Related papers: The syntax-lexicon tradeoff in writing
Language models (LMs) have been used in cognitive modeling as well as engineering studies -- they compute information-theoretic complexity metrics that simulate humans' cognitive load during reading. This study highlights a limitation of…
Language is a fundamental aspect of human societies, continuously evolving in response to various stimuli, including societal changes and intercultural interactions. Technological advancements have profoundly transformed communication, with…
This article presents a neural language architecture of sentence structure in the brain, in which sentences are temporal connection paths that interconnect neural structures underlying their words. Words remain 'in-situ', hence they are…
We report on the idea to use colours to distinguish syntax and semantics as an educational tool in logic classes. This distinction gives also reason to reflect on some philosophical issues concerning semantics.
We first present our view of detection and correction of syntactic errors. We then introduce a new correction method, based on heuristic criteria used to decide which correction should be preferred. Weighting of these criteria leads to a…
This paper explores the impact of variable pragmatic competence on communicative success through simulating language learning and conversing between speakers and listeners with different levels of reasoning abilities. Through studying this…
A unified theory of language combines a Bayesian cognitive linguistic model of language processing, with the proposal that language evolved by sexual selection for the display of intelligence. The theory accounts for the major facts of…
Speech is a fundamental means of communication that can be seen to provide two channels for transmitting information: the lexical channel of which words are said, and the non-lexical channel of how they are spoken. Both channels shape…
The question What is Complexity? has occupied a great deal of time and paper over the last 20 or so years. There are a myriad different perspectives and definitions but still no consensus. In this paper I take a phenomenological approach,…
With the advent of large language models (LLM), the line between human-crafted and machine-generated texts has become increasingly blurred. This paper delves into the inquiry of identifying discernible and unique linguistic properties in…
The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved their ability to generate natural language, making texts generated by LLMs increasingly indistinguishable from human-written texts. Recent research has…
Humans teach others about the world through language and demonstration. When might one of these modalities be more effective than the other? In this work, we study the factors that modulate the effectiveness of language vs. demonstration…
Mathematical text is written using a combination of words and mathematical expressions. This combination, along with a specific way of structuring sentences makes it challenging for state-of-art NLP tools to understand and reason on top of…
Recent work on evaluating the diversity of text generated by LLMs has focused on word-level features. Here we offer an analysis of syntactic features to characterize general repetition in models, beyond frequent n-grams. Specifically, we…
Debate and deliberation play essential roles in politics and government, but most models presume that debates are won mainly via superior style or agenda control. Ideally, however, debates would be won on the merits, as a function of which…
Recent work has explored the syntactic abilities of RNNs using the subject-verb agreement task, which diagnoses sensitivity to sentence structure. RNNs performed this task well in common cases, but faltered in complex sentences (Linzen et…
Language expression is known to be dependent on attributes intrinsic to the author. To date, however, little attention has been devoted to the effect of interfaces used to articulate language on its expression. Here we study a large corpus…
Why do some things succeed in the marketplace of ideas? While some argue that content drives success, others suggest that style, or the way ideas are presented, also plays an important role. To provide a stringent test of style's…
Sentence simplification reduces semantic complexity to benefit people with language impairments. Previous simplification studies on the sentence level and word level have achieved promising results but also meet great challenges. For…
Beyond the local constraints imposed by grammar, words concatenated in long sequences carrying a complex message show statistical regularities that may reflect their linguistic role in the message. In this paper, we perform a systematic…