Related papers: Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic cate…
Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state…
Categorization is a core component of human linguistic competence. We investigate how a transformer-based language model (LM) learns linguistic categories by comparing its behaviour over the course of training to behaviours which…
Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…
Game semantics is a rich and successful class of denotational models for programming languages. Most game models feature a rather intuitive setup, yet surprisingly difficult proofs of such basic results as associativity of composition of…
In experimental applications of bounded-reasoning models, behavior is often summarized by distributions of "levels". We argue that such summaries conflate two conceptually distinct dimensions: a player's type, capturing beliefs about what…
Programming languages are engineered languages that allow to instruct a machine and share algorithmic information; they have a great influence on the society since they underlie almost every information technology artefact, and they are at…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance on a range of NLP tasks, due to the general-purpose linguistic knowledge acquired during pretraining. Existing model interpretability research (Tenney et al., 2019) suggests that a…
The complexity of human interactions with social and natural phenomena is mirrored in the way we describe our experiences through natural language. In order to retain and convey such a high dimensional information, the statistical…
The relationship between the "knowledge base" and the "globalization" of communication systems is discussed from the perspective of communication theory. I argue that inter-human communication takes place at two levels. At the first level…
All natural languages exhibit a distinction between content words (like nouns and adjectives) and function words (like determiners, auxiliaries, prepositions). Yet surprisingly little has been said about the emergence of this universal…
Knowledge is useless without structure. While the classification of knowledge has been an enduring philosophical enterprise, it recently found applications in computer science, notably for artificial intelligence. The availability of large…
Interaction with the world requires an organism to transform sensory signals into representations in which behaviorally meaningful properties of the environment are made explicit. These representations are derived through cascades of…
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…
In this paper, we continue the research on the power of contextual grammars with selection languages from subfamilies of the family of regular languages. In the past, two independent hierarchies have been obtained for external and internal…
Linguistic evaluations of how well LMs generalize to produce or understand language often implicitly take for granted that natural languages are generated by symbolic rules. According to this perspective, grammaticality is determined by…
Lexical Semantics is concerned with how words encode mental representations of the world, i.e., concepts . We call this type of concepts, classification concepts . In this paper, we focus on Visual Semantics , namely on how humans build…
Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…
We propose a general framework to study language emergence through signaling games with neural agents. Using a continuous latent space, we are able to (i) train using backpropagation, (ii) show that discrete messages nonetheless naturally…
The empirical evidence that human color categorization exhibits some universal patterns beyond superficial discrepancies across different cultures is a major breakthrough in cognitive science. As observed in the World Color Survey (WCS),…