Related papers: Co-evolution of Language and of the Language Acqui…

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…

The learning trajectories of linguistic phenomena in humans provide insight into linguistic representation, beyond what can be gleaned from inspecting the behavior of an adult speaker. To apply a similar approach to analyze neural language…

This paper examines the characterization and learning of grammars defined with enriched representational models. Model-theoretic approaches to formal language theory traditionally assume that each position in a string belongs to exactly one…

The named concepts and compositional operators present in natural language provide a rich source of information about the kinds of abstractions humans use to navigate the world. Can this linguistic background knowledge improve the…

This thesis presents a computational theory of unsupervised language acquisition, precisely defining procedures for learning language from ordinary spoken or written utterances, with no explicit help from a teacher. The theory is based…

The recent successes of deep learning and deep reinforcement learning have firmly established their statuses as state-of-the-art artificial learning techniques. However, longstanding drawbacks of these approaches, such as their poor sample…

A major target of linguistics and cognitive science has been to understand what class of learning systems can acquire the key structures of natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue…

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…

n this paper, we attempt to explain the emergence of the linguistic diversity that exists across the consonant inventories of some of the major language families of the world through a complex network based growth model. There is only a…

How do learners acquire languages from the limited data available to them? This process must involve some inductive biases - factors that affect how a learner generalizes - but it is unclear which inductive biases can explain observed…

Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…

This paper is concerned with what intermediate syntactic categories children acquire during first language development, and in what order. Maturational theories make different predictions. Bottom-up accounts (GROWING) propose that lexical…

In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to…

The evolution of grammatical systems of syntactic and semantic composition is modeled here with a novel application of reinforcement learning theory. To test the functionalist thesis that speakers' expressive purposes shape their language,…

Language models generally produce grammatical text, but they are more likely to make errors in certain contexts. Drawing on paradigms from psycholinguistics, we carry out a fine-grained analysis of those errors in different syntactic…

We propose a learning system in which language is grounded in visual percepts without specific pre-defined categories of terms. We present a unified generative method to acquire a shared semantic/visual embedding that enables the learning…

Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through…

Referential games offer a grounded learning environment for neural agents which accounts for the fact that language is functionally used to communicate. However, they do not take into account a second constraint considered to be fundamental…

Since language is tied to cognition, we expect the linguistic structures to reflect patterns we encounter in nature and analyzed by physics. Within this realm we investigate the process of protolanguage acquisition, using analytical and…

Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…