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Information theory, though originally developed for communications engineering, provides mathematical tools with broad applications across science. These tools characterize the fundamental limits of data compression and transmission in the…
The language generation and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have enabled conversational systems with impressive performance in a variety of tasks, from code generation, to composing essays, to passing STEM and legal…
Human language offers a powerful window into our thoughts -- we tell stories, give explanations, and express our beliefs and goals through words. Abundant evidence also suggests that language plays a developmental role in structuring our…
Current models for opinion dynamics typically utilize a Poisson process for speaker selection, making the waiting time between events exponentially distributed. Human interaction tends to be bursty, though, having higher probabilities of…
Synchronization of finite spike sequences is the way two brain regions compare their content and extract the most suitable sequence. This is the core of the linguistic comparison between a word and a previous one retrieved by memory.…
To develop computational agents that better communicate using their own emergent language, we endow the agents with an ability to focus their attention on particular concepts in the environment. Humans often understand an object or scene as…
Speakers repeat constructions frequently in dialogue. Due to their peculiar information-theoretic properties, repetitions can be thought of as a strategy for cost-effective communication. In this study, we focus on the repetition of…
Generative seq2seq dialogue systems are trained to predict the next word in dialogues that have already occurred. They can learn from large unlabeled conversation datasets, build a deeper understanding of conversational context, and…
Advances in information technology reduce barriers to information propagation, but at the same time they also induce the information overload problem. For the making of various decisions, mere digestion of the relevant information has…
Speakers often have multiple ways to express the same meaning. The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis suggests that speakers exploit this variability to maintain a consistent rate of information transmission during language…
The Shannon-Weaver model of linear information transmission is extended with two loops potentially generating redundancies: (i) meaning is provided locally to the information from the perspective of hindsight, and (ii) meanings can be…
Speech production is a dynamic procedure, which involved multi human organs including the tongue, jaw and lips. Modeling the dynamics of the vocal tract deformation is a fundamental problem to understand the speech, which is the most common…
In a recent article, Christiansen and Chater (2016) present a fundamental constraint on language, i.e. a now-or-never bottleneck that arises from our fleeting memory, and explore its implications, e.g., chunk-and-pass processing, outlining…
We study conversational dialog in which there are many possible responses to a given history. We present the MultiTalk Dataset, a corpus of over 320,000 sentences of written conversational dialog that balances a high branching factor (10)…
Information theory is concerned with the study of transmission, processing, extraction, and utilization of information. In its most abstract form, information is conceived as a means of resolving uncertainty. Shannon and Weaver (1949) were…
This discussion paper reflects on how quantitative approaches to historical linguistics interact with dataset properties. Drawing on two worked examples, we examine English data using quad-based concept modelling of Early Modern English…
Semi-structured interviews are a common method in qualitative research. However, conducting high-quality interviews is cognitively demanding and requires strong interviewing skills. To lower this bar, we propose InterFlow, an AI-powered…
Intimacy is a fundamental aspect of how we relate to others in social settings. Language encodes the social information of intimacy through both topics and other more subtle cues (such as linguistic hedging and swearing). Here, we introduce…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as conversational partners for learning, yet the interactional dynamics supporting users' learning and engagement are understudied. We analyze the linguistic and interactional features from…
We analyze strategic communication when advice is generated by a reinforcement-learning algorithm rather than by a fully rational sender. Building on the cheap-talk framework of Crawford and Sobel (1982), an advisor adapts its messages…