Related papers: Ambiguity in language networks
Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are huge artificial neural networks which primarily serve to generate text, but also provide a very sophisticated probabilistic model of language use. Since generating a semantically consistent text requires a…
Humans' distinctive role in the world can largely be attributed to our capacity for iterated learning, a process by which knowledge is expanded and refined over generations. A range of theories seek to explain why humans are so adept at…
In this article, we present a fresh perspective on language, combining ideas from various sources, but mixed in a new synthesis. As in the minimalist program, the question is whether we can formulate an elegant formalism, a universal…
In a combinatorial communication system, some signals consist of the combinations of other signals. Such systems are more efficient than equivalent, non-combinatorial systems, yet despite this they are rare in nature. Why? Previous…
Artificial agents have been shown to learn to communicate when needed to complete a cooperative task. Some level of language structure (e.g., compositionality) has been found in the learned communication protocols. This observed structure…
Word embeddings are powerful representations that form the foundation of many natural language processing architectures, both in English and in other languages. To gain further insight into word embeddings, we explore their stability (e.g.,…
Fields such as the philosophy of language, continental philosophy, and literary studies have long established that human language is, at its essence, ambiguous and that this quality, although challenging to communication, enriches language…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the…
Language, which allows complex ideas to be communicated through symbolic sequences, is a characteristic feature of our species and manifested in a multitude of forms. Using large written corpora for many different languages and scripts, we…
Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…
We argue that human language learning proceeds in a manner that is different in nature from current approaches to training LLMs, predicting a difference in learning biases. We then present evidence from German plural formation by LLMs that…
The iterated learning model simulates the transmission of language from generation to generation in order to explore how the constraints imposed by language transmission facilitate the emergence of language structure. Despite each modelled…
A common trait of complex systems is that they can be represented by means of a network of interacting parts. It is, in fact, the network organisation (more than the parts) what largely conditions most higher-level properties, which are not…
One hallmark of human language is its combinatoriality -- reusing a relatively small inventory of building blocks to create a far larger inventory of increasingly complex structures. In this paper, we explore the idea that combinatoriality…
Ambiguity in natural language is a significant obstacle for achieving accurate text to structured data mapping through large language models (LLMs), which affects the performance of tasks such as mapping text to agentic tool calling and…
Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…
We investigate the nature of written human language within the framework of complex network theory. In particular, we analyse the topology of Orwell's \textit{1984} focusing on the local properties of the network, such as the properties of…
The automatic disambiguation of word senses (i.e., the identification of which of the meanings is used in a given context for a word that has multiple meanings) is essential for such applications as machine translation and information…