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This paper presents a novel treebank-driven approach to comparing syntactic structures in speech and writing using dependency-parsed corpora. Adopting a fully inductive, bottom-up method, we define syntactic structures as delexicalized…
It is now a common practice to compare models of human language processing by predicting participant reactions (such as reading times) to corpora consisting of rich naturalistic linguistic materials. However, many of the corpora used in…
A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language…
The syntactic structures of sentences can be readily read-out from the activations of large language models (LLMs). However, the ``structural probes'' that have been developed to reveal this phenomenon are typically evaluated on an…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
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…
A central question in psycholinguistics is the timing of syntax in sentence processing. Much of the existing evidence comes from violation paradigms, which conflate two separable processes - syntactic category detection and phrase structure…
Neural network architectures have been augmented with differentiable stacks in order to introduce a bias toward learning hierarchy-sensitive regularities. It has, however, proven difficult to assess the degree to which such a bias is…
Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to…
We introduce a graph polynomial that distinguishes tree structures to represent dependency grammar and a measure based on the polynomial representation to quantify syntax similarity. The polynomial encodes accurate and comprehensive…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Parse trees are fundamental syntactic structures in both computational linguistics and compilers construction. We argue in this paper that, in both fields, there are good incentives for model-checking sets of parse trees for some word…
This paper includes a reflection on the role of networks in the study of English language acquisition, as well as a collection of practical criteria to annotate free-speech corpora from children utterances. At the theoretical level, the…
We aim to provide an explanation for how the human brain might connect words for sentence formation. A novel approach to modeling syntactic representation is introduced, potentially showing the existence of universal syntactic structures…
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…
Understanding social interaction within groups is key to analyzing online communities. Most current work focuses on structural properties: who talks to whom, and how such interactions form larger network structures. The interactions…
How much data is required to learn the structure of a language via next-token prediction? We study this question for synthetic datasets generated via a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG) -- a tree-like generative model that captures…
This research introduces a new parsing approach, based on earlier syntactic work on context free grammar (CFG) and generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG). The approach comprises both a new parsing algorithm and a set of syntactic rules…
Obtaining syntactic parses is a crucial part of many NLP pipelines. However, most of the world's languages do not have large amounts of syntactically annotated corpora available for building parsers. Syntactic projection techniques attempt…
It is commonly believed that knowledge of syntactic structure should improve language modeling. However, effectively and computationally efficiently incorporating syntactic structure into neural language models has been a challenging topic.…