Related papers: How communicatively optimal are exact numeral syst…
Much recent work has shown how cross-linguistic variation is constrained by competing pressures from efficient communication. However, little attention has been paid to the role of the systematicity of forms (regularity), a key property of…
Numeral systems across the world's languages vary in fascinating ways, both regarding their synchronic structure and the diachronic processes that determined how they evolved in their current shape. For a proper comparison of numeral…
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…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
Language models perform differently across languages. It has been previously suggested that morphological typology may explain some of this variability (Cotterell et al., 2018). We replicate previous analyses and find additional new…
Morphosyntactic lexicons and word vector representations have both proven useful for improving the accuracy of statistical part-of-speech taggers. Here we compare the performances of four systems on datasets covering 16 languages, two of…
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…
Human lexicons contain many different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., "purple" or "magenta" for the same shade of color. On the one hand, studies on language use have explored how speakers adapt their…
Morphologically rich languages accentuate two properties of distributional vector space models: 1) the difficulty of inducing accurate representations for low-frequency word forms; and 2) insensitivity to distinct lexical relations that…
The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…
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.…
Across languages, numeral systems vary widely in how they construct and combine numbers. While humans consistently learn to navigate this diversity, large language models (LLMs) struggle with linguistic-mathematical puzzles involving…
Human recursive numeral systems (i.e., counting systems such as English base-10 numerals), like many other grammatical systems, are highly regular. Following prior work that relates cross-linguistic tendencies to biases in learning, we ask…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
Token representations influence the efficiency and adaptability of language models, yet conventional tokenization strategies impose rigid segmentation boundaries that do not adjust dynamically to evolving contextual relationships. The…
Generalizations of linear numeration systems in which the set of natural numbers is recognizable by finite automata are obtained by describing an arbitrary infinite regular language following the lexicographic ordering. For these systems of…
Prior work has shown that large language models (LLMs) often converge to accurate input embedding for numbers, based on sinusoidal representations. In this work, we quantify that these representations are in fact strikingly systematic, to…
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…
Numeracy is the ability to understand and work with numbers. It is a necessary skill for composing and understanding documents in clinical, scientific, and other technical domains. In this paper, we explore different strategies for…
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…