Related papers: The syntax-lexicon tradeoff in writing
Hierarchies are the hidden backbones of complex systems and their analysis allows for a deeper understanding of their structure and how they evolve. We consider languages also to be complex adaptive systems with several intricate networks…
This short note discusses the role of syntax vs. semantics and the interplay between logic, philosophy, and language in computer science and game theory.
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
Targeted syntactic evaluations have demonstrated the ability of language models to perform subject-verb agreement given difficult contexts. To elucidate the mechanisms by which the models accomplish this behavior, this study applies causal…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
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…
Using theory and experiments, this paper shows that the difficulty of making tradeoffs offers a parsimonious explanation for a wide range of behavioral phenomena. We develop a model of imprecise comparisons applicable to multiattribute,…
Value trade-offs are an integral part of human decision-making and language use, however, current tools for interpreting such dynamic and multi-faceted notions of values in language models are limited. In cognitive science, so-called…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
Large language models demonstrate limited capability in proficiency-controlled sentence simplification, particularly when simplifying across large readability levels. We propose a framework that decomposes complex simplifications into…
Written language is complex. A written text can be considered an attempt to convey a meaningful message which ends up being constrained by language rules, context dependence and highly redundant in its use of resources. Despite all these…
Writing style is a combination of consistent decisions at different levels of language production including lexical, syntactic, and structural associated to a specific author (or author groups). While lexical-based models have been widely…
Text simplification is one of the domains in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that offers an opportunity to understand the text in a simplified manner for exploration. However, it is always hard to understand and retrieve knowledge from…
This paper investigates the influence of discourse features on text complexity assessment. To do so, we created two data sets based on the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Simple English Wikipedia corpora and compared the influence of…
Syntactic structure of sentences in a document substantially informs about its authorial writing style. Sentence representation learning has been widely explored in recent years and it has been shown that it improves the generalization of…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
Digital learning platforms enable students to learn on a flexible and individual schedule as well as providing instant feedback mechanisms. The field of STEM education requires students to solve numerous training exercises to grasp…
Leveraging an established exercise in negotiation education, we build a novel dataset for studying how the use of language shapes bilateral bargaining. Our dataset extends existing work in two ways: 1) we recruit participants via behavioral…
We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified…
The differences in written text and conversational speech are substantial; previous parsers trained on treebanked text have given very poor results on spontaneous speech. For spoken language, the mismatch in style also extends to prosodic…