Related papers: DALL-E 2 Fails to Reliably Capture Common Syntacti…
Recursive processing in sentence comprehension is considered a hallmark of human linguistic abilities. However, its underlying neural mechanisms remain largely unknown. We studied whether a modern artificial neural network trained with…
An ability that underlies human syntactic knowledge is determining which words can appear in the similar structures (i.e. grouping words by their syntactic categories). These groupings enable humans to combine structures in order to…
Natural language is compositional; the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of its parts. This property allows humans to create and interpret novel sentences, generalizing robustly outside their prior experience. Neural…
Providing plausible responses to why questions is a challenging but critical goal for language based human-machine interaction. Explanations are challenging in that they require many different forms of abstract knowledge and reasoning.…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Compositionality has long been considered a key explanatory property underlying human intelligence: arbitrary concepts can be composed into novel complex combinations, permitting the acquisition of an open ended, potentially infinite…
Can a machine understand the meanings of natural language? Recent developments in the generative large language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence have led to the belief that traditional philosophical assumptions about machine…
How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers.…
We analyze two Natural Language Inference data sets with respect to their linguistic features. The goal is to identify those syntactic and semantic properties that are particularly hard to comprehend for a machine learning model. To this…
A longstanding question in cognitive science concerns the learning mechanisms underlying compositionality in human cognition. Humans can infer the structured relationships (e.g., grammatical rules) implicit in their sensory observations…
Human processing of idioms relies on understanding the contextual sentences in which idioms occur, as well as language-intrinsic features such as frequency and speaker-intrinsic factors like familiarity. While LLMs have shown high…
Do language models (LMs) offer insights into human language learning? A common argument against this idea is that because their architecture and training paradigm are so vastly different from humans, LMs can learn arbitrary inputs as easily…
A recent study (Kuribayashi et al., 2025) has shown that human sentence processing behavior, typically measured on syntactically unchallenging constructions, can be effectively modeled using surprisal from early layers of large language…
Grammatical features across human languages show intriguing correlations often attributed to learning biases in humans. However, empirical evidence has been limited to experiments with highly simplified artificial languages, and whether…
Analogical reasoning -- the capacity to identify and map structural relationships between different domains -- is fundamental to human cognition and learning. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can sometimes match…
Large language models (LLMs) that fluently converse with humans are a reality - but do LLMs experience human-like processing difficulties? We systematically compare human and LLM sentence comprehension across seven challenging linguistic…
Compositionality is a pivotal property of symbolic reasoning. However, how well recent neural models capture compositionality remains underexplored in the symbolic reasoning tasks. This study empirically addresses this question by…
We integrate foundational theories of meaning with a mathematical formalism of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to offer a comprehensive mechanistic explanation of meaning, communication, and symbol emergence. This synthesis holds…
In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to…
The wide use of black-box models in natural language processing brings great challenges to the understanding of the decision basis, the trustworthiness of the prediction results, and the improvement of the model performance. The words in…