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Human beings possess the most sophisticated computational machinery in the known universe. We can understand language of rich descriptive power, and communicate in the same environment with astonishing clarity. Two of the many contributors…
Language enables humans to share knowledge, reason about the world, and pass on strategies for survival and innovation across generations. At the heart of this process is not just the ability to communicate but also the remarkable…
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…
What counts as evidence for syntactic structure? In traditional generative grammar, systematic contrasts in grammaticality such as subject-auxiliary inversion and the licensing of parasitic gaps are taken as evidence for an internal,…
This paper discusses the problem of learning language from unprocessed text and speech signals, concentrating on the problem of learning a lexicon. In particular, it argues for a representation of language in which linguistic parameters…
Multilinear Grammar provides a framework for integrating the many different syntagmatic structures of language into a coherent semiotically based Rank Interpretation Architecture, with default linear grammars at each rank. The architecture…
Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
Given a language, which in this article is a set of strings of some fixed length, we study the problem of producing its elements by a procedure in which each position has its own local rule. We introduce a way of measuring how much…
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…
We use the persistent homology method of topological data analysis and dimensional analysis techniques to study data of syntactic structures of world languages. We analyze relations between syntactic parameters in terms of dimensionality,…
The principle behind algebraic language theory for various kinds of structures, such as words or trees, is to use a compositional function from the structures into a finite set. To talk about compositionality, one needs some way of…
We introduce here the notion of syntactic lattice algebra which is an analogy of the syntactic monoid and of the syntactic semiring. We present a unified approach to get those three structures.
We investigate the extent to which modern, neural language models are susceptible to structural priming, the phenomenon whereby the structure of a sentence makes the same structure more probable in a follow-up sentence. We explore how…
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…
We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with…
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…
This paper compares a qualitative reasoning model of translation with a quantitative statistical model. We consider these models within the context of two hypothetical speech translation systems, starting with a logic-based design and…
Due to the increased complexity of software development projects more and more systems are described by models. The sheer size makes it impractical to describe these systems by a single model. Instead many models are developed that provide…
This paper includes a reflection on the role of networks in the study of English language acquisition, as well as a collection of practical criteria to annotate free-speech corpora from children utterances. At the theoretical level, the…