Related papers: Human Associations Help to Detect Conventionalized…
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…
Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining…
Recommendations based on behavioral data may be faced with ambiguous statistical evidence. We consider the case of association rules, relevant e.g.~for query and product recommendations. For example: Suppose that a customer belongs to…
A deterministic finite automaton is said to be synchronizing if it has a reset word, i.e. a word that brings all states of the automaton to a particular one. We prove that it is a PSPACE-complete problem to check whether the language of…
Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross-linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim…
Despite alarm over the reliance of machine learning systems on so-called spurious patterns, the term lacks coherent meaning in standard statistical frameworks. However, the language of causality offers clarity: spurious associations are due…
Are pairs of words that tend to occur together also likely to stand in a linguistic dependency? This empirical question is motivated by a long history of literature in cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and NLP. In this work we…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
In this paper, we propose a statistical test to determine whether a given word is used as a polysemic word or not. The statistic of the word in this test roughly corresponds to the fluctuation in the senses of the neighboring words a nd the…
Understanding causal explanations - reasons given for happenings in one's life - has been found to be an important psychological factor linked to physical and mental health. Causal explanations are often studied through manual…
Sentence similarity is considered the basis of many natural language tasks such as information retrieval, question answering and text summarization. The semantic meaning between compared text fragments is based on the words semantic…
Recently, emergence of signaling conventions, among which language is a prime example, draws a considerable interdisciplinary interest ranging from game theory, to robotics to evolutionary linguistics. Such a wide spectrum of research is…
Word embeddings have gained significant attention as learnable representations of semantic relations between words, and have been shown to improve upon the results of traditional word representations. However, little effort has been devoted…
The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that…
Compositional generalization is the ability to generalize systematically to a new data distribution by combining known components. Although humans seem to have a great ability to generalize compositionally, state-of-the-art neural models…
Humans carry stereotypic tacit assumptions (STAs) (Prince, 1978), or propositional beliefs about generic concepts. Such associations are crucial for understanding natural language. We construct a diagnostic set of word prediction prompts to…
We study the entropy of Chinese and English texts, based on characters in case of Chinese texts and based on words for both languages. Significant differences are found between the languages and between different personal styles of debating…
Conjoint analysis is a popular experimental design used to measure multidimensional preferences. Researchers examine how varying a factor of interest, while controlling for other relevant factors, influences decision-making. Currently,…
Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of…
By capturing statistical patterns in large corpora, machine learning has enabled significant advances in natural language processing, including in machine translation, question answering, and sentiment analysis. However, for agents to…