Related papers: The Hierarchical Organization of Syntax

The evolution of human language allowed the efficient propagation of nongenetic information, thus creating a new form of evolutionary change. Language development in children offers the opportunity of exploring the emergence of such complex…

Emotional responses to auditory stimuli are a common part of everyday life. However, for some individuals, these responses can be distressing enough to interfere with daily functioning. Despite their prevalence, the mechanisms underlying…

The network characteristics based on the phonological similarities in the lexicons of several languages were examined. These languages differed widely in their history and linguistic structure, but commonalities in the network…

Matrix syntax is a formal model of syntactic relations in language. The purpose of this paper is to explain its mathematical foundations, for an audience with some formal background. We make an axiomatic presentation, motivating each axiom…

The Internet has evolved through successive architectural abstractions that enabled unprecedented scale, interoperability, and innovation. Packet-based networking enabled the reliable transport of bits; cloud-native systems enabled the…

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…

Functional networks provide a topological description of activity patterns in the brain, as they stem from the propagation of neural activity on the underlying anatomical or structural network of synaptic connections. This latter is well…

The underlying structure of natural language is hierarchical; words combine into phrases, which in turn form clauses. An awareness of this hierarchical structure can aid machine learning models in performing many linguistic tasks. However,…

This research aims to investigate the dynamic nature of linguistic style throughout various stages of life, from post teenage to old age. By employing linguistic analysis tools and methodologies, the study will delve into the intricacies of…

We explore how the social dynamics of communication and learning can bring about the rise of a syntactic communication in a population of speakers. Our study is developed starting from a version of the Naming Game model where an elementary…

When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…

Understanding which information is encoded in deep models of spoken and written language has been the focus of much research in recent years, as it is crucial for debugging and improving these architectures. Most previous work has focused…

The distributed representations currently used are dense and uninterpretable, leading to interpretations that themselves are relative, overcomplete, and hard to interpret. We propose a method that transforms these word vectors into reduced…

Accurate syntactic representations are essential for robust generalization in natural language. Recent work has found that pre-training can teach language models to rely on hierarchical syntactic features - as opposed to incorrect linear…

Understanding the origins of complexity is a fundamental challenge with implications for biological and technological systems. Network theory emerges as a powerful tool to model complex systems. Networks are an intuitive framework to…

Human communication is often executed in the form of a narrative, an account of connected events composed of characters, actions, and settings. A coherent narrative structure is therefore a requisite for a well-formulated narrative -- be it…

Hierarchical organization -- the recursive composition of sub-modules -- is ubiquitous in biological networks, including neural, metabolic, ecological, and genetic regulatory networks, and in human-made systems, such as large organizations…

The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…

As speakers turn their thoughts into sentences, they maintain a balance between the complexity of words and syntax. However, it is unclear whether this syntax-lexicon tradeoff is unique to the spoken language production that is under the…

Human conversations can evolve in many different ways, creating challenges for automatic understanding and summarization. Goal-oriented conversations often have meaningful sub-dialogue structure, but it can be highly domain-dependent. This…