Related papers: Linguistic Paradoxes and Tautologies
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
As speakers turn their thoughts into sentences, they maintain a balance between the complexity of words and syntax. However, it is unclear whether this syntax-lexicon tradeoff is unique to the spoken language production that is under the…
This essay considers the special character of mathematical reasoning, and draws on observations from interactive theorem proving and the history of mathematics to clarify the nature of formal and informal mathematical language. It proposes…
Transformer-based language models have recently achieved remarkable results in many natural language tasks. However, performance on leaderboards is generally achieved by leveraging massive amounts of training data, and rarely by encoding…
In this paper we provide a unifying description of different types of semantics of modal logic found in the literature via the framework of topological categories. In the style of categorical logic, we establish an exact correspondence…
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.…
In the present paper, the existence and multiplicity problems of extensions are addressed. The focus is on extension of the stable type. The main result of the paper is an elegant characterization of the existence and multiplicity of…
In the quest to give a formal compositional semantics to natural languages, semanticists have started turning their attention to phenomena that have been also considered as parts of pragmatics (e.g., discourse anaphora and presupposition…
This paper introduces a theory about the role of language in learning physics. The theory is developed in the context of physics students' and physicists' talking and writing about the subject of quantum mechanics. We found that physicists'…
We propose a cognitively and linguistically motivated set of sorts for lexical semantics in a compositional setting: the classifiers in languages that do have such pronouns. These sorts are needed to include lexical considerations in a…
The author describes a conceptual study towards mapping grounded natural language discourse representation structures to instances of controlled language statements. This can be achieved via a pipeline of preexisting state of the art…
There are many scientific problems generated by the multiple and conflicting alternative definitions of linguistic recursion and human recursive processing that exist in the literature. The purpose of this article is to make available to…
Paradoxes are a very frequent phenomenon in processes of thought which strive towards the intelectual and cognitive shifts. They occur in all areas of human spiritual activites. What we are interested here in, are the paradoxes in physics.…
In Probabilistic Logic Nilsson uses the device of a probability distribution over a set of possible worlds to assign probabilities to the sentences of a logical language. In his paper Nilsson concentrated on inference and associated…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
A key problem in the description of language structure is to explain its contradictory properties of specificity and generality, the contrasting poles of formulaic prescription and generative productivity. I argue that this is possible if…
Linguistic typology aims to capture structural and semantic variation across the world's languages. A large-scale typology could provide excellent guidance for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for languages that…
We consider various shuffling and unshuffling operations on languages and words, and examine their closure properties. Although the main goal is to provide some good and novel exercises and examples for undergraduate formal language theory…
In this chapter, we introduce a new dialogical system for first order classical logic which is close to natural language argumentation, and we prove its completeness with respect to usual classical validity. We combine our dialogical system…