Related papers: Reconsidering Written Language
Developmental machine learning studies how artificial agents can model the way children learn open-ended repertoires of skills. Such agents need to create and represent goals, select which ones to pursue and learn to achieve them. Recent…
Tidying up a messy table may appear simple for humans, but articulating clear criteria for tidiness is challenging due to the ambiguous nature of common sense reasoning. Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven capable of capturing common…
When we communicate with other humans, we do not simply generate a sequence of words. Rather, we use our cognitive state (beliefs, desires, intentions) and our model of the audience's cognitive state to create utterances that affect the…
This article examines the importance of graphic representations in the social sciences, and particularly in (medieval) history, taking as its starting point a reflection by {\'E}tienne-Jules Marey, a physiologist and pioneer of 19th-century…
Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…
Mathematics is one of the ways our species makes sense of this world and I believe that it is inherent in our thinking machinery. The mathematics we do in turn is dependent on the way we view our universe and ourselves. Lakoff and Nunez…
Language is a major source of systemic inequities in science, particularly among scholars whose first language is not English. Studies have examined scientists' linguistic practices in specific contexts; few, however, have provided a global…
Reasoning with quantifier expressions in natural language combines logical and arithmetical features, transcending strict divides between qualitative and quantitative. Our topic is this cooperation of styles as it occurs in common…
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements, with the test-time scaling law consistently enhancing the reasoning capabilities. Through systematic evaluation and exploration of a diverse spectrum of…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in many reasoning benchmarks. However, recent studies have pointed to memorization, rather than generalization, as one of the leading causes for such performance. LLMs, in fact, are…
The principle behind algebraic language theory for various kinds of structures, such as words or trees, is to use a compositional function from the structures into a finite set. To talk about compositionality, one needs some way of…
Contemporary scientific exchanges are international, yet language continues to be a persistent barrier to scientific communication, particularly for non-native English-speaking scholars. Since the ability to absorb knowledge has a strong…
Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology…
Curiosity serves as a pivotal conduit for human beings to discover and learn new knowledge. Recent advancements of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing have sparked discussions regarding whether these models possess…
Scientific idea generation is central to discovery, requiring the joint satisfaction of novelty and scientific soundness. Unlike standard reasoning or general creative generation, scientific ideation is inherently open-ended and…
Selection through iterated learning explains no more than other non-functional accounts, such as universal grammar, why language is so well-designed for communicative efficiency. It does not predict several distinctive features of language…
Linear logic was conceived in 1987 by Girard and, in contrast to classical logic, restricts the usage of the structural inference rules of weakening and contraction. With this, atoms of the logic are no longer interpreted as truth, but as…
In the concluding remarks of Ontological Promiscuity Hobbs (1985) made what we believe to be a very insightful observation: given that semantics is an attempt at specifying the relation between language and the world, if "one can assume a…
When you have a question, the most effective way to have the question answered is to directly connect with experts on the topic and have a conversation with them. Prior to the invention of writing, this was the only way. Although effective,…
Recent developments in computer programming and in mathematics suggest that there is a strong case for a new way of introducing programming to enhance the learning of school mathematics. The article describes a collaboration of mathematics…