Related papers: Swap distance minimization in SOV languages. Cogni…
Languages of the world vary concerning the order of subject, object and verb. The most frequent dominant orders are SOV and SVO, and researchers have tailored models to this fact. However, there are still languages whose dominant order does…
Dependency length minimization is a universally observed quantitative property of natural languages. However, the extent of dependency length minimization, and the cognitive mechanisms through which the language processor achieves this…
The word order of a sentence is shaped by multiple principles. The principle of syntactic dependency distance minimization is in conflict with the principle of surprisal minimization (or predictability maximization) in single head syntactic…
The structure of all the permutations of a sequence can be represented as a permutohedron, a graph where vertices are permutations and two vertices are linked if a swap of adjacent elements in the permutation of one of the vertices produces…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
Dependency distance minimization (DDm) is a well-established principle of word order. It has been predicted theoretically that DDm implies compression, namely the minimization of word lengths. This is a second order prediction because it…
It is often stated that human languages, as other biological systems, are shaped by cost-cutting pressures but, to what extent? Attempts to quantify the degree of optimality of languages by means of an optimality score have been scarce and…
It is well known that the length of a syntactic dependency determines its online memory cost. Thus, the problem of the placement of a head and its dependents (complements or modifiers) that minimizes online memory is equivalent to the…
Little is known about why SOV order is initially preferred and then discarded or recovered. Here we present a framework for understanding these and many related word order phenomena: the diversity of dominant orders, the existence of free…
Dependency distance minimization (DDm) is a word order principle favouring the placement of syntactically related words close to each other in sentences. Massive evidence of the principle has been reported for more than a decade with the…
The principle of DEPENDENCY LENGTH MINIMIZATION, which seeks to keep syntactically related words close in a sentence, is thought to universally shape the structure of human languages for effective communication. However, the extent to which…
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…
The sequential structure of language, and the order of words in a sentence specifically, plays a central role in human language processing. Consequently, in designing computational models of language, the de facto approach is to present…
In this paper we derive sufficient conditions for the convergence of two popular alternating minimisation algorithms for dictionary learning - the Method of Optimal Directions (MOD) and Online Dictionary Learning (ODL), which can also be…
Previous work has shown that isolated non-canonical sentences with Object-before-Subject (OSV) order are initially harder to process than their canonical counterparts with Subject-before-Object (SOV) order. Although this difficulty…
Humans use spatial language to naturally describe object locations and their relations. Interpreting spatial language not only adds a perceptual modality for robots, but also reduces the barrier of interfacing with humans. Previous work…
Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synthetic word-order variants of natural languages. We observe…
The subject-verb-object (SVO) word order prevalent in English is shared by about $42\%$ of world languages. Another $45\%$ of all languages follow the SOV order, $9\%$ the VSO order, and fewer languages use the three remaining permutations.…
While spatial reasoning has made progress in object localization relationships, it often overlooks object orientation-a key factor in 6-DoF fine-grained manipulation. Traditional pose representations rely on pre-defined frames or templates,…
The minimization of the length of syntactic dependencies is a well-established principle of word order and the basis of a mathematical theory of word order. Here we complete that theory from the perspective of information theory, adding a…