Related papers: The Evolution of Language and Human Rationality
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Providing plausible responses to why questions is a challenging but critical goal for language based human-machine interaction. Explanations are challenging in that they require many different forms of abstract knowledge and reasoning.…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
Hierarchies are the hidden backbones of complex systems and their analysis allows for a deeper understanding of their structure and how they evolve. We consider languages also to be complex adaptive systems with several intricate networks…
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…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Human communication is a multifaceted and multimodal skill. Communication requires an understanding of both the surface-level textual content and the connotative intent of a piece of communication. In humans, learning to go beyond the…
Conversational modeling is an important task in natural language understanding and machine intelligence. Although previous approaches exist, they are often restricted to specific domains (e.g., booking an airline ticket) and require…
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…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
Language is crucial for human intelligence, but what exactly is its role? We take language to be a part of a system for understanding and communicating about situations. The human ability to understand and communicate about situations…
Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task. Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional -- i.e., express meaning by…
This work discusses how to build more rational language and multimodal agents and what criteria define rationality in intelligent systems. Rationality is the quality of being guided by reason, characterized by decision-making that aligns…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
Argumentation theory is a powerful paradigm that formalizes a type of commonsense reasoning that aims to simulate the human ability to resolve a specific problem in an intelligent manner. A classical argumentation process takes into account…
Learning to communicate through interaction, rather than relying on explicit supervision, is often considered a prerequisite for developing a general AI. We study a setting where two agents engage in playing a referential game and, from…
Explanation constitutes an archetypal feature of human rationality, underpinning learning and generalisation, and representing one of the media supporting scientific discovery and communication. Due to the importance of explanations in…
"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…
Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…