Related papers: Systematicity between Forms and Meanings across La…
A longstanding debate in semiotics centers on the relationship between linguistic signs and their corresponding semantics: is there an arbitrary relationship between a word form and its meaning, or does some systematic phenomenon pervade?…
We explore the ability of word embeddings to capture both semantic and morphological similarity, as affected by the different types of linguistic properties (surface form, lemma, morphological tag) used to compose the representation of each…
Meaning can be generated when information is related at a systemic level. Such a system can be an observer, but also a discourse, for example, operationalized as a set of documents. The measurement of semantics as similarity in patterns…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
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…
A quantitative method is suggested, where meanings of words, and grammatic rules about these, of a vocabulary are represented by real numbers. People meet randomly, and average their vocabularies if they are equal; otherwise they either…
Words can be represented by composing the representations of subword units such as word segments, characters, and/or character n-grams. While such representations are effective and may capture the morphological regularities of words, they…
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…
Thousands of different forms (words) are associated with thousands of different meanings (concepts) in a language computer model. Reasonable agreement with reality is found for the number of languages in a family and the Hamming distances…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
Artificial agents have been shown to learn to communicate when needed to complete a cooperative task. Some level of language structure (e.g., compositionality) has been found in the learned communication protocols. This observed structure…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
Identifying the relations that exist between words (or entities) is important for various natural language processing tasks such as, relational search, noun-modifier classification and analogy detection. A popular approach to represent the…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most…
The explicit relationship among perception, communication, and design is being discussed in some detail, in order to relate it to characteristic details of the modeling of the world which defines the scientific and artistic activities of…
Much recent work has argued that the variation in the languages of the world can be explained from the perspective of efficient communication; in particular, languages can be seen as optimally balancing competing pressures to be simple and…