Papers › Bayesian Inference Semantics: A Modelling System and A Test Suite
Bayesian Inference Semantics: A Modelling System and A Test Suite
Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Rasmus Blanck, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Shalom Lappin, Aleks Maskharashvili, re
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.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections