Related papers: Kauffman's adjacent possible in word order evoluti…
Fix two words over the binary alphabet $\{0,1\}$, and generate iid Bernoulli$(p)$ bits until one of the words occurs in sequence. This setup, commonly known as Penney's ante, was popularized by Conway, who found (in unpublished work) a…
Word order, an essential property of natural languages, is injected in Transformer-based neural language models using position encoding. However, recent experiments have shown that explicit position encoding is not always useful, since some…
We say that a family $\mathcal{W}$ of strings over $\Sigma^+$ forms a Unique Maximal Factorization Family (UMFF) if and only if every $w \in \mathcal{W}$ has a unique maximal factorization. Further, an UMFF $\mathcal{W}$ is called a…
The word mover's distance (WMD) is a popular semantic similarity metric for two texts. This position paper studies several possible extensions of WMD. We experiment with the frequency of words in the corpus as a weighting factor and the…
Given a countable set X (usually taken to be the natural numbers or integers), an infinite permutation, \pi, of X is a linear ordering of X. This paper investigates the combinatorial complexity of infinite permutations on the natural…
We consider entailment problems involving powerful constraint languages such as guarded existential rules, in which additional semantic restrictions are put on a set of distinguished relations. We consider restricting a relation to be…
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…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish…
The Saccharomyces cerevisiae protein-protein interaction map, as well as many natural and man-made networks, shares the scale-free topology. The preferential attachment model was suggested as a generic network evolution model that yields…
Involution words are variations of reduced words for involutions in Coxeter groups, first studied under the name of "admissible sequences" by Richardson and Springer. They are maximal chains in Richardson and Springer's weak order on…
Combining the representations of the words that make up a sentence into a cohesive whole is difficult, since it needs to account for the order of words, and to establish how the words present relate to each other. The solution we propose…
Population structure has been known to substantially affect evolutionary dynamics. Networks that promote the spreading of fitter mutants are called amplifiers of natural selection, and those that suppress the spreading of fitter mutants are…
The number of 123-avoiding permutation on $\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ with a fixed leading terms is counted by the ballot numbers. The same holds for $132$-avoiding permutations. These results were proved by Miner and Pak using the…
We investigate the quantifier alternation hierarchy in first-order logic on finite words. Levels in this hierarchy are defined by counting the number of quantifier alternations in formulas. We prove that one can decide membership of a…
In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity, after an informal…
To improve the generalization of the representations for natural language processing tasks, words are commonly represented using vectors, where distances among the vectors are related to the similarity of the words. While word2vec, the…
In this paper we compare two finite words $u$ and $v$ by the lexicographical order of the infinite words $u^\omega$ and $v^\omega$. Informally, we say that we compare $u$ and $v$ by the infinite order. We show several properties of Lyndon…
We investigate two problems for a class C of regular word languages. The C-membership problem asks for an algorithm to decide whether an input language belongs to C. The C-separation problem asks for an algorithm that, given as input two…
A pattern is encountered in a word if some infix of the word is the image of the pattern under some non-erasing morphism. A pattern $p$ is unavoidable if, over every finite alphabet, every sufficiently long word encounters $p$. A theorem by…