Related papers: Is there an aesthetic component of language?
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…
Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…
Is there a characteristic of coordination languages that makes them qualitatively different from general programming languages and deserves special academic attention? This report proposes a nuanced answer in three parts. The first part…
Classes of linguistic paradoxes and linguistic tautologies are introduced with examples and explanations. They are part of the author's work on the Paradoxist Philosophy based on mathematical logic. The general cases exposed below are…
During a conversation, individuals take turns speaking and engage in exchanges, which can occur smoothly or involve interruptions. Listeners have various ways of participating, such as displaying backchannels, signalling the aim to take a…
Language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to the social interactions it facilitates. Despite the incredible effectiveness of language processing models to tackle…
This paper proposes a simple test for compositionality (i.e., literal usage) of a word or phrase in a context-specific way. The test is computationally simple, relying on no external resources and only uses a set of trained word vectors.…
Math is constructed by people for people: just as natural language corpora reflect not just propositions but the communicative goals of language users, the math data that models are trained on reflects not just idealized mathematical…
Making a linguistic theory is like making a programming language: one typically devises a type system to delineate the acceptable utterances and a denotational semantics to explain observations on their behavior. Via this connection, the…
The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…
While large language models (LLMs) are generally considered proficient in generating language, how similar their language usage is to that of humans remains understudied. In this paper, we test whether models exhibit linguistic convergence,…
Although information theoretic characterizations of human communication have become increasingly popular in linguistics, to date they have largely involved grafting probabilistic constructs onto older ideas about grammar. Similarities…
In emotion recognition from speech, a key challenge lies in identifying speech signal segments that carry the most relevant acoustic variations for discerning specific emotions. Traditional approaches compute functionals for features such…
Generic sentences express generalisations about the world without explicit quantification. Although generics are central to everyday communication, building a precise semantic framework has proven difficult, in part because speakers use…
The conventional GUI is more mechanical and does not recognize or communicate emotions. The modern GUIs are trying to infer the likely emotional state and personality of the user and communicate through a corresponding emotional state.…
In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…
Dysphasic subjects do not have complete linguistic abilities and only produce a weakly structured, topicalized language. They are offered artificial symbolic languages to help them communicate in a way more adapted to their linguistic…
Prosody -- the suprasegmental component of speech, including pitch, loudness, and tempo -- carries critical aspects of meaning. However, the relationship between the information conveyed by prosody vs. by the words themselves remains poorly…
A key aim of science is explanation, yet the idea of explaining language phenomena has taken a backseat in mainstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) and many other areas of Artificial Intelligence. I argue that explanation of linguistic…
Recognizing emotion from speech has become one the active research themes in speech processing and in applications based on human-computer interaction. This paper conducts an experimental study on recognizing emotions from human speech. The…