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Humans can systematically generalize to novel compositions of existing concepts. Recent studies argue that neural networks appear inherently ineffective in such cognitive capacity, leading to a pessimistic view and a lack of attention to…
Humans are social creatures who readily recognize various social interactions from simple display of moving shapes. While previous research has often focused on visual features, we examine what semantic representations that humans employ to…
Categories such as animal or furniture are acquired at an early age and play an important role in processing, organizing, and communicating world knowledge. Categories exist across cultures: they allow to efficiently represent the…
Syntax connects words to each other in very specific ways. Two words are syntactically connected if they depend directly on each other. Syntactic connections usually happen within a sentence. Gathering all those connection across several…
Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because processing within the brain's core…
The impact of culture in visual emotion perception has recently captured the attention of multimedia research. In this study, we pro- vide powerful computational linguistics tools to explore, retrieve and browse a dataset of 16K…
In recent years, a new interest for the use of graph-theory based networks has emerged within the field of cognitive science. This has played a key role in mining the large amount of data generated by word association norms. In the present…
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…
The syntactic structures of sentences can be readily read-out from the activations of large language models (LLMs). However, the ``structural probes'' that have been developed to reveal this phenomenon are typically evaluated on an…
Language is not only a tool for communication but also a medium for human cognition and reasoning. If, as linguistic relativity suggests, the structure of language shapes cognitive patterns, then large language models (LLMs) trained on…
How does language inform our downstream thinking? In particular, how do humans make meaning from language--and how can we leverage a theory of linguistic meaning to build machines that think in more human-like ways? In this paper, we…
The intuitive notion of evidence has both semantic and syntactic features. In this paper, we develop an {\em evidence logic} for epistemic agents faced with possibly contradictory evidence from different sources. The logic is based on a…
It is demonstrated that under the hypothesis of boundedness, the semantics appears as a property of spontaneous physical processes. It turns that both semantic structure and semantic meaning have their own physical agents each of which is…
How human cognitive abilities are formed has long captivated researchers. However, a significant challenge lies in developing meaningful methods to measure these complex processes. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), which now…
Humans organize knowledge into compact conceptual categories that balance compression with semantic richness. Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive linguistic abilities, but whether they navigate this same compression-meaning…
Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…
The explicit relationship among perception, communication, and design is being discussed in some detail, in order to relate it to characteristic details of the modeling of the world which defines the scientific and artistic activities of…
Large language models show human-like performance in knowledge extraction, reasoning and dialogue, but it remains controversial whether this performance is best explained by memorization and pattern matching, or whether it reflects…
Metaphors are everywhere. They appear extensively across all domains of natural language, from the most sophisticated poetry to seemingly dry academic prose. A significant body of research in the cognitive science of language argues for the…
Interpreting natural language is an increasingly important task in computer algorithms due to the growing availability of unstructured textual data. Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications rely on semantic networks for structured…