Related papers: Ambiguity in language networks
Programming with logic for sophisticated applications must deal with recursion and negation, which together have created significant challenges in logic, leading to many different, conflicting semantics of rules. This paper describes a…
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…
Despite the frequent challenges posed by ambiguity when representing meaning via natural language, it is often ignored or deliberately removed in tasks mapping language to formally-designed representations, which generally assume a…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
Systems for language understanding have become remarkably strong at overcoming linguistic imperfections in tasks involving phrase matching or simple reasoning. Yet, their accuracy drops dramatically as the number of reasoning steps…
The meaning of a sentence is a function of the relations that hold between its words. We instantiate this relational view of semantics in a series of neural models based on variants of relation networks (RNs) which represent a set of…
Human sociality depends upon the benefits of mutual aid and extensive communication. However mutual aid is made difficult by the problems of coordinating diverse norms and preferences, and communication is harried by substantial ambiguity…
Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) trained for next-word prediction have demonstrated remarkable proficiency at producing coherent text. But are they equally adept at forming coherent probability judgments? We use probabilistic…
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…
Populations have often been perceived as a structuring component for language to emerge and evolve: the larger the population, the more structured the language. While this observation is widespread in the sociolinguistic literature, it has…
The evolution of human language allowed the efficient propagation of nongenetic information, thus creating a new form of evolutionary change. Language development in children offers the opportunity of exploring the emergence of such complex…
Can artificial intelligence discover, from raw experience and without human supervision, concepts that humans have discovered? One challenge is that human concepts themselves are fluid: conceptual boundaries can shift, split, and merge as…
Human language offers a powerful window into our thoughts -- we tell stories, give explanations, and express our beliefs and goals through words. Abundant evidence also suggests that language plays a developmental role in structuring our…
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature,…
Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task. Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional -- i.e., express meaning by…
Detecting ambiguity is important for language understanding, including uncertainty estimation, humour detection, and processing garden path sentences. We assess language models' sensitivity to ambiguity by introducing an adversarial…
An exhaustive study on neural network language modeling (NNLM) is performed in this paper. Different architectures of basic neural network language models are described and examined. A number of different improvements over basic neural…
A central component of rational behavior is logical inference: the process of determining which conclusions follow from a set of premises. Psychologists have documented several ways in which humans' inferences deviate from the rules of…
Natural language has the universal properties of being compositional and grounded in reality. The emergence of linguistic properties is often investigated through simulations of emergent communication in referential games. However, these…
As NNs permeate various scientific and industrial domains, understanding the universality and reusability of their representations becomes crucial. At their core, these networks create intermediate neural representations, indicated as…