Frege's invention of the predicate calculus has been the most influential event in the history of modern logic. The calculus’ place in logic is so central that many philosophers think, in fact, of it when they think of logic. This book challenges the position in contemporary logic and philosophy of language of the predicate calculus claiming that it is based on mistaken assumptions. Ben-Yami shows that the predicate calculus is different from natural language in its fundamental semantic (...) charac. (shrink)

This paper develops a natural-language agent-based model of argumentation (ABMA). Its artificial deliberative agents (ADAs) are constructed with the help of so-called neural language models recently developed in AI and computational linguistics. ADAs are equipped with a minimalist belief system and may generate and submit novel contributions to a conversation. The natural-language ABMA allows us to simulate collective deliberation in English, i.e. with arguments, reasons, and claims themselves — rather than with their mathematical representations (as (...) in symbolic models). This paper uses the natural-language ABMA to test the robustness of symbolic reason-balancing models of argumentation (Mäs & Flache 2013; Singer et al. 2019): First of all, as long as ADAs remain passive, confirmation bias and homophily updating trigger polarization, which is consistent with results from symbolic models. However, once ADAs start to actively generate new contributions, the evolution of a conversation is dominated by properties of the agents as authors. This suggests that the creation of new arguments, reasons, and claims critically affects a conversation and is of pivotal importance for understanding the dynamics of collective deliberation. The paper closes by pointing out further fruitful applications of the model and challenges for future research. (shrink)

This paper presents two projects concerned with the application of natural language processing technology for improving communication between Public Administration and citizens. The first project, GIST,is concerned with automatic multilingual generation of instructional texts for form-filling. The second project, TAMIC, aims at providing an interface for interactive access to information, centered on natural language processing and supposed to be used by the clerk but with the active participation of the citizen.

_Natural Language and Possible Minds: How Language Uncovers the Cognitive Landscape of Nature_ examines the intrinsic connection between natural language and the nature of mentality, offering to show how language can shed light on the forms of other types of mentality in non-humans.

The aim of natural language ontology is to uncover the ontological categories and structures that are implicit in the use of natural language, that is, that a speaker accepts when using a language. This article aims to clarify what exactly the subject matter of natural language ontology is, what sorts of linguistic data it should take into account, how natural language ontology relates to other branches of metaphysics, in what ways (...) class='Hi'>natural language ontology is important, and what may be distinctive of the ontological categories and structures reflected in natural language. (shrink)

Abbott replies to each of Hauser's arguments. Problem solving by chimpanzees and evidence of recursion in the thought of a feral human being suggest that natural language is not necessary for productive thought. Communication would be trivial if the inner language were the outer language, but it is not. The decryption analogy Hauser uses is flawed, and it is not clear which way Occam's razor cuts.

From a leading authority in artificial intelligence, this book delivers a synthesis of the major modern techniques and the most current research in natural language processing. The approach is unique in its coverage of semantic interpretation and discourse alongside the foundational material in syntactic processing.

Independence Friendly Logic, introduced by Hintikka, is a logic in which a quantifier can be marked for being independent of other quantifiers. Dependence logic, introduced by Väänänen, is a logic with the complementary approach: for a quantifier it can be indicated on which quantifiers it depends. These logics are claimed to be useful for many phenomena, for instance natural language semantics. In this contribution we will compare these two logics by investigating their application in a compositional analysis of (...) the de dicto - de re ambiguity in natural language. It will be argued that Independence Friendly logic is suitable, whereas Dependence Logic is not. (shrink)

Natural language processing (NLP) has undergone significant changes in its methods, reflecting advances in computing technology and cognitive research. This article reviews the key stages of the evolution of natural language processing methods. The article touches on the topic of the first NLP systems developed, provides justification for the reasons for the complexity of some processed texts and the possible depth of analysis. In addition, it describes not only NLP methods before and after the GPT revolution, (...) but also current trends and prospects in the field of natural language processing. The article allows us to trace how the idea of natural language text has changed during the development of computer analysis methods, as well as to understand what text is in the mirror of natural language processing, what is really the subject of natural language processing research and what cannot be seen through the eyes of a simple researcher who does not use NLP methods. (shrink)

