Related papers: Systematicity between Forms and Meanings across La…
Word class flexibility refers to the phenomenon whereby a single word form is used across different grammatical categories. Extensive work in linguistic typology has sought to characterize word class flexibility across languages, but…
Linguistic typology aims to capture structural and semantic variation across the world's languages. A large-scale typology could provide excellent guidance for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for languages that…
All languages have a noun category, but its realisation varies considerably. Depending on the language, semantic and/or morphosyntactic differences may be more or less pronounced. This paper explores these variations, using Riffian as a…
Artificial agents that learn to communicate in order to accomplish a given task acquire communication protocols that are typically opaque to a human. A large body of work has attempted to evaluate the emergent communication via various…
Recent research argues that exact recursive numeral systems optimize communicative efficiency by balancing a tradeoff between the size of the numeral lexicon and the average morphosyntactic complexity (roughly length in morphemes) of…
Among the several findings deriving from the application of complex network formalism to the investigation of natural phenomena, the fact that linguistic constructions follow power laws presents special interest for its potential…
By the age of two, children tend to assume that new word categories are based on objects' shape, rather than their color or texture; this assumption is called the shape bias. They are thought to learn this bias by observing that their…
Sequence-processing neural networks led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks. As a consequence, there has been increasing interest in understanding to what extent they process language as humans do. We aim here to uncover which biases…
The use of subword-level information (e.g., characters, character n-grams, morphemes) has become ubiquitous in modern word representation learning. Its importance is attested especially for morphologically rich languages which generate a…
It has been claimed that within a language, morphologically irregular words are more likely to be phonotactically simple and morphologically regular words are more likely to be phonotactically complex. This inverse correlation has been…
We explore which linguistic factors -- at the sentence and token level -- play an important role in influencing language model predictions, and investigate whether these are reflective of results found in humans and human corpora (Gries and…
Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to…
We quantify the linguistic complexity of different languages' morphological systems. We verify that there is an empirical trade-off between paradigm size and irregularity: a language's inflectional paradigms may be either large in size or…
The iterated learning model simulates the transmission of language from generation to generation in order to explore how the constraints imposed by language transmission facilitate the emergence of language structure. Despite each modelled…
Selection through iterated learning explains no more than other non-functional accounts, such as universal grammar, why language is so well-designed for communicative efficiency. It does not predict several distinctive features of language…
We study analysis of complex systems using a Quantitative Theory of Meaning developed as an extention of Shannon's Communication Theory. The approach consideres complexity not in terms of the manifestation of its effects which are…
Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…
This work presents an information-theoretic operationalisation of cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. It is not a new idea that there are small, cross-linguistic associations between the forms and meanings of words. For instance, it has…
Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change of human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or \textbf{semantic changes} of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning…
Ontologies enable knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration by providing standardized, structured vocabularies for diverse communities. While logical axioms are a cornerstone of ontology design, natural language elements such as…