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Related papers: The Hierarchical Organization of Syntax

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It is commonly believed that knowledge of syntactic structure should improve language modeling. However, effectively and computationally efficiently incorporating syntactic structure into neural language models has been a challenging topic.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-13 Wenyu Du , Zhouhan Lin , Yikang Shen , Timothy J. O'Donnell , Yoshua Bengio , Yue Zhang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Luyao Chen , Weibo Gao , Junjie Wu , Jinshan Wu , Angela D. Friederici

Recent studies have shown how spiking networks can learn complex functionality through error-correcting plasticity, but the resulting structures and dynamics remain poorly studied. To elucidate how these models may link to observed dynamics…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-08-19 Jonas Oberste-Frielinghaus , Anno C. Kurth , Julian Göltz , Laura Kriener , Junji Ito , Mihai A. Petrovici , Sonja Grün

One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Li-Min Wang , Sun-Ting Tsai , Shan-Jyun Wu , Meng-Xue Tsai , Daw-Wei Wang , Yi-Ching Su , Tzay-Ming Hong

Representing and navigating hierarchy is a fundamental primitive of reasoning. Large language models have demonstrated proficiency in a wide variety of tasks requiring hierarchical reasoning, but there exists limited analysis on how the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Cutter Dawes , Aryan Sharma , Angelos Ioannis Lagos , Shivam Raval

Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-03-02 Ceyda Sanli , Anupam Mondal , Erik Cambria

The emergence of syntax during childhood is a remarkable example of how complex correlations unfold in nonlinear ways through development. In particular, rapid transitions seem to occur as children reach the age of two, which seems to…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2018-07-25 Bernat Corominas-Murtra , Martí Sànchez Fibla , Sergi Valverde , Ricard Solé

Network representation is a crucial topic in historical social network analysis. The debate around their value and connotations, led by humanist scholars, is today more relevant than ever, seeing how common these representations are as…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Houda Lamqaddam , Inez De Prekel , Koenraad Brosens , Katrien Verbert

Linear sequences of words are implicitly represented in our brains by hierarchical structures that organize the composition of words in sentences. Linguists formalize different frameworks to model this hierarchy; two of the most common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Omar Momen

Neural networks trained on natural language processing tasks capture syntax even though it is not provided as a supervision signal. This indicates that syntactic analysis is essential to the understating of language in artificial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-05 Tomasz Limisiewicz , David Mareček

The speech code is a vehicle of language: it defines a set of forms used by a community to carry information. Such a code is necessary to support the linguistic interactions that allow humans to communicate. How then may a speech code be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

Human language can be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and neighboring words in sentences are connected by edges. It was recently found (Ferrer and…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 S. N. Dorogovtsev , J. F. F. Mendes

Transformers trained on natural language data have been shown to learn its hierarchical structure and generalize to sentences with unseen syntactic structures without explicitly encoding any structural bias. In this work, we investigate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Kabir Ahuja , Vidhisha Balachandran , Madhur Panwar , Tianxing He , Noah A. Smith , Navin Goyal , Yulia Tsvetkov

Formation of a hierarchy within an organization is a natural way of assigning the duties, delegating responsibilities and optimizing the flow of information. Only for the smallest companies the lack of the hierarchy, that is, a flat one, is…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2020-09-16 Mateusz Nurek , Radosław Michalski

Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 David Sanchez , Luciano Zunino , Juan De Gregorio , Raul Toral , Claudio Mirasso

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), predicting linguistic structures, such as parsing and chunking, has mostly relied on manual annotations of syntactic structures. This paper introduces an unsupervised approach to chunking, a syntactic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Zijun Wu , Anup Anand Deshmukh , Yongkang Wu , Jimmy Lin , Lili Mou

A central question in psycholinguistics is the timing of syntax in sentence processing. Much of the existing evidence comes from violation paradigms, which conflate two separable processes - syntactic category detection and phrase structure…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Nan Wang , Jiaxuan Li

The phenomenon of human language is widely studied from various points of view. It is interesting not only for social scientists, antropologists or philosophers, but also for those, interesting in the network dynamics. In several recent…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 Maria Markosova

Many studies have shown that human languages tend to optimize for lower complexity and increased communication efficiency. Syntactic dependency distance, which measures the linear distance between dependent words, is often considered a key…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Yanran Chen , Wei Zhao , Anne Breitbarth , Manuel Stoeckel , Alexander Mehler , Steffen Eger

We explore using latent natural language instructions as an expressive and compositional representation of complex actions for hierarchical decision making. Rather than directly selecting micro-actions, our agent first generates a latent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-03 Hengyuan Hu , Denis Yarats , Qucheng Gong , Yuandong Tian , Mike Lewis