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This is an essay that considering the knowledge structure and language of a different nature, attempts to build on an explanation of the object of study and characteristics of the mathematical science. We end up with a learning cycle of…
Cognition and language seem closely related to the human cognitive process, although they have not been studied and investigated in detail. Our brain is too complex to fully comprehend the structures and connectivity, as well as its…
The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation…
We present a metagrammatical formalism, {\em generic rules}, to give a default interpretation to grammar rules. Our formalism introduces a process of {\em dynamic binding} interfacing the level of pure grammatical knowledge representation…
A distinguishing property of human intelligence is the ability to flexibly use language in order to communicate complex ideas with other humans in a variety of contexts. Research in natural language dialogue should focus on designing…
When we communicate with other humans, we do not simply generate a sequence of words. Rather, we use our cognitive state (beliefs, desires, intentions) and our model of the audience's cognitive state to create utterances that affect the…
Why should computers interpret language incrementally? In recent years psycholinguistic evidence for incremental interpretation has become more and more compelling, suggesting that humans perform semantic interpretation before constituent…
Establishing a communication system is hard because the intended meaning of a signal is unknown to its receiver when first produced, and the signaller also has no idea how that signal will be interpreted. Most theoretical accounts of the…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…
Language models (LMs) are said to be exhibiting reasoning, but what does this entail? We assess definitions of reasoning and how key papers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) use the notion and argue that the definitions…
Despite tremendous progress in neuroscience, we do not have a compelling narrative for the precise way whereby the spiking of neurons in our brain results in high-level cognitive phenomena such as planning and language. We introduce a…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
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…
Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and…
Hierarchies are the hidden backbones of complex systems and their analysis allows for a deeper understanding of their structure and how they evolve. We consider languages also to be complex adaptive systems with several intricate networks…
We argue that human language learning proceeds in a manner that is different in nature from current approaches to training LLMs, predicting a difference in learning biases. We then present evidence from German plural formation by LLMs that…
Learning to communicate through interaction, rather than relying on explicit supervision, is often considered a prerequisite for developing a general AI. We study a setting where two agents engage in playing a referential game and, from…
Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…
The principle of compositionality, which enables natural language to represent complex concepts via a structured combination of simpler ones, allows us to convey an open-ended set of messages using a limited vocabulary. If compositionality…