YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Gibson

lines on the record: 228
first: 2024-04-17
most recent: 2024-04-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's connected to the boy in the beginning. Right. And so I can do that. And I can say that that's a perfectly fine English sentence. And I can say the cat which the dog chased ran away or something. Okay, I can do that. But it's really hard now. I've got whenever I have here, I have the boy who the cat. Now let's say I try to modify cat. The boy who the cat which the dog chased scratched ran away. Oh my god, that's hard, right? I'm sort of just working that through in my head, how to produce and how to, and it's really just horrendous to understand. It's not so bad. At least I've got intonation there to sort of mark the boundaries and stuff, but it's that's really complicated. That's sort of English in a way. I mean, that follows the rules of English. So what's interesting about that is that what I'm doing is nesting dependencies there. I'm putting one.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The boy who the cat scratched cried. We're going to have a mean cat here. And so what I've got here is the boy cried, it would be a very short, simple sentence. And I just told you something about the boy, and I told you it was the boy who the cat scratched, okay?”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A really neat insight, which turns out to be true, is that the further apart the pair of words are that you're connecting, the harder it is to do the production, the harder it is to do the comprehension. It's as harder to produce, it's harder to understand when the words are far apart, when they're close together, it's easy to produce and it's easy to comprehend. Let me give you an example, okay? in any language we have mostly local connections between words, but they're abstract. The connections are abstract. They're between categories of words. And so you can always make things further apart if you put modification, for example, after a noun. So a noun in English comes before a verb, the subject noun comes before verb, and then there's an”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the reason I like dependency grammar, as I've said before, is that it's very transparent about its representation of distance between words. So all it is is you've got a bunch of words, you're connecting together to make a sentence.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are theories. So the theories, like the theories are, but I think the reason we differ in part is because of how we evaluate the theories. And so I evaluate theories quantitatively. And GNOME doesn't.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm called a linguist. I'm happy to be called a computer scientist. I'm happy to be called a psychologist. Any of those things. But in”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm a psychologist, so I would say we're in psychology. I'm in brain cognitive sciences. Is MIT's old psychology department? It was a psychology department up until 1985 and it became the brain and cognitive science department. And so my training is in psychology. I mean, my training is math and computer science, but I'm a psychologist. I mean, I don't know what I am. So data driven psychologist. Yeah, yeah, y”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a cross the street, they're across the street from us kind of difference between Brain and Cogsai and linguistics. I mean, not all some of the linguists, depending on what you do, more speech-oriented, they do more quantitative stuff. But in the meaning words and, well, it's combinations of words and text semantics, they tend not to do experiments. Corpus analyses. So, on the linguistic side.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I've been at MIT for 31 years since 1993, and he, Chomsky's been there much longer. So I met him, I knew him when I first got there, I guess. And we would interact every now and then. I'd say that, so I tell our biggest difference is our methods. And so that's the biggest difference between me and GNOME, is that I gather data from people. I do experiments with people and I gather corpus data, whatever corpus data is available, and we do quantitative methods to evaluate any kind of hypothesis we have. He just doesn't do that. He has never once been associated with any experiment or corpus work ever. And so it's all thought experiments. It's his own intuitions. So I just don't think that's the way to do things.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, in that network, our best guess is that whole network is doing something similar, but maybe different parts of that network are doing different things. And that's probably the case. We just don't have very good methods to figure that out, right, at this moment.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little overstated right now. At this point, the technology isn't great. It's not bad, but we have the best way to figure out what's going on in my brain when I'm listening or reading language is to use fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. And that's a very good localization method. So I can figure out where exactly these signals are coming from pretty, you know, down to millimeters, you know, cubic millimeters or smaller. Okay, very small. We can figure those out very well. The problem is the when, okay, it's measuring oxygen. And oxygen takes a little while to get to those cells. And so it takes on the order of seconds. So I talk fast. I probably listen fast and I can probably understand things really fast. So a lot of stuff happens in two seconds. And so to say that we know what's going on, that the words”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wherever I look in that network, if you look for the combinations versus the words, it's everywhere. It's the same. That's fascinating. And so it's like hard to find. There are no areas that we know. I mean, that's...”