Related papers: Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic cate…
All human societies present unique narratives that shape their customs and beliefs. Despite cultural differences, some symbolic elements (e.g., heroes and tricksters) are common across many cultures. Here, we reconcile these seemingly…
Understanding the semantic relationships between terms is a fundamental task in natural language processing applications. While structured resources that can express those relationships in a formal way, such as ontologies, are still scarce,…
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…
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…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
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…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
This perspective paper explores the bidirectional influence between language emergence and the relational structure of subjective experiences, termed qualia structure, and lays out a constructive approach to the intricate dependency between…
In natural language, referencing objects at different levels of specificity is a fundamental pragmatic mechanism for efficient communication in context. We develop a novel communication game, the hierarchical reference game, to study the…
Many complex generative systems use languages to create structured objects. We consider a model of random languages, defined by weighted context-free grammars. As the distribution of grammar weights broadens, a transition is found from a…
Language can be described as a network of interacting objects with different qualitative properties and complexity. These networks include semantic, syntactic, or phonological levels and have been found to provide a new picture of language…
How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers.…
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…
This paper introduces how human languages can be studied in light of recent development of network theories. There are two directions of exploration. One is to study networks existing in the language system. Various lexical networks can be…
Human categorization is one of the most important and successful targets of cognitive modeling in psychology, yet decades of development and assessment of competing models have been contingent on small sets of simple, artificial…
The explicit relationship among perception, communication, and design is being discussed in some detail, in order to relate it to characteristic details of the modeling of the world which defines the scientific and artistic activities of…
Process theories combine a graphical language for compositional reasoning with an underlying categorical semantics. They have been successfully applied to fields such as quantum computation, natural language processing, linear dynamical…
"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and…
Dictionaries are inherently circular in nature. A given word is linked to a set of alternative words (the definition) which in turn point to further descendants. Iterating through definitions in this way, one typically finds that…
A concept of "evolving categories" is suggested to build a simple, scalable, mathematically consistent framework for representing in uniform way both data and algorithms. A state machine for executing algorithms becomes clear, rich and…