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Grammar induction has made significant progress in recent years. However, it is not clear how the application of induced grammar could enhance practical performance in downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce an unsupervised grammar…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
Syntax is a latent hierarchical structure which underpins the robust and compositional nature of human language. In this work, we explore the hypothesis that syntactic dependencies can be represented in language model attention…
The purpose of this paper is to abstractly describe the notion of a generative mechanism that implements a code and to provide a number of examples including the DNA-RNA machinery that implements the genetic code, Chomsky's Principles &…
Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of larger units given the meanings of their parts. Meanings are often assumed to combine…
The cognitive essence of humans is deeply intertwined with the concept of animacy, which plays an essential role in shaping their memory, vision, and multi-layered language understanding. Although animacy appears in language via nuanced…
We present a model for pragmatically describing scenes, in which contrastive behavior results from a combination of inference-driven pragmatics and learned semantics. Like previous learned approaches to language generation, our model uses a…
Construction Grammar (CxG) is a paradigm from cognitive linguistics emphasising the connection between syntax and semantics. Rather than rules that operate on lexical items, it posits constructions as the central building blocks of…
This paper discusses the problem of learning language from unprocessed text and speech signals, concentrating on the problem of learning a lexicon. In particular, it argues for a representation of language in which linguistic parameters…
The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the communication…
Natural languages are complexly structured entities. They exhibit characterising regularities that can be exploited to link them one another. In this work, I compare two morphological aspects of languages: Written Patterns and Sentence…
While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures…
Categories provide a coarse grained description of the world. A fundamental question is whether categories simply mirror an underlying structure of nature, or instead come from the complex interactions of human beings among themselves and…
Language is highly structured, with syntactic and semantic structures, to some extent, agreed upon by speakers of the same language. With implicit or explicit awareness of such structures, humans can learn and use language efficiently and…
A plausible definition of "reasoning" could be "algebraically manipulating previously acquired knowledge in order to answer a new question". This definition covers first-order logical inference or probabilistic inference. It also includes…
Inferring the abstract relational and causal structure of the world is a major challenge for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents. For humans, language--particularly in the form of explanations--plays a considerable role in overcoming this…
In this paper we discuss methods of using the language of actions, formal languages, and grammars for qualitative conceptual linguistic modeling of companies as technological and human institutions. The main problem following the discussion…
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…
What counts as evidence for syntactic structure? In traditional generative grammar, systematic contrasts in grammaticality such as subject-auxiliary inversion and the licensing of parasitic gaps are taken as evidence for an internal,…