Related papers: Formation of Languages; Equality, Hierarchy and Te…
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…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…
Categories provide a coarse grained description of the world. A fundamental question is whether categories simply mirror an underlying structure of nature, or instead come from the complex interactions of human beings among themselves and…
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…
Qualitative relationships describe how increasing or decreasing one property (e.g. altitude) affects another (e.g. temperature). They are an important aspect of natural language question answering and are crucial for building chatbots or…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the `descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages,…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
We show that the equality language of two non-periodic binary morphisms is generated by at most two words. If its rank is two, then the generators start (and end) with different letters. This in particular implies that any binary language…
Meaning can be generated when information is related at a systemic level. Such a system can be an observer, but also a discourse, for example, operationalized as a set of documents. The measurement of semantics as similarity in patterns…
Identifying the relations that exist between words (or entities) is important for various natural language processing tasks such as, relational search, noun-modifier classification and analogy detection. A popular approach to represent the…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
Human languages use a wide range of grammatical categories to constrain which words or phrases can fill certain slots in grammatical patterns and to express additional meanings, such as tense or aspect, through morpho-syntactic means. These…
The average uncertainty associated with words is an information-theoretic concept at the heart of quantitative and computational linguistics. The entropy has been established as a measure of this average uncertainty - also called average…
In this article, we present a fresh perspective on language, combining ideas from various sources, but mixed in a new synthesis. As in the minimalist program, the question is whether we can formulate an elegant formalism, a universal…
Language provides simple ways of communicating generalizable knowledge to each other (e.g., "Birds fly", "John hikes", "Fire makes smoke"). Though found in every language and emerging early in development, the language of generalization is…