Starting from a question by Dan Sperber, we analyze the expressive power of massively modular systems from a computational point of view. The key operation is introducing a non-computational component, a limited amount of resources to be shared among the modules. A case study is provided showing that such systems are flexible and context-sensitive, also having interesting cognitive features suc...

We consider here colonies (grammar systems having as components regular grammars generating finite languages) with various derivation modes (*,t,< k,= k,> k, as usual in grammar systems area). Their generative capacity is investigated. Problems still open in the theory of general grammar systems (concerning, for instance, hierarchies on the number of components and on the parameter k mentioned ...

We apply basic notions of the theory of rough sets, due to Pawlak [30, 31], to explicate certain properties of unification-based learning algorithms for categorial grammars, introduced in [6, 11] and further developed in e.g. [18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 9, 28, 14, 15, 3]. The outcomes of these algorithms can be used to compute both the lower and the upper approximation of the searched language with re...

Listeners flexibly recalibrate the perceptual categorization of sounds in response to speakers’ unusual pronunciation variants. Recent studies have shown that generalization of this recalibration can inform us about the nature of prelexical units used for speech perception. The present study tested whether this generalization is sensitive to phonetic or phonological properties of speech. Using ...

This study focuses on the class of string languages generated by TAGs. It examines whether the class of string languages can be generated by some epsilon-free grammars and by some lexicalized grammars. Utilizing spine grammars, this problem is solved positively. This result for spine grammars can be translated into the result for TAGs.

Locality Conditions (LCs) on (unbounded) dependencies have played a major role in the development of generative syntax ever since the seminal work by Ross [22]. Descriptively, they fall into two groups. On the one hand there are intervention-based LCs (ILCs) often formulated as “minimality constraints” (“minimal link condition,” “minimize chain links,”“shortest move,”“attract closest,” etc.). O...

We generalize Solomonoff’s stochastic context-free grammar induction method to context-sensitive grammars, and apply it to transfer learning problem by means of an efficient update algorithm. The stochastic grammar serves as a guiding program distribution which improves future probabilistic induction approximations by learning about the training sequence of problems. Stochastic grammar is updat...

We introduce and investigate a new way of generating mildly context-sensitive languages. The main idea is that the contexts are adjoined by shu ing them on certain trajectories. In this way we obtain also a very general class of contextual grammars such that most of the fundamental classes of contextual grammars, for instance, internal contextual grammars, external contextual grammars, n-contex...

The change within the linguistic framework of transformational grammar from GB–theory to minimalism brought up a particular type of formal grammar, as well. We show that this type of a minimalist grammar (MG) constitutes a subclass of mildly context–sensitive grammars in the sense that for each MG there is a weakly equivalent linear context–free rewriting system (LCFRS). Moreover, an infinite h...