Related papers: The morphospace of language networks
This paper includes a reflection on the role of networks in the study of English language acquisition, as well as a collection of practical criteria to annotate free-speech corpora from children utterances. At the theoretical level, the…
Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…
In the domain of unsupervised learning most work on speech has focused on discovering low-level constructs such as phoneme inventories or word-like units. In contrast, for written language, where there is a large body of work on…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
Language models (LMs) are trained on collections of documents, written by individual human agents to achieve specific goals in an outside world. During training, LMs have access only to text of these documents, with no direct evidence of…
The search for linguistic patterns, stylometry and forensic linguistics have in the theory of complex networks, their structures and associated mathematical tools, allies with which to model and analyze texts. In this paper we present a new…
Pragmatics is core to natural language, enabling speakers to communicate efficiently with structures like ellipsis and anaphora that can shorten utterances without loss of meaning. These structures require a listener to interpret an…
Language exhibits structure at different scales, ranging from subwords to words, sentences, paragraphs, and documents. To what extent do deep models capture information at these scales, and can we force them to better capture structure…
Artificial agents have been shown to learn to communicate when needed to complete a cooperative task. Some level of language structure (e.g., compositionality) has been found in the learned communication protocols. This observed structure…
Spoken communication occurs in a "noisy channel" characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input,…
Understanding how humans process natural language has long been a vital research direction. The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently experienced a surge in the development of powerful language models. These models have…
Statistical regularities in human language have fascinated researchers for decades, suggesting deep underlying principles governing its evolution and information structuring for efficient communication. While Zipf's Law describes the…
A unified theory of language combines a Bayesian cognitive linguistic model of language processing, with the proposal that language evolved by sexual selection for the display of intelligence. The theory accounts for the major facts of…
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and…
As individuals communicate, their exchanges form a dynamic network. We demonstrate, using time series analysis of communication in three online settings, that network structure alone can be highly revealing of the diversity and novelty of…
The evolution of language has been a hotly debated subject with contradicting hypotheses and unreliable claims. Drawing from signalling games, dynamic population mechanics, machine learning and algebraic topology, we present a method for…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Large language models (LLMs) offer a new empirical setting in which long-standing theories of linguistic meaning can be examined. This paper contrasts two broad approaches: social constructivist accounts associated with language games, and…
Hierarchies are the hidden backbones of complex systems and their analysis allows for a deeper understanding of their structure and how they evolve. We consider languages also to be complex adaptive systems with several intricate networks…
Autoregressive language models achieve remarkable performance, yet a unified theory explaining their internal mechanisms, how training shapes representations, and why these representations support complex behavior remains incomplete. We…