Related papers: Geometry of Language
We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…
Linguistic evaluations of how well LMs generalize to produce or understand language often implicitly take for granted that natural languages are generated by symbolic rules. According to this perspective, grammaticality is determined by…
Natural Language Processing enables computers to understand human language by analysing and classifying text efficiently with deep-level grammatical and semantic features. Existing models capture features by learning from large corpora with…
This thesis investigates how the sub-structure of words can be accounted for in probabilistic models of language. Such models play an important role in natural language processing tasks such as translation or speech recognition, but often…
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise…
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…
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…
We aim to provide an explanation for how the human brain might connect words for sentence formation. A novel approach to modeling syntactic representation is introduced, potentially showing the existence of universal syntactic structures…
The integration of lexical semantics and pragmatics in the analysis of the meaning of natural lan- guage has prompted changes to the global framework derived from Montague. In those works, the original lexicon, in which words were assigned…
Human language can be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and neighboring words in sentences are connected by edges. It was recently found (Ferrer and…
Every formal grammar defines a language and can in principle be used in three ways: to generate strings (production), to recognize them (parsing), or -- given only examples -- to infer the grammar itself (grammar induction). Generation and…
A natural next step in the evolution of constraint-based grammar formalisms from rewriting formalisms is to abstract fully away from the details of the grammar mechanism---to express syntactic theories purely in terms of the properties of…
In this paper we provide a first analysis of the research questions that arise when dealing with the problem of communicating pieces of formal argumentation through natural language interfaces. It is a generally held opinion that formal…
We develop and explore the idea of recognition of languages (in the general sense of subsets of topological algebras) as preimages of clopen sets under continuous homomorphisms into Stone topological algebras. We obtain an Eilenberg…
We present an approach to natural language understanding based on a computable grammar of constructions. A "construction" consists of a set of features of form and a description of meaning in a context. A grammar is a set of constructions.…
This paper addresses the problem of mapping natural language sentences to lambda-calculus encodings of their meaning. We describe a learning algorithm that takes as input a training set of sentences labeled with expressions in the lambda…
Recent advances in large language models using deep learning techniques have renewed interest on how languages can be learned from data. However, it is unclear whether or how these models represent grammatical information from the learned…
Grammatical features such as number and gender serve two central functions in human languages. While they encode salient semantic attributes like numerosity and animacy, they also offload sentence processing cost by predictably linking…
The present article is the first of a series whose goal is to define a logical formalism in which it is possible to reason about genetics. In this paper, we introduce the main concepts of our language whose domain of discourse consists of a…
Techniques in which words are represented as vectors have proved useful in many applications in computational linguistics, however there is currently no general semantic formalism for representing meaning in terms of vectors. We present a…