Related papers: Linguistic Structure as Composition and Perturbati…
A neural language model trained on a text corpus can be used to induce distributed representations of words, such that similar words end up with similar representations. If the corpus is multilingual, the same model can be used to learn…
Traditional language models treat language as a finite state automaton on a probability space over words. This is a very strong assumption when modeling something inherently complex such as language. In this paper, we challenge this by…
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…
While word embeddings are currently predominant for natural language processing, most of existing models learn them solely from their contexts. However, these context-based word embeddings are limited since not all words' meaning can be…
Systems now exist which are able to compile unification grammars into language models that can be included in a speech recognizer, but it is so far unclear whether non-trivial linguistically principled grammars can be used for this purpose.…
Natural language is compositional; the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of its parts. This property allows humans to create and interpret novel sentences, generalizing robustly outside their prior experience. Neural…
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…
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…
Linguistic evaluations of how well LMs generalize to produce or understand language often implicitly take for granted that natural languages are generated by symbolic rules. According to this perspective, grammaticality is determined by…
Isomorphisms allow human cognition to transcribe a potentially unsolvable problem from one domain to a different domain where the problem might be more easily addressed. Current approaches only focus on transcribing structural information…
We develop a system that formally represents spatial semantics concepts within natural language descriptions of spatial arrangements. The system builds on a model of spatial semantics representation according to which words in a sentence…
Words in some natural languages can have a composite structure. Elements of this structure include the root (that could also be composite), prefixes and suffixes with which various nuances and relations to other words can be expressed.…
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…
The words-as-classifiers model of grounded lexical semantics learns a semantic fitness score between physical entities and the words that are used to denote those entities. In this paper, we explore how such a model can incrementally…
There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three…
Understanding how sentences are internally represented in the human brain, as well as in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, is a major challenge for cognitive science. Classic linguistic theories propose that the brain represents…
Language interpretation is a compositional process, in which the meaning of more complex linguistic structures is inferred from the meaning of their parts. Large language models possess remarkable language interpretation capabilities and…
Language models can produce fluent, grammatical text. Nonetheless, some maintain that language models don't really learn language and also that, even if they did, that would not be informative for the study of human learning and processing.…
A unified theory of language combines a Bayesian cognitive linguistic model of language processing, with the proposal that language evolved by sexual selection for the display of intelligence. The theory accounts for the major facts of…
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…