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Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
Language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to the social interactions it facilitates. Despite the incredible effectiveness of language processing models to tackle…
The complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures is one of the core design features of human language. Duality of patterning refers for instance to the organization of the meaningful elements in a language at two distinct…
Natural languages display a trade-off among different strategies to convey syntactic structure, such as word order or inflection. This trade-off, however, has not appeared in recent simulations of iterated language learning with neural…
A longstanding question in cognitive science concerns the learning mechanisms underlying compositionality in human cognition. Humans can infer the structured relationships (e.g., grammatical rules) implicit in their sensory observations…
In this article, we present a fresh perspective on language, combining ideas from various sources, but mixed in a new synthesis. As in the minimalist program, the question is whether we can formulate an elegant formalism, a universal…
Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining…
Natural language allows us to refer to novel composite concepts by combining expressions denoting their parts according to systematic rules, a property known as \emph{compositionality}. In this paper, we study whether the language emerging…
Words (phrases or symbols) play a key role in human life. Word (phrase or symbol) representation is the fundamental problem for knowledge representation and understanding. A word (phrase or symbol) usually represents a name of a category.…
Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties…
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.…
In order to communicate, humans flatten a complex representation of ideas and their attributes into a single word or a sentence. We investigate the impact of representation learning in artificial agents by developing graph referential…
Formal Semantics and Distributional Semantics are two important semantic frameworks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Cognitive Semantics belongs to the movement of Cognitive Linguistics, which is based on contemporary cognitive…
Humans communicate using systems of interconnected stimuli or concepts -- from language and music to literature and science -- yet it remains unclear how, if at all, the structure of these networks supports the communication of information.…
Modality is one of the important components of grammar in linguistics. It lets speaker to express attitude towards, or give assessment or potentiality of state of affairs. It implies different senses and thus has different perceptions as…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
The author describes a conceptual study towards mapping grounded natural language discourse representation structures to instances of controlled language statements. This can be achieved via a pipeline of preexisting state of the art…
Measuring meaning is a central problem in cultural sociology and word embeddings may offer powerful new tools to do so. But like any tool, they build on and exert theoretical assumptions. In this paper I theorize the ways in which word…
Humans convey their intentions through the usage of both verbal and nonverbal behaviors during face-to-face communication. Speaker intentions often vary dynamically depending on different nonverbal contexts, such as vocal patterns and…