We propose a shift in perspective from the view of natural languages as formal languages to natural languages as a collection of resources for constructing local languages for use in particular situations. This is suggested by our experience constructing natural language grammars for particular applications using the Grammatical Framework. It points to a research programme investigating how such resources play a role in linguistic innovation by agents constructing situation-specific local languages and how they can be made (...) dynamic, modified by the linguistic agent’s exposure to innovative linguistic data. (shrink)

This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis, in the context for type-logical grammars, of the logical models and algorithms currently used in natural language semantics, defined as a function from a grammatical sentence to a set of logical formulas—because a statement can be ambiguous, it can correspond (...) to multiple formulas, one for each reading. We argue that as long as we do not explicitly compute the interpretation in terms of possible world models, one can compute the semantic representation of a given statement, including aspects of lexical meaning. This is a very generic process, so the results are, at least in principle, widely applicable. We also discuss the algorithmic complexity of this process. (shrink)

I assume that the task of natural language semantics is to provide an unambiguous logical language into which natural language can be translated in such a way that the translating expressions display a structure which is isomorphic to the meaning of the translated expressions. Since language is a means of thinking and communicating mental contents, the meanings of singular terms cannot be the individuals of the substratist tradition, because such individuals are not cognizable entities. (...) Thus I propose that the logical language be based on Castaneda's guise theory, according to which singular terms always denote guises, i.e., roughly, bundles of properties. This, I argue, would result in a semantics which is in accordance with projects such as Lakoff's natural logic or Fodor's methodological solipsism. ;I first propose a formal system, GCC, which tries to be as faithful as possible to Castaneda's informal presentation of guise theory. It is therefore characterized by different forms of predication and a distinction between a level of property composition and a level of proposition composition. Such a distinction is dropped in a second system, GF, which presents a more traditional Fregean representation of predication. Yet, GF endorses essential assumptions of guise theory such as the existence of different sameness relations that can provide various interpretations for the English "is". I claim that GF provides more theoretical simplicity than GCC. ;Finally, I show the fruitfulness of the present approach by applying GF to a vast collection of linguistico-philosophical puzzles which includes but is not restricted to those that guise theory was originally designed to address: various versions of Frege's paradox, the paradox of analysis, Quine's puzzle on the number of planets, issues of reidentification and intentional identity, the anaphoric "it" of sentences such as "the lizard's tail fell off but then it grew back," problems connected with the use of "knowing-who ," proper names, indexicals and demonstratives. (shrink)

The contributions in this volume focus on the Bayesian interpretation of natural languages, which is widely used in areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computational linguistics. This is the first volume to take up topics in Bayesian Natural Language Interpretation and make proposals based on information theory, probability theory, and related fields. The methodologies offered here extend to the target semantic and pragmatic analyses of computational natural language interpretation. Bayesian approaches to natural (...) class='Hi'>language semantics and pragmatics are based on methods from signal processing and the causal Bayesian models pioneered by especially Pearl. In signal processing, the Bayesian method finds the most probable interpretation by finding the one that maximizes the product of the prior probability and the likelihood of the interpretation. It thus stresses the importance of a production model for interpretation as in Grice’s contributions to pragmatics or in interpretation by abduction. (shrink)

This article presents an architecture for natural language generation of biomedical argumentation. The goal is to reconstruct the normative arguments that a domain expert would provide, in a manner that is transparent to a lay audience. Transparency means that an argument's structure and functional components are accessible to its audience. Transparency is necessary before an audience can fully comprehend, evaluate or challenge an argument, or re-evaluate it in light of new findings about the case or changes in scientific (...) knowledge. The architecture has been implemented and evaluated in the Genetics Information Expression Assistant, a prototype system for drafting genetic counselling patient letters. Argument generation makes use of abstract argumentation schemes. Derived from the analysis of arguments used in genetic counselling, these mainly causal argument patterns refer to abstract properties of qualitative causal domain models. (shrink)

This paper gives a characterization of the ontology implicit in natural language and the entities it involves, situates natural language ontology within metaphysics, and responds to Chomskys' dismissal of externalist semantics.

