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_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…
What if the patterns hidden within dialogue reveal more about communication than the words themselves? We introduce Conversational DNA, a novel visual language that treats any dialogue -- whether between humans, between human and AI, or…
Large language models (LLMs) have complicated internal dynamics, but induce representations of words and phrases whose geometry we can study. Human language processing is also opaque, but neural response measurements can provide (noisy)…
Conversations allow the quick transfer of short bits of information and it is reasonable to expect that changes in communication medium affect how we converse. Using conversations in works of fiction and in an online social networking…
Cognitive diversity, reflected in variations of language, perspective, and reasoning, is essential to creativity and collective intelligence. This diversity is rich and grounded in culture, history, and individual experience. Yet as large…
Human language, the most powerful communication system in history, is closely associated with cognition. Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how…
Psychological research consistently finds that human ratings of words across diverse semantic scales can be reduced to a low-dimensional form with relatively little information loss. We find that the semantic associations encoded in the…
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…
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 complexity of human interactions with social and natural phenomena is mirrored in the way we describe our experiences through natural language. In order to retain and convey such a high dimensional information, the statistical…
The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…
By virtue of linguistic compositionality, few syntactic rules and a finite lexicon can generate an unbounded number of sentences. That is, language, though seemingly high-dimensional, can be explained using relatively few degrees of…
Many computational linguistic methods have been proposed to study the information content of languages. We consider two interesting research questions: 1) how is information distributed over long documents, and 2) how does content…
Semantic communication aims to facilitate purposeful information exchange among diverse intelligent entities, including humans, machines, and organisms. It emphasizes precise semantic transmission over data fidelity, striving for meaningful…
In Shannon's seminal paper, entropy of printed English, treated as a stationary stochastic process, was estimated to be roughly 1 bit per character. However, considered as a means of communication, language differs considerably from its…
Large language models have shown unprecedented abilities in generating linguistically coherent and syntactically correct natural language output. However, they often return incorrect and inconsistent answers to input questions. Due to the…
There is an intricate relation between the properties of an image and how humans behave while describing the image. This behavior shows ample variation, as manifested in human signals such as eye movements and when humans start to describe…
With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to various domains, concerns regarding the trustworthiness of LLMs in safety-critical scenarios have been raised, due to their unpredictable tendency to hallucinate and…
Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution \emph{rank diversity}. We calculate this diversity…
Language is not only a tool for communication but also a medium for human cognition and reasoning. If, as linguistic relativity suggests, the structure of language shapes cognitive patterns, then large language models (LLMs) trained on…