Related papers: Memory limitations are hidden in grammar
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…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Natural languages are complexly structured entities. They exhibit characterising regularities that can be exploited to link them one another. In this work, I compare two morphological aspects of languages: Written Patterns and Sentence…
Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and…
Language enables humans to share knowledge, reason about the world, and pass on strategies for survival and innovation across generations. At the heart of this process is not just the ability to communicate but also the remarkable…
Grammatical features such as number and gender serve two central functions in human languages. While they encode salient semantic attributes like numerosity and animacy, they also offload sentence processing cost by predictably linking…
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…
A lively ongoing debate is taking place, since the extraordinary emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with regards to their capability to understand the world and capture the meaning of the dialogues in which they are involved.…
Phrases are fundamental linguistic units through which humans convey semantics. This study critically examines the capacity of API-based large language models (LLMs) to comprehend phrase semantics, utilizing three human-annotated datasets.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have come closest among all models to date to mastering human language, yet opinions about their linguistic and cognitive capabilities remain split. Here, we evaluate LLMs using a distinction between formal…
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…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…
Although information theoretic characterizations of human communication have become increasingly popular in linguistics, to date they have largely involved grafting probabilistic constructs onto older ideas about grammar. Similarities…
A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language…
Language models (LMs) trained on large quantities of text have been claimed to acquire abstract linguistic representations. Our work tests the robustness of these abstractions by focusing on the ability of LMs to learn interactions between…
Language is a uniquely human trait, conveying information efficiently by organizing word sequences in sentences into hierarchical structures. A central question persists: Why is human language hierarchical? In this study, we show that…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
Despite widespread success in language understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) exhibit unclear and often inconsistent behavior when faced with tasks that require probabilistic reasoning. In this work, we present the first…
Languages are not created randomly but rather to communicate information. There is a strong association between languages and their underlying meanings, resulting in a sparse joint distribution that is heavily peaked according to their…