The paper argues that natural language quantification, as expressed by determiner phrases, is not polysemous. The foil for this claim is Hofweber, who contends that natural language quantification is polysemous between a domain reading and an inferential reading. The thesis is intended to support a more general division between externalist and internalist positions in semantics. The paper, to the contrary, argues that there is no linguistic evidence for polysemous quantification, and Hofweber’s proposal proves to be non-compositional. (...) Further, an approach at least consistent with internalism is available independent of an inferential reading, for natural language quantification can be read as ontologically neutral, which removes the rationale for the polysemy hypothesis. The paper remains neutral on so-called heavyweight vs. lightweight construals of quantification, which are not claims about natural language semantics. (shrink)

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any (...) intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process. (shrink)

Modern weaponry is often too complex for unaided human operation, and is largely or totally controlled by computers. But modern software, particularly artificial intelligence software, exhibits such complexity and inscrutability that there are grave dangers associated with its use in non-benign applications. Recent efforts to make computer systems more accessible to military personnel through natural language processing systems, as proposed in the Strategic Computing Initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, increases rather than decreases the dangers of (...) unpredictable behavior. Defense systems constitute, in fact, a paradigm case of the wrong kind of application for this technology. This cannot be expected to change, since the unpredictability stems from inherent properties of computer systems and of natural languages. (shrink)

In this paper I review the Neo-Davidsonian semantics of prepositional phrases and secondary predication. I argue that certain types of examples pose challenge to this semantics. I present an alternative to the Neo-Davidsonian analysis which successfully deals with the problematic examples. The core idea lies in representing theta-roles not as functions from events to their participants, but rather as argument-labels encoding the role of each argument in a given verb. As a result, natural-language predicates can now be treated (...) in the manner in which relations are treated in the relational model of data, that is, as naming sets of tuples in which every object is given together with its role named by a corresponding attribute (a theta-role). Such a representation allows the employment of relational algebra operators to calculate the extensions of complex predicates (predicates built out of atomic predicates and/or atomic predicates and prepositions). I lay out the foundations of a relational FOL appropriate for the representation of natural-language predicates and present solutions to the problematic examples. From a practical perspective, the expressions of a relational FOL can be translated to a relational algebra or SQL, which makes it possible to operate with these three languages on the same relational model of data. From a philosophical perspective, a relational FOL permits a return to ‘property-based’ semantics, one in which properties named by predicates are those of individuals, and not of events. (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt at the investigation of the nature of polarity contrast in natural languages. Truth conditions for natural language sentences are incomplete unless they include a proper definition of the conditions under which they are false. It is argued that the tertium non datur principle of classical bivalent logical systems is empirically invalid for natural languages: falsity cannot be equated with non-truth. Lacking a direct intuition about the conditions under which a sentence (...) is false, we need an independent foundation of the concept of falsity. The solution I offer is a definition of falsity in terms of the truth of a syntactic negation of the sentence. A definition of syntactic negation is proposed for English. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall provide a novel response to the argument from context-sensitivity against truth-conditional semantics. It is often argued that the contextual influences on truth-conditions outstrip the resources of standard truth-conditional accounts, and so truth-conditional semantics rests on a mistake. The argument assumes that truth-conditional semantics is legitimate if and only if natural language sentences have truth-conditions. I shall argue that this assumption is mistaken. Truth-conditional analyses should be viewed as idealised approximations of the complexities of (...) natural language meaning. From this perspective, disparity between the scientific model and its real-world target is to be expected. I elaborate on what such an approach to semantics would look like. (shrink)

This article contains the results of a theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of natural language understanding (NLU), as a methodological problem. The combination of structural-ontological and informational-psychological approaches provided an opportunity to describe the subject matter field of NLU, as a composite function of the mind, which systemically combines the verbal and discursive structural layers. In particular, the idea of NLU is presented, on the one hand, as the relation between the discourse of a specific speech message and (...) the meta-discourse of a language, in turn, activated by the need-motivational factors. On the other hand, it is conceptualized as a process with a specific structure of information metabolism, the study of which implies the necessity to differentiate the affective (emotional) and need-motivational influences on the NLU, as well as to take into account their interaction. At the same time, the hypothesis about the influence of needs on NLU under the scenario similar to the pattern of Yerkes-Dodson is argued. And the theoretical conclusion that emotions fulfill the function of the operator of the structural features of the information metabolism of NLU is substantiated. Thus, depending on the modality of emotions in the process of NLU, it was proposed to distinguish two scenarios for the implementation of information metabolism - reduction and synthetic. The argument in favor of the conclusion about the productive and constitutive role of emotions in the process of NLU is also given. (shrink)

