Related papers: Formation of Languages; Equality, Hierarchy and Te…
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…
The complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures is one of the core design features of human language. Duality of patterning refers for instance to the organization of the meaningful elements in a language at two distinct…
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…
The ability to read, write, and speak mathematics is critical to students becoming comfortable with statistical models and skills. Faster development of those skills may act as encouragement to further engage with the discipline. Vocabulary…
We develop a system that formally represents spatial semantics concepts within natural language descriptions of spatial arrangements. The system builds on a model of spatial semantics representation according to which words in a sentence…
Thousands of different forms (words) are associated with thousands of different meanings (concepts) in a language computer model. Reasonable agreement with reality is found for the number of languages in a family and the Hamming distances…
Though English sentences are typically inflexible vis-\`a-vis word order, constituents often show far more variability in ordering. One prominent theory presents the notion that constituent ordering is directly correlated with constituent…
Language models (LMs) are statistical models trained to assign probability to human-generated text. As such, it is reasonable to question whether they approximate linguistic variability exhibited by humans well. This form of statistical…
We use a probabilistic method to produce some combinatorial inequalities by considering pattern containment in permutations and words.
A new account of parameter setting during grammatical acquisition is presented in terms of Generalized Categorial Grammar embedded in a default inheritance hierarchy, providing a natural partial ordering on the setting of parameters.…
An automatic word classification system has been designed which processes word unigram and bigram frequency statistics extracted from a corpus of natural language utterances. The system implements a binary top-down form of word clustering…
Mobile devices use language models to suggest words and phrases for use in text entry. Traditional language models are based on contextual word frequency in a static corpus of text. However, certain types of phrases, when offered to writers…
Language enables humans to share knowledge, reason about the world, and pass on strategies for survival and innovation across generations. At the heart of this process is not just the ability to communicate but also the remarkable…
Children can use the statistical regularities of their environment to learn word meanings, a mechanism known as cross-situational learning. We take a computational approach to investigate how the information present during each observation…
Hierarchies allow feature sharing between objects at multiple levels of representation, can code exponential variability in a very compact way and enable fast inference. This makes them potentially suitable for learning and recognizing a…
Similarity is a core notion that is used in psychology and two branches of linguistics: theoretical and computational. The similarity datasets that come from the two fields differ in design: psychological datasets are focused around a…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
Quantified formulas pose a significant challenge for Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers due to their inherent undecidability. Existing instantiation techniques, such as e-matching, syntax-guided, model-based, conflict-based, and…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
Construction grammar posits that constructions, or form-meaning pairings, are acquired through experience with language (the distributional learning hypothesis). But how much information about constructions does this distribution actually…