Related papers: Language as an Evolving Word Web
The World Wide Web has grown so big, in such an anarchic fashion, that it is difficult to describe. One of the evident intrinsic characteristics of the World Wide Web is its multilinguality. Here, we present a technique for estimating the…
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and…
Wikipedia is a popular web-based encyclopedia edited freely and collaboratively by its users. In this paper we present an analysis of Wikipedias in several languages as complex networks. The hyperlinks pointing from one Wikipedia article to…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
Language carries thought and coordination among humans but rarely reaches further along the spectrum of diverse intelligence. Yet non-neural systems -- from gene regulatory networks and microbial consortia to fungi -- are increasingly…
Human language and its governing rules present a number of analogies with the organization and structure of communication and information management in living organisms. This chapter will provide a short general introduction about grammar,…
We consider a language together with the subword relation, the cover relation, and regular predicates. For such structures, we consider the extension of first-order logic by threshold- and modulo-counting quantifiers. Depending on the…
Social network structure is one of the key determinants of human language evolution. Previous work has shown that the network of social interactions shapes decentralized learning in human groups, leading to the emergence of different kinds…
We define a notion of randomness for individual and collections of formal languages based on automatic martingales acting on sequences of words from some underlying domain. An automatic martingale bets if the incoming word belongs to the…
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…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
Contemporary semantic description of logic is based on the ontology of all possible interpretations, an insufficiently clear metaphysical concept. In this article, logic is described as the internal organization of language. Logical…
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most…
Patterns describe proven solutions for recurring problems. Typically, patterns in a particular domain are interrelated and organized in pattern languages. As real-world problems often require patterns of multiple domains, different pattern…
The speech code is a vehicle of language: it defines a set of forms used by a community to carry information. Such a code is necessary to support the linguistic interactions that allow humans to communicate. How then may a speech code be…
Humans communicate using systems of interconnected stimuli or concepts -- from language and music to literature and science -- yet it remains unclear how, if at all, the structure of these networks supports the communication of information.…
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…
Recent findings in neuroscience suggest that the human brain represents information in a geometric structure (for instance, through conceptual spaces). In order to communicate, we flatten the complex representation of entities and their…
The relationship between the "knowledge base" and the "globalization" of communication systems is discussed from the perspective of communication theory. I argue that inter-human communication takes place at two levels. At the first level…
We investigate inflection structure of a synthetic language using Latin as an example. We construct a bipartite graph in which one group of vertices correspond to dictionary headwords and the other group to inflected forms encountered in a…