Progress in philosophy is difficult to achieve because our methods are evidentially and rhetorically weak. In the last two decades, experimental philosophers have begun to employ the methods of the social sciences to address philosophical questions. However, the adequacy of these methods has been called into question by repeated failures of replication. Experimental philosophers need to incorporate more robust methods to achieve a multi-modal perspective. In this chapter, we describe and showcase cutting-edge methods for data-mining and visualization. Big data is (...) a useful investigatory tool for moral psychology, and it fits well with the Ramsification method the first author advances in a series of recent papers. The guiding insight of these papers is that we can infer the meaning and structure of concepts from patterns of assertions and inferential associations in natural language. (shrink)

Recent work on compositional distributional models shows that bialgebras over finite dimensional vector spaces can be applied to treat generalised quantifiersGeneralised quantifiers for natural language. That technique requires one to construct the vector space over powersets, and therefore is computationally costly. In this paper, we overcome this problem by considering fuzzy versions of quantifiers along the lines of ZadehZadeh, L. A., within the category of many valued relationsMany valued relations. We show that this category is a concrete instantiation (...) of the compositional distributional model. We show that the semantics obtained in this model is equivalent to the semantics of the fuzzy quantifiers of ZadehZadeh, L. A.. As a result, we are now able to treat fuzzy quantification without requiring a powerset construction. (shrink)

This book presents a new theory of how children acquire language and discusses its implications for a wide range of topics. It explores the roles of innateness and experience in language acquisition, provides further evidence for the theory of Universal Grammar, and shows how linguistic development in children is a driving force behind language shifts and changes.Charles Yang surveys a wide range of errors in children's language and identifies overlooked patterns. He combines these with work in (...) biological evolution in order to develop a model of language acquisition by which to understand the interaction between children's internal linguistic knowledge and their external linguistic experience. He then presents evidence from his own and others' research in the acquisition of syntax and morphology and data from historical language change to test its validity. The model is the first to make quantitative and cross-linguistic predictions about child language. It may also be deployed as a predictive model of language change which, when the evidence is available, could explain why grammars change in a particular direction at a particular time.Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language is a pioneering work at the centre of current concerns in linguistics and cognitive science. It will interest all those concerned to understand and explain language acquisition, Universal Grammar, and language change. (shrink)

An argument for Trivialism, the view that natural languages are logically inconsistent, is provided that does not rely on contentious empirical assumptions about natural language terms such as “and” or “or.” Further, the view is defended against an important objection recently mounted against it by Thomas Hofweber.

Good communication is vital in healthcare both among healthcare professionals and be tween healthcare professionals and their patients And well written documents describing and or explaining the information in structured databases may be easier to comprehend more edifying and even more convincing than the structured data even when presented in tabu lar or graphic form Documents may be automatically generated from structured data using techniques from the eld of natural language generation These techniques are concerned with how the (...) content organisation and language used in a document can be dynamically selected depending on the audience and context They have been used to generate health education ma terials explanations and critiques in decision support systems and medical reports and progress notes.. (shrink)

The present paper intends to draw the conception of language implied in the technique of word embeddings that supported the recent development of deep neural network models in computational linguistics. After a preliminary presentation of the basic functioning of elementary artificial neural networks, we introduce the motivations and capabilities of word embeddings through one of its pioneering models, word2vec. To assess the remarkable results of the latter, we inspect the nature of its underlying mechanisms, which have been characterized as (...) the implicit factorization of a word-context matrix. We then discuss the ordinary association of the “distributional hypothesis” with a “use theory of meaning,” often justifying the theoretical basis of word embeddings, and contrast them to the theory of meaning stemming from those mechanisms through the lens of matrix models (such as vector space models and distributional semantic models). Finally, we trace back the principles of their possible consistency through Harris’s original distributionalism up to the structuralist conception of language of Saussure and Hjelmslev. Other than giving access to the technical literature and state of the art in the field of natural language processing to non-specialist readers, the paper seeks to reveal the conceptual and philosophical stakes involved in the recent application of new neural network techniques to the computational treatment of language. (shrink)

