Related papers: False perspectives on human language: why statisti…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
Language models (LM) are capable of remarkably complex linguistic tasks; however, numerical reasoning is an area in which they frequently struggle. An important but rarely evaluated form of reasoning is understanding probability…
What does it mean to know language? Since the Chomskian revolution, one popular answer to this question has been: to possess a generative grammar that exclusively licenses certain syntactic structures. Decades later, not even an…
Dependency syntax represents the structure of a sentence as a tree composed of dependencies, i.e., directed relations between lexical units. While in its more general form any such tree is allowed, in practice many are not plausible or are…
It is commonly believed that knowledge of syntactic structure should improve language modeling. However, effectively and computationally efficiently incorporating syntactic structure into neural language models has been a challenging topic.…
Human syntactic structures are usually represented as graphs. Much research has focused on the mapping between such graphs and linguistic sequences, but less attention has been paid to the shapes of the graphs themselves: their topologies.…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
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…
Syntactic parsing, the process of obtaining the internal structure of sentences in natural languages, is a crucial task for artificial intelligence applications that need to extract meaning from natural language text or speech. Sentiment…
Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…
Large language models generate judgments that resemble those of humans. Yet the extent to which these models align with human judgments in interpreting figurative and socially grounded language remains uncertain. To investigate this, human…
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…
Spoken language applications in natural dialogue settings place serious requirements on the choice of processing architecture. Especially under adverse phonetic and acoustic conditions parsing procedures have to be developed which do not…
Large language models generate text through probabilistic sampling from high-dimensional distributions, yet how this process reshapes the structural statistical organization of language remains incompletely characterized. Here we show that…
Natural Language Processing prides itself to be an empirically-minded, if not outright empiricist field, and yet lately it seems to get itself into essentialist debates on issues of meaning and measurement ("Do Large Language Models…
The intelligibility of speech relies on the ability of interlocutors to dynamically align their expectations about the rates at which informative changes in signals occur. Exactly how this is achieved remains an open question. We propose…
Statistical modeling is a powerful tool for developing and testing theories by way of causal explanation, prediction, and description. In many disciplines there is near-exclusive use of statistical modeling for causal explanation and the…
Syntactic parsing is a necessary task which is required for NLP applications including machine translation. It is a challenging task to develop a qualitative parser for morphological rich and agglutinative languages. Syntactic analysis is…
Rhetoric, both spoken and written, involves not only content but also style. One common stylistic tool is $\textit{parallelism}$: the juxtaposition of phrases which have the same sequence of linguistic ($\textit{e.g.}$, phonological,…
If humans understood language by randomly selecting parsing actions, it might have been necessary to construct a robust symbolic system capable of being interpreted under any hierarchical structure. However, human parsing strategies do not…