Related papers: Human languages order information efficiently
The sequential structure of language, and the order of words in a sentence specifically, plays a central role in human language processing. Consequently, in designing computational models of language, the de facto approach is to present…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
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…
We consider a language together with the subword relation, the cover relation, and regular predicates. For such structures, we consider the extension of first-order logic by threshold- and modulo-counting quantifiers. Depending on the…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We…
Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…
Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin…
Word order is an important concept in natural language, and in this work, we study how word order affects the induction of world knowledge from raw text using language models. We use word analogies to probe for such knowledge. Specifically,…
Are the predictions of humans and language models affected by similar things? Research suggests that while comprehending language, humans make predictions about upcoming words, with more predictable words being processed more easily.…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
Human language can be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and neighboring words in sentences are connected by edges. It was recently found (Ferrer and…
Sequence-processing neural networks led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks. As a consequence, there has been increasing interest in understanding to what extent they process language as humans do. We aim here to uncover which biases…
Do machines and humans process language in similar ways? Recent research has hinted at the affirmative, showing that human neural activity can be effectively predicted using the internal representations of language models (LMs). Although…
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition,…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…