Related papers: On the universal structure of human lexical semant…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
Neural network models of language have long been used as a tool for developing hypotheses about conceptual representation in the mind and brain. For many years, such use involved extracting vector-space representations of words and using…
The lexicon consists of a set of word meanings and their semantic relationships. A systematic representation of the English lexicon based in psycholinguistic considerations has been put together in the database Wordnet in a long-term…
The words of a language reflect the structure of the human mind, allowing us to transmit thoughts between individuals. However, language can represent only a subset of our rich and detailed cognitive architecture. Here, we ask what kinds of…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
We aim to provide an explanation for how the human brain might connect words for sentence formation. A novel approach to modeling syntactic representation is introduced, potentially showing the existence of universal syntactic structures…
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited considerable cross-lingual generalization abilities, whereby they implicitly transfer knowledge across languages. However, the transfer is not equally successful for all languages, especially for…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Semantic measures are widely used today to estimate the strength of the semantic relationship between elements of various types: units of language (e.g., words, sentences, documents), concepts or even instances semantically characterized…
People acquire concepts through rich physical and social experiences and use them to understand and navigate the world. In contrast, large language models (LLMs), trained solely through next-token prediction on text, exhibit strikingly…
Lexical Semantics is concerned with how words encode mental representations of the world, i.e., concepts . We call this type of concepts, classification concepts . In this paper, we focus on Visual Semantics , namely on how humans build…
Cognition and language seem closely related to the human cognitive process, although they have not been studied and investigated in detail. Our brain is too complex to fully comprehend the structures and connectivity, as well as its…
Psychological research consistently finds that human ratings of words across diverse semantic scales can be reduced to a low-dimensional form with relatively little information loss. We find that the semantic associations encoded in the…
The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…
The process of meaning composition, wherein smaller units like morphemes or words combine to form the meaning of phrases and sentences, is essential for human sentence comprehension. Despite extensive neurolinguistic research into the brain…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
Psychology has had difficulty accounting for the creative, context-sensitive manner in which concepts are used. We believe this stems from the view of concepts as identifiers rather than bridges between mind and world that participate in…
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;…
How does scientific knowledge grow? This question has occupied a central place in the philosophy of science, stimulating heated debates, but yielding no clear consensus. Many explanations can be understood in terms of whether and how they…
Recent work has attempted to characterize the structure of semantic memory and the search algorithms which, together, best approximate human patterns of search revealed in a semantic fluency task. There are a number of models that seek to…