Related papers: Language as an Evolving Word Web
Language evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that…
For a system to understand natural language, it needs to be able to take natural language text and answer questions given in natural language with respect to that text; it also needs to be able to follow instructions given in natural…
The evolution of language has been a hotly debated subject with contradicting hypotheses and unreliable claims. Drawing from signalling games, dynamic population mechanics, machine learning and algebraic topology, we present a method for…
Machine learning is a means to uncover deep patterns from rich sources of data. Here, we find that machine learning can recover the conceptual organization of the human mind when applied to the natural language use of millions of people.…
The review summarizes the main methodological concepts used in studying natural language from the perspective of complexity science and documents their applicability in identifying both universal and system-specific features of language in…
We study the self-organization of the consonant inventories through a complex network approach. We observe that the distribution of occurrence as well as cooccurrence of the consonants across languages follow a power-law behavior. The…
Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…
A longstanding question in cognitive science concerns the learning mechanisms underlying compositionality in human cognition. Humans can infer the structured relationships (e.g., grammatical rules) implicit in their sensory observations…
Temporal information conveyed by language describes how the world around us changes through time. Events, durations and times are all temporal elements that can be viewed as intervals. These intervals are sometimes temporally related in…
Naming game simulates the process of naming an object by a single word, in which a population of communicating agents can reach global consensus asymptotically through iteratively pair-wise conversations. We propose an extension of the…
All natural languages exhibit a distinction between content words (like nouns and adjectives) and function words (like determiners, auxiliaries, prepositions). Yet surprisingly little has been said about the emergence of this universal…
Humans communicate, receive, and store information using sequences of items -- from words in a sentence or notes in music to abstract concepts in lectures and books. The networks formed by these items (nodes) and the sequential transitions…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it. Assuming such a structure we show that the semantics of various natural language…
We consider the spreading and competition of languages that are spoken by a population of individuals. The individuals can change their mother tongue during their lifespan, pass on their language to their offspring and finally die. The…
New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community's lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a…
This article presents a neural language architecture of sentence structure in the brain, in which sentences are temporal connection paths that interconnect neural structures underlying their words. Words remain 'in-situ', hence they are…
The aim of this paper is to introduce a logic in which nouns and verbs are handled together as a deductive reasoning, and also to observe the relationship between nouns and verbs as well as between logics and conversations.
The success of neural networks on a diverse set of NLP tasks has led researchers to question how much these networks actually ``know'' about natural language. Probes are a natural way of assessing this. When probing, a researcher chooses a…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
We present statistical analyses of the large-scale structure of three types of semantic networks: word associations, WordNet, and Roget's thesaurus. We show that they have a small-world structure, characterized by sparse connectivity, short…