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same. If you look at my brain in the scanner while I'm listening to a language I understand and you compare, I can localize my language network in a few minutes, in like 15 minutes. And what you do is I listen to a language I know. I listen to maybe some language I don't know, or I listen to muffled speech or I read sentences and I read non-words, like I can do anything like this, anything that's sort of really like English and anything that's not very like English. So I've got something like it and not and I got to control. And the voxels, which is just, you know, the 3D pixels in my brain that are responding most is a language area. And that's this left lateralized area in my head.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subtle ways in which things which look like generalizations aren't generalizations and they across the category they're word specific and they have and they kind of work but they don't work across various other words in the category and so it's easier to just think of these things as lexical copies and I think he was very obsessed I don't know. I'm guessing that he just he really wanted this story to be simple in some sense and language is a little more complicated in some sense you know He didn't like words He never talks about words he likes to talk about combinations of words and words are you know look up a dictionary there's 50 senses for a common word right the word take will have 30 or 40 senses in it so there'll be many different senses for common words and he just doesn't think about that it's or doesn't think that's language I think he doesn't think that's language he thinks that words are distinct from combinations of words I think they're the same”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which rule of rules was intended. And so, and then he said, well, that means it's innate. It's kind of interesting. He just really thought the movement was just so obviously true that he couldn't, he didn't even entertain giving it up. It's just obvious. That's obviously right. And it was later where people figured out”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So within a sentence, within a sentence, yeah, within a sentence. So here we're going to get to that. But the formal language stuff is a little aside. Chomsky wasn't proposing it for human languages even. He was just pointing out that human languages are context-free. And then he was most, for human, because that was kind of stuff we did for formal languages. And what he was most interested in was human language. And that's like the movement is where we sort of set off on, I would say, a very interesting, but wrong foot. It was kind of interesting. I agree. It's a very interesting history. So there's this, so he proposed this multiple theories in 57 and then 65. They all have this framework, though, was phrase structure plus movement, different versions of the phrase structure and the movement in the 57s. These are the most famous original bits of Chomsky's work. And then 71 is when he figured out that those lead to learning problems, that there's cases where a kid could never figure out.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Says okay, I actually have more than one thing on the left. I can tell you only in this context, you know, I maybe have like a left and a right context or just a left context or a right context. I have two or more stuff on the left tells you how to expand those things in that way. Okay, so it's context sensitive. A regular language is just more constrained. And so it doesn't allow anything on the right. It allows very, basically it's one very complicated rule is kind of what a regular language is. And so it doesn't have any long distance dependencies. It doesn't allow recursion, for instance. There's no recursion. Yeah, recursion is where you, which human languages have recursion. They have embedding and you can't, well, it doesn't allow center embedded recursion, which human languages have, which is what”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so you have a left hand side category and you're expanding to anything on the right's, that's a context-free. So the idea is that that category on the left expands independent of context to those things, whatever they're on the right. It doesn't matter what. And a context sensitive.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. Not at all. I mean, regular languages are too simple for human languages. It's a part of the hierarchy, but human languages are in the phrase structure world, they're at least context-free, maybe a little bit more, a little bit harder than that. So there's something called context sensitive as well, where you can have, like this is just the formal language description in a context free grammar, you have one this is like a bunch of like formal language theory we're doing here.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Or a particular defense grammar, you can make a phrase structure grammar, which generates exactly those same sentences and vice versa. But there are many phrase structure grammars which you can't really make a dependency grammar. I mean, you can do a lot more in a phrase structure grammar. You get many more of these extra nodes, basically. You can have more structure in there. And some people like that. And maybe there's value to that. I don't like it. Well, for you, so...”