Related papers: Is there an aesthetic component of language?

We propose a novel feature selection strategy to discover language-independent acoustic features that tend to be responsible for emotions regardless of languages, linguistics and other factors. Experimental results suggest that the…

Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to…

Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression…

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…

Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…

Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…

In machine learning (ML), researchers and engineers seem to be at odds. System implementers would prefer models to be declarative, with detailed type information and semantic restrictions that allow models to be optimised, rearranged and…

Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the…

Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…

Language models can produce fluent, grammatical text. Nonetheless, some maintain that language models don't really learn language and also that, even if they did, that would not be informative for the study of human learning and processing.…

Given the growing ubiquity of emojis in language, there is a need for methods and resources that shed light on their meaning and communicative role. One conspicuous aspect of emojis is their use to convey affect in ways that may otherwise…

Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…

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…

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with…

Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of human languages, often used to express complex ideas in compressed or conventional ways (e.g. eager beaver as a keen and enthusiastic person). However, their interpretations may not be…

Natural language, although complex in structure, contains considerable detail. All instances of language serve the purpose of making sense of experience and the intent of actors. Language conveys actor's personal reference to goals,…

What does it mean to know language? Since the Chomskian revolution, one popular answer to this question has been: to possess a generative grammar that exclusively licenses certain syntactic structures. Decades later, not even an…

Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding--namely, that the way something is expressed reflects…

Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of natural language and constantly being added to a language. Owing to their non-compositionality and their ability to take on a figurative or literal meaning depending on the sentential context,…

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…