Daniel Mitropolsky


2022

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Center-Embedding and Constituency in the Brain and a New Characterization of Context-Free Languages
Daniel Mitropolsky | Adiba Ejaz | Mirah Shi | Christos Papadimitriou | Mihalis Yannakakis
Proceedings of the 3rd Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning Workshop (NALOMA III)

2021

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A Biologically Plausible Parser
Daniel Mitropolsky | Michael J. Collins | Christos H. Papadimitriou
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

We describe a parser of English effectuated by biologically plausible neurons and synapses, and implemented through the Assembly Calculus, a recently proposed computational framework for cognitive function. We demonstrate that this device is capable of correctly parsing reasonably nontrivial sentences.1 While our experiments entail rather simple sentences in English, our results suggest that the parser can be extended beyond what we have implemented, to several directions encompassing much of language. For example, we present a simple Russian version of the parser, and discuss how to handle recursion, embedding, and polysemy.