Related papers: The Evolution of Language and Human Rationality
Many real-world tasks require agents to coordinate their behavior to achieve shared goals. Successful collaboration requires not only adopting the same communicative conventions, but also grounding these conventions in the same…
As the etymology of the word shows, logic is intimately related to language, as exemplified by the work of philosophers from Antiquity and from the Middle-Age. At the beginning of the XX century, the crisis of the foundations of mathematics…
System 2 reasoning is one of the defining characteristics of intelligence, which requires slow and logical thinking. Human conducts System 2 reasoning via the language of thoughts that organizes the reasoning process as a causal sequence of…
Reasoning, as an essential ability for complex problem-solving, can provide back-end support for various real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, negotiation, etc. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge…
The cognitive constraints that humans exhibit in their social interactions have been extensively studied by anthropologists, who have highlighted their regularities across different types of social networks. We postulate that similar…
Human achievement, whether in culture, science, or technology, is unparalleled in the known existence. This achievement is tied to the enormous communities of knowledge, made possible by language: leaving theological content aside, it is…
Designing machine intelligence to converse with a human user necessarily requires an understanding of how humans participate in conversation, and thus conversation modeling is an important task in natural language processing. New…
The efficient use of available resources is a key factor in achieving success on both personal and organizational levels. One of the crucial resources in knowledge economy is time. The ability to force others to adapt to our schedule even…
This essay considers the special character of mathematical reasoning, and draws on observations from interactive theorem proving and the history of mathematics to clarify the nature of formal and informal mathematical language. It proposes…
Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Language has the power to reinforce stereotypes and project social biases onto others. At the core of the challenge is that it is rarely what is stated explicitly, but…
Grammatical features such as number and gender serve two central functions in human languages. While they encode salient semantic attributes like numerosity and animacy, they also offload sentence processing cost by predictably linking…
In this paper we provide a first analysis of the research questions that arise when dealing with the problem of communicating pieces of formal argumentation through natural language interfaces. It is a generally held opinion that formal…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Typically, when evaluating Theory of Mind, we consider the beliefs of others to be binary: held or not held. But what if someone is unsure about their own beliefs? How can we quantify this uncertainty? We propose a new suite of tasks,…
Human syntactic structures are usually represented as graphs. Much research has focused on the mapping between such graphs and linguistic sequences, but less attention has been paid to the shapes of the graphs themselves: their topologies.…
We consider the spreading and competition of languages that are spoken by a population of individuals. The individuals can change their mother tongue during their lifespan, pass on their language to their offspring and finally die. The…
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on…
Compositionality has traditionally been understood as a major factor in productivity of language and, more broadly, human cognition. Yet, recently, some research started to question its status, showing that artificial neural networks are…
Theory of Mind (ToM) is a critical component of intelligence but its assessment remains the subject of heated debates. Prior research applied human ToM assessments to natural language processing models using either human-created…
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,…