Related papers: The morphospace of language networks
Recent advancements in unsupervised feature learning have developed powerful latent representations of words. However, it is still not clear what makes one representation better than another and how we can learn the ideal representation.…
Language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to the social interactions it facilitates. Despite the incredible effectiveness of language processing models to tackle…
Systems for language understanding have become remarkably strong at overcoming linguistic imperfections in tasks involving phrase matching or simple reasoning. Yet, their accuracy drops dramatically as the number of reasoning steps…
Since language is tied to cognition, we expect the linguistic structures to reflect patterns we encounter in nature and analyzed by physics. Within this realm we investigate the process of protolanguage acquisition, using analytical and…
Recent findings in neuroscience suggest that the human brain represents information in a geometric structure (for instance, through conceptual spaces). In order to communicate, we flatten the complex representation of entities and their…
The mental lexicon is a complex cognitive system representing information about the words/concepts that one knows. Decades of psychological experiments have shown that conceptual associations across multiple, interactive cognitive levels…
We investigate the nature of written human language within the framework of complex network theory. In particular, we analyse the topology of Orwell's \textit{1984} focusing on the local properties of the network, such as the properties of…
Recent research has shown that language and the socio-cognitive phenomena associated with it can be aptly modeled and visualized through networks of linguistic entities. However, most of the existing works on linguistic networks focus only…
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…
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…
Knowledge is a network of interconnected concepts. Yet, precisely how the topological structure of knowledge constrains its acquisition remains unknown, hampering the development of learning enhancement strategies. Here we study the…
The distribution of human linguistic groups presents a number of interesting and non-trivial patterns. The distributions of the number of speakers per language and the area each group covers follow log-normal distributions, while population…
One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…
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…
Among the several findings deriving from the application of complex network formalism to the investigation of natural phenomena, the fact that linguistic constructions follow power laws presents special interest for its potential…
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…
Routing information through networks is a universal phenomenon in both natural and manmade complex systems. When each node has full knowledge of the global network connectivity, finding short communication paths is merely a matter of…
Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…
A large body of work in psycholinguistics has focused on the idea that online language comprehension can be shallow or `good enough': given constraints on time or available computation, comprehenders may form interpretations of their input…
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,…