Effect-driven interpretation: Functors for natural language composition

Computer programs are often factored into pure components -- simple, total functions from inputs to outputs -- and components that may have side effects -- errors, changes to memory, parallel threads, abortion of the current loop, etc. We make the case that human languages are similarly organized around the give and pull of pure values and impure processes, and we'll aim to show how denotational techniques from computer science can be leveraged to support elegant and illuminating analyses of natural language composition.

Meaning Beyond Truth Conditions: Evaluating Discourse Level Understanding via Anaphora Accessibility

We present a hierarchy of natural language understanding abilities and argue for the importance of moving beyond assessments of understanding at the lexical and sentence levels to the discourse level. We propose the task of anaphora accessibility as a diagnostic for assessing discourse understanding, and to this end, present an evaluation dataset inspired by theoretical research in dynamic semantics. We evaluate human and LLM performance on our dataset and find that LLMs and humans align on some tasks and diverge on others. Such divergence can be explained by LLMs' reliance on specific lexical items during language comprehension, in contrast to human sensitivity to structural abstractions.