Notice that this paper has not claimed that all natural languages are CFL's. What it has shown is that every published argument purporting to demonstrate the non-context-freeness of some natural language is invalid, either formally or empirically or both.18 Whether non-context-free characteristics can be found in the stringset of some natural language remains an open question, just as it was a quarter century ago.Whether the question is ultimately answered in the negative or the affirmative, there (...) will be interesting further questions to ask. If it turns out that natural languages are indeed always CFL's, it will be reasonable to ask whether this helps to explain why speakers apparently recognize so quickly whether a presented utterance corresponds to a grammatical sentence or not, and to associate structural and semantic details with it. It might also be reasonable to speculate about the explanation for the universally context-free character of the languages used by humans, and to wonder whether evolutionary biological factors are implicated in some way (Sampson (1979) could be read in this light). And naturally, it will be reasonable to pursue the program put forward by Gazdar (1981, in press) to see to what extent CFL-inducing grammatical devices can be exploited to yield insightful descriptions of natural languages that capture generalizations in revealing ways.If a human language that is not a CFL is proved to exist, on the other hand, a different question will be raised: give the non-context-free character of human languages in general, why has this property been so hard to demonstrate that it has taken over twenty-five years to bring it to light since the issue was first explicitly posed? If human languages do not have to be CFL's, why do so many (most?) of them come so close to having the property of context-freeness? And, since the CFL's certainly constitute a very broad class of mathematically natural and computationally tractable languages, what property of human beings or their communicative or cognitive needs is it that has caused some linguistic communities to reach beyond the boundaries of this class in the course of evolving a linguistic system?Either way, we shall be interested to see our initial question resolved, and further questions raised. One cautionary word should be said, however, about the implications (or lack of them) that the answer will have for grammatical studies. Chomsky has repeatedly stated that he does not see weak generative capacity as a theme of central importance in the theory of grammar, and we agree. It is very far from being the case that the recent resurgence of interest in exploring the potential of CF-PSG or equivalent systems will, or should, be halted dead in its tracks by the discovery (if it is ever forthcoming) that some natural language is not a CFL. In the area of parsing, for instance, it seems possible that natural languages are not only parsed on the basis of constituent structure such as a CF-PSG would assign, but are parsed as if they were finite state languages (see Langendoen (1975) and Church (1980) for discussion along these lines). That is, precisely those construction-types that figure in the various proofs that English is not an FSL appear to cause massive difficulty in the human processing system; the sentences crucial to the proofs are for the most part unprocessable unless they are extremely short (yet the arguments for English not being and FSL only go through if length is not an issue). This means that in practice properties of finite state grammars are still of great potential importance to linguistic theory despite the fact that they do not provide the framework for defining the total class of grammatical sentences. The same would almost certannly be true of CF-PSG's if they were shown to be inadequate in a similar sense. It is highly unlikely that the advances made so far in far in phrase structure description could be nullified by a discovery about weak generative capacity. Moreover, there are known to be numerous ways in which the power of CF-PSG's can be marginally enhanced to permit, for example, xx languages to be generated without allowing anything like the full class of recursively enumerable or even context-sensitive languages (see Hopcroft and Ullmann (1979), Chapter 14) for an introduction to this topic, noting especially Figure 14.7 on p. 393. The obvious thing to do if natural languages were ever shown not to be CFL's in the general case would be to start exploring such minimal enhancements of expressive power to determine exactly what natural languages call for in this regard and how it could be effectively but parsimoniously provided in a way that closely modelled human linguistic capacities.In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume that the natural languages are a proper subset of the infinite-cardinality CFL's until such time as they are validly shown not to be. (shrink)

In this paper we propose a way to deal with natural language inference by implementing Modern Type Theoretical Semantics in the proof assistant Coq. The paper is a first attempt to deal with NLI and natural language reasoning in general by using the proof assistant technology. Valid NLIs are treated as theorems and as such the adequacy of our account is tested by trying to prove them. We use Luo’s Modern Type Theory with coercive subtyping as (...) the formal language into which we translate natural language semantics, and we further implement these semantics in the Coq proof assistant. It is shown that the use of a MTT with an adequate subtyping mechanism can give us a number of promising results as regards NLI. Specifically, it is shown that a number of inference cases, i.e. quantifiers, adjectives, conjoined noun phrases and temporal reference among other things can be successfully dealt with. It is then shown, that even though Coq is an interactive and not an automated theorem prover, automation of all of the test examples is possible by introducing user-defined automated tactics. Lastly, the paper offers a number of innovative approaches to NL phenomena like adjectives, collective predication, comparatives and factive verbs among other things, contributing in this respect to the theoretical study of formal semantics using MTTs. (shrink)

