Related papers: Paying Attention to Function Words
Effectful programs interact in ways that go beyond simple input-output, making compositional reasoning challenging. Existing work has shown that when such programs are ``separate'', i.e., when programs do not interfere with each other, it…
Language is a ubiquitous tool that is foundational to reasoning and collaboration, ranging from everyday interactions to sophisticated problem-solving tasks. The establishment of a common language can serve as a powerful asset in ensuring…
Language carries thought and coordination among humans but rarely reaches further along the spectrum of diverse intelligence. Yet non-neural systems -- from gene regulatory networks and microbial consortia to fungi -- are increasingly…
A number of concepts are included in the term 'consciousness'. We choose to concentrate here on phenomenal consciousness, the process through which we are able to experience aspects of our environment or of our physical state. We probably…
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.…
A longstanding question in cognitive science concerns the learning mechanisms underlying compositionality in human cognition. Humans can infer the structured relationships (e.g., grammatical rules) implicit in their sensory observations…
To interact with humans, artificial intelligence (AI) systems must understand our social world. Within this world norms play an important role in motivating and guiding agents. However, very few computational theories for learning social…
As text generated by large language models proliferates, it becomes vital to understand how humans engage with such text, and whether or not they are able to detect when the text they are reading did not originate with a human writer. Prior…
As text processing systems expand in scope, they will require ever larger lexicons along with a parsing capability for discriminating among many senses of a word. Existing systems do not incorporate such subtleties in meaning for their…
The named concepts and compositional operators present in natural language provide a rich source of information about the kinds of abstractions humans use to navigate the world. Can this linguistic background knowledge improve the…
When using a third language to construct a bilingual dictionary, it is necessary to discriminate equivalencies from inappropriate words derived as a result of ambiguity in the third language. We propose a method to treat this by utilizing…
Language sciences rely less and less on formal syntax as their base. The reason is probably its lack of psychological reality, knowingly avoided. Philosophers of science call for a paradigm shift in which explanations are by mechanisms, as…
In this paper we discuss the following issue: How do we decide whether a certain property of language is a competence property or a performance property? Our claim is that the answer to this question is not given a-priori. The answer…
Current evaluation metrics for language modeling and generation rely heavily on the accuracy of predicted (or generated) words as compared to a reference ground truth. While important, token-level accuracy only captures one aspect of a…
This introduction aims to tell the story of how we put words into computers. It is part of the story of the field of natural language processing (NLP), a branch of artificial intelligence. It targets a wide audience with a basic…
Functional languages with strong static type systems have beneficial properties to help ensure program correctness and reliability. Surprisingly, their practical significance in applications is low relative to other languages lacking in…
Language is crucial for human intelligence, but what exactly is its role? We take language to be a part of a system for understanding and communicating about situations. The human ability to understand and communicate about situations…
Humans excel at applying learned behavior to unlearned situations. A crucial component of this generalization behavior is our ability to compose/decompose a whole into reusable parts, an attribute known as compositionality. One of the…
By the age of two, children tend to assume that new word categories are based on objects' shape, rather than their color or texture; this assumption is called the shape bias. They are thought to learn this bias by observing that their…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…