Related papers: Linguistic laws in biology
Human language, the most powerful communication system in history, is closely associated with cognition. Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how…
Apparent parallels between natural language and biological sequence have led to a recent surge in the application of deep language models (LMs) to the analysis of antibody and other biological sequences. However, a lack of a rigorous…
Language models can produce fluent, grammatical text. Nonetheless, some maintain that language models don't really learn language and also that, even if they did, that would not be informative for the study of human learning and processing.…
Chargaff once said that "I saw before me in dark contours the beginning of a grammar of Biology". In linguistics, "grammar" is the set of natural language rules, but we do not know for sure what Chargaff meant by "grammar" of Biology.…
"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…
In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present…
We propose an alternate approach to quantifying how well language models learn natural language: we ask how well they match the statistical tendencies of natural language. To answer this question, we analyze whether text generated from…
This work examines the interconnections between logic, epistemology, and sciences within the Naturalist tradition. It presents a scheme that connects logic, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and cognition, emphasizing…
Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf's law of word…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…
Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive performance on various linguistic tasks, but their relationship to human language processing in the brain remains unclear. This paper examines the gaps and overlaps between LMs and the brain at…
In the present article the recent works to formulate laws in Darwinian evolutionary dynamics are discussed. Although there is a strong consensus that general laws in biology may exist, opinions opposing such suggestion are abundant. Based…
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…
With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), the prevalence of iterative interactions among these models is anticipated to increase. Notably, recent advancements in multi-round self-improving methods allow LLMs to generate…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped our world with significant advancements in science, engineering, and society through applications ranging from scientific discoveries and medical diagnostics to Chatbots. Despite their ubiquity and…
With the increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) for planning in natural language, understanding their behaviors becomes an important research question. This work conducts a systematic investigation of LLMs' ability to…
Existential rules, a.k.a. dependencies in databases, and Datalog+/- in knowledge representation and reasoning recently, are a family of important logical languages widely used in computer science and artificial intelligence. Towards a deep…
A fundamental challenge in the cognitive sciences is discovering the dynamics that govern behaviour. Take the example of spoken language, which is characterised by a highly variable and complex set of physical movements that map onto the…
The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…