, a Bayesian Inference Semantics, for probabilistic reasoning in natural language. The current system is based on the framework of Bernardy et al. (2018), but departs from it in important respects. BIS makes use of Bayesian learning for inferring a hypothesis from premises. This involves estimating the probability of the hypothesis, given the data supplied by the premises of an argument. It uses a syntactic parser to generate typed syntactic structures that serve as input to a model generation system. Sentences are interpreted compositionally to probabilistic programs, and the corresponding truth values are estimated using sampling methods. BIS successfully deals with various probabilistic semantic phenomena, including frequency adverbs, generalised quantifiers, generics, and vague predicates. It performs well on a number of interesting probabilistic reasoning tasks. It also sustains most classically valid inferences (instantiation, de Morgan’s laws, etc.). To test BIS we have built an experimental test suite with examples of a range of probabilistic and classical inference patterns.
Anthology ID:
S19-1029
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Rada Mihalcea, Ekaterina Shutova, Lun-Wei Ku, Kilian Evang, Soujanya Poria
Venue:
*SEM
SIGs:
SIGLEX | SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
263–272
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S19-1029
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S19-1029
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Rasmus Blanck, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Shalom Lappin, and Aleksandre Maskharashvili. 2019. Bayesian Inference Semantics: A Modelling System and A Test Suite. In Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019), pages 263–272, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bayesian Inference Semantics: A Modelling System and A Test Suite (Bernardy et al., *SEM 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/S19-1029.pdf
Code
 GU-CLASP/bbclm2019