Related papers: The distribution of syntactic dependency distances
We present a model of speech perception which takes into account effects of correlations between sounds. Words in this model correspond to the attractors of a suitably chosen descent dynamics. The resulting lexicon is rich in short words,…
Language models must capture statistical dependencies between words at timescales ranging from very short to very long. Earlier work has demonstrated that dependencies in natural language tend to decay with distance between words according…
In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody--the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry…
Segmental structure is a common pattern in many types of sequences such as phrases in human languages. In this paper, we present a probabilistic model for sequences via their segmentations. The probability of a segmented sequence is…
Distributional semantic models learn vector representations of words through the contexts they occur in. Although the choice of context (which often takes the form of a sliding window) has a direct influence on the resulting embeddings, the…
Understanding how network function constrains neural connectivity is a central challenge in neuroscience. An influential approach is to train neural networks with gradient descent on cognitive tasks and characterize the resulting…
Answer sentence selection (AS2) in open-domain question answering finds answer for a question by ranking candidate sentences extracted from web documents. Recent work exploits answer context, i.e., sentences around a candidate, by…
Statistical Inference is the process of determining a probability distribution over the space of parameters of a model given a data set. As more data becomes available this probability distribution becomes updated via the application of…
Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying…
In previous work we gave a mathematical foundation, referred to as DisCoCat, for how words interact in a sentence in order to produce the meaning of that sentence. To do so, we exploited the perfect structural match of grammar and…
We propose a model to create synthetic networks that may also serve as a narrative of a certain kind of infrastructure network evolution. It consists of an initialization phase with the network extending tree-like for minimum cost and a…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
Probabilistic embeddings have several advantages over deterministic embeddings as they map each data point to a distribution, which better describes the uncertainty and complexity of data. Many works focus on adjusting the distribution…
Semantics of a sentence is defined with much less ambiguity than semantics of a single word, and we assume that it should be better preserved by translation to another language. If multilingual sentence embeddings intend to represent…
The diffusion of ideas and language in society has conventionally been described by S-shaped models, such as the logistic curve. However, the role of sub-exponential growth -- a slower-than-exponential pattern known in epidemiology -- has…
Languages may encode similar meanings using different sentence structures. This makes it a challenge to provide a single set of formal rules that can derive meanings from sentences in many languages at once. To overcome the challenge, we…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
Citation distributions are crucial for the analysis and modeling of the activity of scientists. We investigated bibliometric data of papers published in journals of the American Physical Society, searching for the type of function which…
This paper studies the limits of language models' statistical learning in the context of Zipf's law. First, we demonstrate that Zipf-law token distribution emerges irrespective of the chosen tokenization. Second, we show that Zipf…
We study the time taken by a language learner to correctly identify the meaning of all words in a lexicon under conditions where many plausible meanings can be inferred whenever a word is uttered. We show that the most basic form of…