Related papers: Subject islands do not reduce to construction-spec…
Children acquiring English make systematic errors on subject control sentences even after they have reached near-adult competence (C. Chomsky, 1969), possibly due to heuristics based on semantic roles (Maratsos, 1974). Given the advanced…
Learning structural information from observational data is central to producing new knowledge outside the training corpus. This holds for mechanistic understanding in scientific discovery as well as flexible test-time compositional…
The contribution of this paper is to provide a semantic model (using soft constraints) of the words used by web-users to describe objects in a language game; a game in which one user describes a selected object of those composing the scene,…
Systems for language understanding have become remarkably strong at overcoming linguistic imperfections in tasks involving phrase matching or simple reasoning. Yet, their accuracy drops dramatically as the number of reasoning steps…
Idioms are unlike most phrases in two important ways. First, the words in an idiom have non-canonical meanings. Second, the non-canonical meanings of words in an idiom are contingent on the presence of other words in the idiom. Linguistic…
Human languages use a wide range of grammatical categories to constrain which words or phrases can fill certain slots in grammatical patterns and to express additional meanings, such as tense or aspect, through morpho-syntactic means. These…
Given a specific discourse, which discourse properties trigger the use of metaphorical language, rather than using literal alternatives? For example, what drives people to say "grasp the meaning" rather than "understand the meaning" within…
Entanglement islands have played a key role in the recent derivation of the Page curve and other progress on the black hole information problem. Arising from the inclusion of connected wormhole saddles in a gravitational replica trick,…
Construction grammar posits that constructions, or form-meaning pairings, are acquired through experience with language (the distributional learning hypothesis). But how much information about constructions does this distribution actually…
Surprisal theory links human processing effort to the predictability of an upcoming linguistic unit, but empirical work often leaves the notion of a unit underspecified. In practice, experimental stimuli are segmented into linguistically…
The prevailing technical literature in AI Safety interprets scheming and sandbagging behaviors in large language models (LLMs) as indicators of deceptive agency or hidden objectives. This transdisciplinary philosophical essay proposes an…
Abductive reasoning, reasoning for inferring explanations for observations, is often mentioned in scientific, design-related and artistic contexts, but its understanding varies across these domains. This paper reviews how abductive…
One of the fundamental requirements for models of semantic processing in dialogue is incrementality: a model must reflect how people interpret and generate language at least on a word-by-word basis, and handle phenomena such as fragments,…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various linguistic tasks. However, it remains uncertain whether LLMs have developed human-like fine-grained grammatical intuition. This preregistered study…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of human languages, often used to express complex ideas in compressed or conventional ways (e.g. eager beaver as a keen and enthusiastic person). However, their interpretations may not be…
Linguistic accommodation is the process in which speakers adjust their accent, diction, vocabulary, and other aspects of language according to the communication style of one another. Previous research has shown how linguistic accommodation…
In this chapter, we argue for the benefits of understanding multiword expressions from the perspective of usage-based, construction grammar approaches. We begin with a historical overview of how construction grammar was developed in order…
Different types of reasoning impose different structural demands on representational systems, yet no systematic account of these demands exists across psychology, AI, and philosophy of mind. I propose a framework identifying four structural…
Summaries of meetings are very important as they convey the essential content of discussions in a concise form. Generally, it is time consuming to read and understand the whole documents. Therefore, summaries play an important role as the…
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are unparalleled in their ability to generate grammatically correct, fluent text. LLMs are appearing rapidly, and debates on LLM capacities have taken off, but reflection is lagging behind. Thus, in this…