Related papers: Reconsidering Written Language
We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
Large language models (LLMs) can exhibit biases in reasoning capabilities due to linguistic modality, performing better on tasks in one language versus another, even with similar content. Most previous works evaluate this through reasoning…
New scientific ideas drive progress, yet measuring scientific novelty remains challenging. We use natural language processing to detect the origin and impact of new ideas in scientific publications. To validate our methods, we analyze Nobel…
Summarization is one of the key features of human intelligence. It plays an important role in understanding and representation. With rapid and continual expansion of texts, pictures and videos in cyberspace, automatic summarization becomes…
Vision and language are two fundamental capabilities of human intelligence. Humans routinely perform tasks through the interactions between vision and language, supporting the uniquely human capacity to talk about what they see or…
Visualizations today are used across a wide range of languages and cultures. Yet the extent to which language impacts how we reason about data and visualizations remains unclear. In this paper, we explore the intersection of visualization…
Mathematics is usually regarded as a kind of language. The essential behavior of physical phenomena can be expressed by mathematical laws, providing descriptions and predictions. In the present essay I argue that, although mathematics can…
Explanation constitutes an archetypal feature of human rationality, underpinning learning and generalisation, and representing one of the media supporting scientific discovery and communication. Due to the importance of explanations in…
Zipf's law of abbreviation, the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, is one of the most solid candidates for a linguistic universal, in the sense that it has the potential for being exceptionless or with a number of exceptions…
The scientific process is a means to turn the results of experiments into knowledge about the world in which we live. Much research effort has been directed toward automating this process. To do this, one needs to formulate the scientific…
This essay aims to bid analogue historians assume that digitisation is the first step to creating historical heritage based on the new language of Science: Computer Science. As we know, Humanities disciplines cannot easily be encapsulated…
The purpose of this essay is to trace the historical development of geometry while focusing on how we acquired mathematical tools for describing the "shape of the universe." More specifically, our aim is to consider, without a claim to…
Quantum lambda calculus has been studied mainly as an idealized programming language -- the evaluation essentially corresponds to a deterministic abstract machine. Very little work has been done to develop a rewriting theory for quantum…
What can relics of the past tell us about the thoughts and beliefs of the people who invented and used them? Recent collaborations at the frontier of archaeology, anthropology, and cognitive science are culminating in speculative but…
Scientific communication is an essential part of modern science: whereas Archimedes worked alone, Newton (correspondence with Hooke, 1676) acknowledged that "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."…
Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a long and rich history, but existing corpora and language technology focus mostly on modern Arabic and its varieties. Therefore, studying the history of the language has so far been mostly limited to…
Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism…
We explore how generating a chain of thought -- a series of intermediate reasoning steps -- significantly improves the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning. In particular, we show how such reasoning abilities emerge…
This paper attributes the sudden emergence of mathematical probability and statistics in the second half of the seventeenth century to Calvin's Reformed theology. Calvin accommodated Epicurean chance with Stoic determinism and synthesised…