Related papers: Meaning and Form in a Language Computer Simulation
Multilingual representations have mostly been evaluated based on their performance on specific tasks. In this article, we look beyond engineering goals and analyze the relations between languages in computational representations. We…
Are the predictions of humans and language models affected by similar things? Research suggests that while comprehending language, humans make predictions about upcoming words, with more predictable words being processed more easily.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in structured reasoning and symbolic tasks, with coding emerging as a particularly successful application. This progress has naturally motivated efforts to extend these…
Cognitive science and neuroscience have long faced the challenge of disentangling representations of language from representations of conceptual meaning. As the same problem arises in today's language models (LMs), we investigate the…
"Natural languages are programming languages for minds." Can we or should we take this slogan seriously? If so, how? Can answers be found by looking at the various "dynamic" treatments of natural language developed over the last decade or…
Language understanding is a key scientific issue in the fields of cognitive and computer science. However, the two disciplines differ substantially in the specific research questions. Cognitive science focuses on analyzing the specific…
Distributed representations of words have been shown to capture lexical semantics, as demonstrated by their effectiveness in word similarity and analogical relation tasks. But, these tasks only evaluate lexical semantics indirectly. In this…
Meaning cannot be based on dictionary definitions all the way down: at some point the circularity of definitions must be broken in some way, by grounding the meanings of certain words in sensorimotor categories learned from experience or…
Programming is the activity of modifying a program in order to bring about specific changes in its behaviour. Yet programming language theory almost exclusively focuses on the meaning of programs. We motivate a "change-oriented" viewpoint…
Over the past 50 years many have debated what representation should be used to capture the meaning of natural language utterances. Recently new needs of such representations have been raised in research. Here I survey some of the…
Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational…
Current common interactions with language models is through full inference. This approach may not necessarily align with the model's internal knowledge. Studies show discrepancies between prompts and internal representations. Most focus on…
At the staggering pace with which the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are increasing, creating future-proof evaluation sets to assess their understanding becomes more and more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel…
Human bilinguals often use similar brain regions to process multiple languages, depending on when they learned their second language and their proficiency. In large language models (LLMs), how are multiple languages learned and encoded? In…
Languages continually evolve in response to societal events, resulting in new terms and shifts in meanings. These changes have significant implications for computer applications, including automatic translation and chatbots, making it…
This work presents an information-theoretic operationalisation of cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. It is not a new idea that there are small, cross-linguistic associations between the forms and meanings of words. For instance, it has…
Distributional semantics provides multi-dimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown in a large body of work in computational linguistics;…
The nouns of our language refer to either concrete entities (like a table) or abstract concepts (like justice or love), and cognitive psychology has established that concreteness influences how words are processed. Accordingly,…
Semantic web information is at the extremities of long pipelines held by human beings. They are at the origin of information and they will consume it either explicitly because the information will be delivered to them in a readable way, or…
Simulations, although powerful in accurately replicating real-world systems, often remain inaccessible to non-technical users due to their complexity. Conversely, large language models (LLMs) provide intuitive, language-based interactions…