Related papers: Is there an aesthetic component of language?
Humans no doubt use language to communicate about their emotional experiences, but does language in turn help humans understand emotions, or is language just a vehicle of communication? This study used a form of artificial intelligence (AI)…
Compositionality has traditionally been understood as a major factor in productivity of language and, more broadly, human cognition. Yet, recently, some research started to question its status, showing that artificial neural networks are…
We study expression learning problems with syntactic restrictions and introduce the class of finite-aspect checkable languages to characterize symbolic languages that admit decidable learning. The semantics of such languages can be defined…
We investigate the properties of formal languages expressible in terms of formulas over quantifier-free theories of word equations, arithmetic over length constraints, and language membership predicates for the classes of regular, visibly…
This essay considers the special character of mathematical reasoning, and draws on observations from interactive theorem proving and the history of mathematics to clarify the nature of formal and informal mathematical language. It proposes…
Following the results and the general methodological framework of a preceeding paper (Models and Metaphors, part I, henceforth: MM), we develop some results on the epistemological state of natural laws and ask for explicit possibilities of…
In this paper we provide a first analysis of the research questions that arise when dealing with the problem of communicating pieces of formal argumentation through natural language interfaces. It is a generally held opinion that formal…
The use of terms from natural and social scientific titles and abstracts is studied from the perspective of sublanguages and their specialized dictionaries. Different notions of sublanguage distinctiveness are explored. Objective methods…
Personal attributes represent structured information about a person, such as their hobbies, pets, family, likes and dislikes. We introduce the tasks of extracting and inferring personal attributes from human-human dialogue, and analyze the…
Humans refer to objects in their environments all the time, especially in dialogue with other people. We explore generating and comprehending natural language referring expressions for objects in images. In particular, we focus on…
Human lexicons contain many different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., "purple" or "magenta" for the same shade of color. On the one hand, studies on language use have explored how speakers adapt their…
The unique and beautiful character of certain mathematical results and proofs is often considered one of the most gratifying aspects of engaging with mathematics. We study whether this perception of mathematical arguments having an…
Language is a popular resource to mine speakers' attitude bias, supposing that speakers' statements represent their bias on concepts. However, psychology studies show that people's explicit bias in statements can be different from their…
Emotional language generation is one of the keys to human-like artificial intelligence. Humans use different type of emotions depending on the situation of the conversation. Emotions also play an important role in mediating the engagement…
Accounts of semantic phenomena often involve extending types of meanings and revising composition rules at the same time. The concept of monads allows many such accounts -- for intensionality, variable binding, quantification and focus --…
All natural languages exhibit a distinction between content words (like nouns and adjectives) and function words (like determiners, auxiliaries, prepositions). Yet surprisingly little has been said about the emergence of this universal…
"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and…
Distributional semantics is the linguistic theory that a word's meaning can be derived from its distribution in natural language (i.e., its use). Language models are commonly viewed as an implementation of distributional semantics, as they…
People convey their intention and attitude through linguistic styles of the text that they write. In this study, we investigate lexicon usages across styles throughout two lenses: human perception and machine word importance, since words…
Natural Language Processing prides itself to be an empirically-minded, if not outright empiricist field, and yet lately it seems to get itself into essentialist debates on issues of meaning and measurement ("Do Large Language Models…