Natural language syntax complies with the free-energy principle.
Natural language syntax yields an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions. We claim that these are used in the service of active inference in accord with the free-energy principle (FEP). While conceptual advances alongside modelling and simulation work have attempted to connect spee...
| Publicado en: | Synthese Vol. 203; no. 5; pp. 1 - 36 |
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| Autores principales: | , , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
| Publicado: |
Springer Nature
May2024
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=177053151&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 177053151 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00397857 4LI jtl: Synthese issn: 00397857 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: May2024 vid: 203 iid: 5 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature artinfo: ui: 177053151 10.1007/s11229-024-04566-3 ppf: 1 ppct: 35 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 675KB tig: atl: Natural language syntax complies with the free-energy principle. aug: au: Murphy, Elliot Holmes, Emma Friston, Karl affil: Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery, McGovern Medical School, University of Texas Health Science Center, 77030, Houston, TX, USA Texas Institute for Restorative Neurotechnologies, University of Texas Health Science Center, 77030, Houston, TX, USA https://ror.org/02jx3x895 Department of Speech Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, WC1N 1PF, London, UK https://ror.org/02704qw51 The Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, WC1N 3AR, London, UK sug: keyword: Active inference Compression Free-energy principle Kolmogorov complexity Language Lempel–Ziv ab: Natural language syntax yields an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions. We claim that these are used in the service of active inference in accord with the free-energy principle (FEP). While conceptual advances alongside modelling and simulation work have attempted to connect speech segmentation and linguistic communication with the FEP, we extend this program to the underlying computations responsible for generating syntactic objects. We argue that recently proposed principles of economy in language design—such as “minimal search” criteria from theoretical syntax—adhere to the FEP. This affords a greater degree of explanatory power to the FEP—with respect to higher language functions—and offers linguistics a grounding in first principles with respect to computability. While we mostly focus on building new principled conceptual relations between syntax and the FEP, we also show through a sample of preliminary examples how both tree-geometric depth and a Kolmogorov complexity estimate (recruiting a Lempel–Ziv compression algorithm) can be used to accurately predict legal operations on syntactic workspaces, directly in line with formulations of variational free energy minimization. This is used to motivate a general principle of language design that we term Turing–Chomsky Compression (TCC). We use TCC to align concerns of linguists with the normative account of self-organization furnished by the FEP, by marshalling evidence from theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics to ground core principles of efficient syntactic computation within active inference. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Synthese is a copyright of Springer, 2024. All Rights Reserved. item: Synthese holder: Springer Nature dt: @attributes: year: 2024 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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