Related papers: On the Evolution of Word Order
The explanations of large language models have recently been shown to be sensitive to the randomness used for their training, creating a need to characterize this sensitivity. In this paper, we propose a characterization that questions the…
Word order evolution has been hypothesized to be constrained by a word order permutation ring: transitions involving orders that are closer in the permutation ring are more likely. The hypothesis can be seen as a particular case of…
We study the question of whether a given regular language of finite trees can be defined in first-order logic. We develop an algebraic approach to address this question and we use it to derive several necessary and sufficient conditions for…
We propose a cognitively and linguistically motivated set of sorts for lexical semantics in a compositional setting: the classifiers in languages that do have such pronouns. These sorts are needed to include lexical considerations in a…
An object--oriented approach to create a natural language understanding system is considered. The understanding program is a formal system built on the base of predicative calculus. Horn's clauses are used as well--formed formulas. An…
The evolution of grammatical systems of syntactic and semantic composition is modeled here with a novel application of reinforcement learning theory. To test the functionalist thesis that speakers' expressive purposes shape their language,…
The sound inventories of the world's languages self-organize themselves giving rise to similar cross-linguistic patterns. In this work we attempt to capture this phenomenon of self-organization, which shapes the structure of the consonant…
The study of linguistic typology is rooted in the implications we find between linguistic features, such as the fact that languages with object-verb word ordering tend to have post-positions. Uncovering such implications typically amounts…
We survey structures endowed with natural partial orderings and prove their universality. These partial orders include partial orders on sets of words, partial orders formed by geometric objects, grammars, polynomials and homomorphism order…
Grammatical cues are sometimes redundant with word meanings in natural language. For instance, English word order rules constrain the word order of a sentence like "The dog chewed the bone" even though the status of "dog" as subject and…
The frequency of the preferred order for a noun phrase formed by demonstrative, numeral, adjective and noun has received significant attention over the last two decades. We investigate the actual distribution of the 24 possible orders.…
A new account of parameter setting during grammatical acquisition is presented in terms of Generalized Categorial Grammar embedded in a default inheritance hierarchy, providing a natural partial ordering on the setting of parameters.…
In `free word order' languages, every sentence is embedded in its specific context. Among others, the order of constituents is determined by the categories `theme', `rheme' and `contrastive focus'. This paper shows how to recognise and to…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it. Assuming such a structure we show that the semantics of various natural language…
Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties…
The eventual goal of a language model is to accurately predict the value of a missing word given its context. We present an approach to word prediction that is based on learning a representation for each word as a function of words and…
In English and other languages, multiple adjectives in noun phrases follow intricate ordering patterns. These patterns have been widely studied in linguistics and provide a useful test case for assessing how language models (LMs) acquire…
Word reordering is one of the most difficult aspects of statistical machine translation (SMT), and an important factor of its quality and efficiency. Despite the vast amount of research published to date, the interest of the community in…
While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility, their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort to identify…
We introduce a partial order on the set of all reduced words of a given permutation $\omega$, called \emph{directed-braid poset} of $\omega$. This poset enables us to produce two algorithms: One is a sorting algorithm applied on any reduced…