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The sequential structure of language, and the order of words in a sentence specifically, plays a central role in human language processing. Consequently, in designing computational models of language, the de facto approach is to present…
This paper presents a model for linguistic description based on group theory. A grammar in this model, or "G-grammar", is a collection of lexical expressions which are products of logical forms, phonological forms, and their inverses.…
Linguistic similarity is multi-faceted. For instance, two words may be similar with respect to semantics, syntax, or morphology inter alia. Continuous word-embeddings have been shown to capture most of these shades of similarity to some…
Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…
With the rapid development of deep learning, most of current state-of-the-art techniques in natural langauge processing are based on deep learning models trained with argescaled static textual corpora. However, we human beings learn and…
In conversation, uptake happens when a speaker builds on the contribution of their interlocutor by, for example, acknowledging, repeating or reformulating what they have said. In education, teachers' uptake of student contributions has been…
Children learn word meanings by tapping into the commonalities across different situations in which words are used and overcome the high level of uncertainty involved in early word learning experiences. We propose a modeling framework to…
We analyze language change over time in a collaborative, goal-oriented instructional task, where utility-maximizing participants form conventions and increase their expertise. Prior work studied such scenarios mostly in the context of…
This paper compares a qualitative reasoning model of translation with a quantitative statistical model. We consider these models within the context of two hypothetical speech translation systems, starting with a logic-based design and…
In this paper I propose a new way of measuring linguistic productivity that objectively assesses the ability of an affix to be used to coin new complex words and, unlike other popular measures, is not directly dependent upon token…
We propose a method for natural language generation, choosing the most representative output rather than the most likely output. By viewing the language generation process from the voting theory perspective, we define representativeness…
We propose an alternate approach to quantifying how well language models learn natural language: we ask how well they match the statistical tendencies of natural language. To answer this question, we analyze whether text generated from…
A standard form of analysis for linguistic typology is the universal implication. These implications state facts about the range of extant languages, such as ``if objects come after verbs, then adjectives come after nouns.'' Such…
What makes some types of languages more probable than others? For instance, we know that almost all spoken languages contain the vowel phoneme /i/; why should that be? The field of linguistic typology seeks to answer these questions and,…
Systems now exist which are able to compile unification grammars into language models that can be included in a speech recognizer, but it is so far unclear whether non-trivial linguistically principled grammars can be used for this purpose.…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
Grammar refers to the system of rules that governs the structural organization and the semantic relations among linguistic units such as sentences, phrases, and words within a given language. In natural language processing, there remains a…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
This article contains ideas and their elaboration for quantifiers, which appeared after checking in practice the experimental language of the formal knowledge representation YAFOLL [1]: - looking at for_all and exists quantifiers as…
A repetition is a response that repeats words in the previous speaker's utterance in a dialogue. Repetitions are essential in communication to build trust with others, as investigated in linguistic studies. In this work, we focus on…