Related papers: A Cognitive Account of the Puzzle of Ideography
Human knowledge is made up of the conceptual structures of many communities of interest. In order to establish coherence in human knowledge representation, it is important to enable communication between the conceptual structures of…
A unified theory of language combines a Bayesian cognitive linguistic model of language processing, with the proposal that language evolved by sexual selection for the display of intelligence. The theory accounts for the major facts of…
Probabilistic puzzles can be confusing, partly because they are formulated in natural languages - full of unclarities and ambiguities - and partly because there is no widely accepted and intuitive formal language to express them. We propose…
Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive rule systems and statistical learning to explain our ability to learn new concepts from just a few examples. The aim of most…
The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We…
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…
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…
Inspired by empirical work in neuroscience for Bayesian approaches to brain function, we give a unified probabilistic account of various types of symbolic reasoning from data. We characterise them in terms of formal logic using 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…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
Cognitive diversity, reflected in variations of language, perspective, and reasoning, is essential to creativity and collective intelligence. This diversity is rich and grounded in culture, history, and individual experience. Yet as large…
Analogy has been shown to be important in many key cognitive abilities, including learning, problem solving, creativity and language change. For cognitive models of analogy, the fundamental computational question is how its inherent…
Indirect speech such as sarcasm achieves a constellation of discourse goals in human communication. While the indirectness of figurative language warrants speakers to achieve certain pragmatic goals, it is challenging for AI agents to…
Explanations are central to human cognition, yet AI systems often produce outputs that are difficult to understand. While symbolic AI offers a transparent foundation for interpretability, raw logical traces often impose a high extraneous…
This article proposes a cognitive mechanism of humour of general applicability, not restricted to verbal communication. It is indebted to Raskin's concept of script overlap, and conforms to the incongruity-resolution theoretical framework,…
With recent advances in natural language processing, rationalization becomes an essential self-explaining diagram to disentangle the black box by selecting a subset of input texts to account for the major variation in prediction. Yet,…
Natural language and visualization are being increasingly deployed together for supporting data analysis in different ways, from multimodal interaction to enriched data summaries and insights. Yet, researchers still lack systematic…
This paper introduces and outlines a new integrative field, Ideometrics. It is the systematic science of generating, evaluating, and prioritising ideas, based on the proposed sense of ideas and assigning value to information by the brain.…
Inspired by Bayesian approaches to brain function in neuroscience, we give a simple theory of probabilistic inference for a unified account of reasoning and learning. We simply model how data cause symbolic knowledge in terms of its…
Language provides simple ways of communicating generalizable knowledge to each other (e.g., "Birds fly", "John hikes", "Fire makes smoke"). Though found in every language and emerging early in development, the language of generalization is…