Related papers: Formation of Languages; Equality, Hierarchy and Te…
Syntax connects words to each other in very specific ways. Two words are syntactically connected if they depend directly on each other. Syntactic connections usually happen within a sentence. Gathering all those connection across several…
Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches to meaning. More specifically, proposals have been put forward to augment formal semantic machinery with…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
Linguistic norms emerge in human communities because people imitate each other. A shared linguistic system provides people with the benefits of shared knowledge and coordinated planning. Once norms are in place, why would they ever change?…
Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to…
Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task. Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional -- i.e., express meaning by…
In this paper we suggest how the mathematical concept of hyperstructures may be a useful tool in the study of the higher, hierachical structure of languages.
Quantification is a fundamental component of everyday language use, yet little is known about how speakers decide whether and how to quantify in naturalistic production. We investigate quantification in Mandarin Chinese using a…
We develop a qualitative model of decision making with two aims: to describe how people make simple decisions and to enable computer programs to do the same. Current approaches based on Planning or Decisions Theory either ignore uncertainty…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
Statistics pedagogy values using a variety of examples. Thanks to text resources on the Web, and since statistical packages have the ability to analyze string data, it is now easy to use language-based examples in a statistics class. Three…
Categorical compositional distributional semantics is a model of natural language; it combines the statistical vector space models of words with the compositional models of grammar. We formalise in this model the generalised quantifier…
Math is constructed by people for people: just as natural language corpora reflect not just propositions but the communicative goals of language users, the math data that models are trained on reflects not just idealized mathematical…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
Though languages can evolve slowly, they can also react strongly to dramatic world events. By studying the connection between words and events, it is possible to identify which events change our vocabulary and in what way. In this work, we…
Formal languages are sets of strings of symbols described by a set of rules specific to them. In this note, we discuss a certain class of formal languages, called regular languages, and put forward some elementary results. The properties of…
Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross-linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim…
We explore using latent natural language instructions as an expressive and compositional representation of complex actions for hierarchical decision making. Rather than directly selecting micro-actions, our agent first generates a latent…
Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…