The topic of temporal meaning in texts has received considerable attention in recent years from scholars in linguistics, logical semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Representing Time in Natural Language offers a systematic and detailed account of how we use temporal information contained in a text or in discourse to reason about the flow of time, inferring the order in which events happened when this is not explicitly stated. A new representational system is designed to formalize an appropriately (...) context-dependent notion of situated inference. The Dynamic Aspect Tree, representing temporal dependencies, constitutes a novel and important dynamic temporal logic, one that makes it easy to see "what follows when" from the information given in an ordinary English text. (shrink)

Strawson described ‘descriptive metaphysics’, Bach described ‘natural language metaphysics’, Sapir and Whorf describe, well, Sapir-Whorfianism. And there are other views concerning the relation between correct semantic analysis of linguistic phenomena and the “reality” that is supposed to be thereby described. I think some considerations from the analyses of the mass-count distinction can shed some light on that very dark topic.

Inner speech is a pervasive feature of our conscious mental lives. Yet its function and character remain an issue of philosophical debate. The present paper focuses on the relation between inner speech and natural language and on the cognitive functions that various contributors have ascribed to inner speech. In particular, it is argued that inner speech does not consist of bare, context-free internal presentations of sentential (or subsentential) content, but rather has an ineliminably perspectival element. The proposed model (...) of inner speech, which characterizes inner speech as akin to the testimony of an inner interlocutor, accounts for this perspectival element and, it is argued, is explanatorily superior, insofar as it better explains, amongst other phenomena, the often condensed character of inner speech. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This chapter contains sections titled: What are the Constraints on Formal Representations? What is the Relationship between a Natural Language Sentence and its Formal Representation?

This light piece reflects on analogies between two often disjoint streams of research: the logical semantics and pragmatics of natural language and dynamic logics of general information-driven agency. The two areas show significant overlap in themes and tools, and yet, the focus seems subtly different in each, defying a simple comparison. We discuss some unusual questions that emerge when the two are put side by side, without any pretense at covering the whole literature or at reaching definitive conclusions.

The paper answers the title question via its methodological commitment to a Husserlian description of the acts of consciousness which we cannot but perform when we engage in linguistic communication. Familiarizing the reader with the central terms of the German Vorstellung and Vorstellbarkeit (imaginability) and their prominence in phenomenological inquiry in the Introduction, the paper addresses major uses of Vorstellung from Kant to Husserl, before identifying imaginability as the hidden core of natural language, captured in a re-definition of (...) language and linguistic meaning. The observation that imaginability affects all linguistic aspects from phonology to pragmatics is followed by the claim that it is primarily a communally shared form of. The last Section offers a speculative, radically gradualist thesis of language evolution in opposition to dominant catastrophe theories, with the conclusion summarising the answer to the title question in terms imaginable, schematized resemblance relations. (shrink)

Hauser defends the proposition that our languages of thought are public languages. One group of arguments points to the coincidence of clearly productive (novel, unbounded) cognitive competence with overt possession of recursive symbol systems. Another group relies on phenomenological experience. A third group cites practical and methodological considerations: Occam's razor and the "streetlight principle" (other things being equal, look under the lamp) that motivate looking for instantiations of outer languages in thought first.

COVID-19 is a disease that affects the quality of life in all aspects. However, the government policy applied in 2020 impacted the lifestyle of the whole world. In this sense, the study of sentiments of people in different countries is a very important task to face future challenges related to lockdown caused by a virus. To contribute to this objective, we have proposed a natural language processing model with the aim to detect positive and negative feelings in open-text (...) answers obtained from a survey in pandemic times. We have proposed a distilBERT transformer model to carry out this task. We have used three approaches to perform a comparison, obtaining for our best model the following average metrics: Accuracy: 0.823, Precision: 0.826, Recall: 0.793 and F1 Score: 0.803. (shrink)