Related papers: Verbal behavior without syntactic structures: beyo…
We present a critical assessment of Piantadosi's (2023) claim that "Modern language models refute Chomsky's approach to language," focusing on four main points. First, despite the impressive performance and utility of large language models…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) we argue that the structure of commonsense knowledge must be discovered, rather than invented; and (ii) we argue that natural language, which is the best known theory of our (shared) commonsense…
Selection through iterated learning explains no more than other non-functional accounts, such as universal grammar, why language is so well-designed for communicative efficiency. It does not predict several distinctive features of language…
This book objective is to develop an algebraization of graph grammars. Equivalently, we study graph dynamics. From the point of view of a computer scientist, graph grammars are a natural generalization of Chomsky grammars for which a purely…
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…
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…
The mechanisms of comprehension during language processing remains an open question. Classically, building the meaning of a linguistic utterance is said to be incremental, step-by-step, based on a compositional process. However, many…
Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because processing within the brain's core…
This report is a survey of the relationships between various state-of-the-art neural network architectures and formal languages as, for example, structured by the Chomsky Language Hierarchy. Of particular interest are the abilities of a…
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition,…
The ability to read, write, and speak mathematics is critical to students becoming comfortable with statistical models and skills. Faster development of those skills may act as encouragement to further engage with the discipline. Vocabulary…
A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language…
Grammar refers to the system of rules that governs the structural organization and the semantic relations among linguistic units such as sentences, phrases, and words within a given language. In natural language processing, there remains a…
In order to design strong paradigms for isolating lexical access and semantics, we need to know what a word is. Surprisingly few linguists and philosophers have a clear model of what a word is, even though words impact basically every…
A key problem in the description of language structure is to explain its contradictory properties of specificity and generality, the contrasting poles of formulaic prescription and generative productivity. I argue that this is possible if…
"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and…
The article is an attempt to contribute to explorations of a common origin for language and planned-collaborative action. It gives `semantics of change' the central stage in the synthesis, from its history and recordkeeping to its…
Human language, music and a variety of animal vocalisations constitute ways of sonic communication that exhibit remarkable structural complexity. While the complexities of language and possible parallels in animal communication have been…