Adrià Torrens-Urrutia

We introduce a Fuzzy Property Grammar System (FPGS), a formalism that integrates a Fuzzy Property Grammar into a linguistic grammar system to formally characterize metaphorical evaluative expressions. The main scope of this paper is to present the formalism of FPGS and to show how it might provide a formal characterization of hate speech linguistic evaluative expressions with metaphors (as fuzzy concepts), together with evaluating their degree of linguistic violence. Linguistic metaphors are full of semantic coercions. It is necessary to formally characterize the context of the communication to acknowledge the extralinguistic constraints of the pragmatic domain, which establishes whether an utterance is violent. To show the applicability of our formalism, we present a proof of concept. By compiling and tagging a 3000-tweet corpus, we have extracted a lexicon of hate speech metaphors. Furthermore, we show how FPGS architecture can deal with different types of hate speech and can identify implicit violent figurative evaluative expressions by context and type. Although we are still in the experimental phase of our project and cannot present conclusive results at the computational level, the proof-of-concept results show that our formalism can achieve the desired outcome.

This paper introduces a new grammatical framework, Fuzzy Property Grammars (FPGr). This is a model based on Property Grammars and Fuzzy Natural Logic. Such grammatical framework is constraint-based and provides a new way to formally characterize gradience by representing grammaticality degrees regarding linguistic competence (without involving speakers judgments). The paper provides a formal-logical characterization of FPGr. A test of the framework is presented by implementing an FPGr for Spanish. FPGr is a formal theory that may serve linguists, computing scientists, and mathematicians since it can capture infinite grammatical structures within the variability of a language.

In this paper, we introduced a fuzzy model for calculating complexity based on universality, aiming to measure the complexity of natural languages in terms of the degree of universality exhibited in their rules. We validated the model by conducting experiments on a corpus of 143 languages obtained from Universal Dependencies 2.11. To formalize the linguistic universals proposed by Greenberg, we employed the Grew tool to convert them into a formal rule representation. This formalization enables the verification of universals within the corpus. By analyzing the corpus, we extracted the occurrences of each universal in different languages. The obtained results were used to define a fuzzy model that quantifies the degree of universality and complexity of both the Greenberg universals and the languages themselves, employing the mathematical theory of evaluative expressions from fuzzy natural logic (FNL). Our analysis revealed an inversely proportional relationship between the degree of universality and the level of complexity observed in the languages. The implications of our findings extended to various applications in the theoretical analysis and computational treatment of languages. In addition, the proposed model offered insights into the nature of language complexity, providing a valuable framework for further research and exploration.

In recent years, the study of evaluative linguistic expressions has crossed the field of theoretical linguistics and has aroused interest in very different research areas such as artificial intelligence, psychology or cognitive linguistics. The interest in this type of expressions may be due to its relevance in applications such as opinion mining or sentiment analysis. This paper brings together Fuzzy Natural Logic and Fuzzy Property Grammars to approach evaluative expressions. Our contribution includes the marriage of mathematical and linguistic methods for providing a formalism to deal with the linguistic vagueness of evaluative expressions by describing the syntax and semantics of these structures. We contribute to the study of evaluative linguistic expressions by proposing a formal characterization of them where the concepts of semantic prime, borderline evaluative expressions and markedness are defined and where the relation between the semantic constraints of evaluations and their sentiment can be established. A proof-of-concept of how to create a lexicon of evaluative expressions for future computational applications is presented. The results demonstrate that linguistic evaluative expressions are gradient, have sentiment, and that the evaluations work as a relation of hypernym and hyponym, the hypernym being a semantic prime. Our findings provide the basis for building an ontology of evaluative expressions for future computational applications.

The paper focuses on linguistic complexity and language universals, which are two important and controversial issues in language research. A Fuzzy Property Grammar for determining the degree of universality and complexity of a natural language is introduced. In this task, the Fuzzy Property Grammar operated only with syntactic constraints. Fuzzy Natural Logic sets the fundamentals to express the notions of universality and complexity as evaluative expressions. The Fuzzy Property Grammar computes the constraints in terms of weights of universality and calculates relative complexity. We present a proof-of-concept in which we have generated a grammar with 42B syntactic constraints. The model classifies constraints in terms of low, medium, and high universality and complexity. Degrees of relative complexity in terms of similarity from a correlation matrix have been obtained. The results show that the architecture of a Universal Fuzzy Property Grammar is flexible, reusable, and re-trainable, and it can easily take into account new sets of languages, perfecting the degree of universality and complexity of the linguistic constraints as well as the degree of complexity between languages.

Defining the natural language and its gradient phenomena force us to look for formal tools that can represent the bases of a grammar with degrees of grammaticality. The mathematical and formal models are often used in linguistics. And yet, fuzzy logic has not received all the attention it deserves as a tool to explain the natural language processing. Here, we show the theoretical bases that have led us to treat the natural language (NL) inputs gradually. The basis of fuzzy logic for NL are explained here as a tool capable of defining non-discrete values, therefore gradual or fuzzy. A Property Grammar will give the rules of the fuzzy grammar.