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are equivalent in some sense in that for any dependency grammar, I can generate a phrase structure grammar which generates exactly the same sentences. I just like the dependency grammar formalism because it makes something really salient, which is the lengths of dependencies between words, which isn't so obvious in the phrase. In the phrase structure, it's just kind of hard to see. It's in there. It's just very, very, it's opaque.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. It just sounds completely out to me Anyway, so there are variants here, and a lot of these words just work in one versus the other. And that's like fine under the lexical copying story. It's like, well, you just learn the usage, whatever the usage is, is what you do with this word. But it's a little bit harder in the movement story. The movement story, like that's an advantage, I think, of Alexa copying and all these different places, there's all these usage variants which make the movement story a little bit harder to.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's not from I Aren't invited to the party. There is no I aren't, right? So that's interrogative only. And then we also have forms like ought. I ought to do this. And I guess some British old British people can say ought. Exactly. It doesn't sound right, does it? For me, it sounds ridiculous. I don't even think aught is great, but I mean, I totally recognize I ought to, it is not too bad, actually. I can say I ought to do this. That sounds pretty good.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just setting parameters, you're set depending on English, is just sort of a variant of the universal grammar, and you're figuring out, oh, which orders does English do these things? The non-movement story doesn't have this. It's like much more bottom-up. Your learning rules. You're learning rules one by one. And, oh, this word is connected to that word. A great advantage, another advantage is learnable. Another advantage of it is that it predicts that not all auxiliaries might move. It might depend on the word depending on whether you. And that turns out to be true. So there's words that don't really work as auxiliary. They work in declarative and not an interrogative. So I can say, I'll give you the opposite first. I can say, aren't I invited to the party? Okay. And that's an interrogative form.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Just learn the English. So baby is lying around listening to the crib, listening to me talk. And how are they learning English? Or, you know, maybe it's a two-year-old who's learning, you know, interrogatives and stuff. How are they doing that? Are they doing it from like, are they figuring out?”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And movement. It's like really hard to figure out what came from what. There's a lot of possibilities there. If you don't have that problem, the learning problem gets a lot easier.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's the lexical copying is similar so that you so then we do lexical copying for that same idea that maybe the declarative is the source and then we can copy it. So an advantage there's multiple advantages of the lexical copying story. It's not my story. This is like Ivan Sogg, linguists, a bunch of linguists have been proposing these stories as well in tandem with the movement story. Ivan Sog died a while ago, but he was one of the proponents of the non-movement of lexical copying story. And so that is that a great advantage is, well, Chomsky really famously in 1971 showed that the movement story leads to learnability problems. It leads to problems for how language is learned. It's really, really hard to figure out what the underlying structure of a language is if you have both phrase structure”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One and oh, I formed the interrogative, or I can form one from the other, doesn't matter which direction you go. And I just have a new entry which has the same meaning, which has a slightly different argument structure, argument structure, just a fancy word for the ordering of the words. And so if I say it was the dog's two dogs can or will enter the room, there's two forms of will. One is will declarative and then, okay, I've got my subject to the left. It comes before me, and the verb comes after me in that one. And then the will interrogative. It's like, oh, I go first. Interrogative will is first, and then I have the subject immediately after, and then the verb after that. And so you just, you can just generate from one of those words another word with a slightly different argument structure with different ordering.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Left is it's a little more complicated than it, but that's his idea there's a movement, okay? And so a different way to think about that that isn't, I mean he ended up showing later. So he proposed this theory of grammar which has movement and there's other places where he thought there's movement not just auxiliary verbs but things like the passive and English and things like questions, WH questions, a bunch of places where he thought there's also movement going on. And each one of those he thinks there's words, well, phrases and words are moving around from one structure to another, which he called deep structure to surface structure. I mean, there's like two different structures in his theory. There's a different way to think about this, which is there's no movement at all. There's a lexical copying rule such that the word will or the word can these auxiliary verbs, they just have two forms. And one of them is the declarative and one of them is interrogative. And you basically have the declarative.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theory there. He talks about it as movement. That word in the Declines, the declarative is the root is deserved default way to think about the sentence, and you move the auxiliary verb to the front. That's a movement theory. And he just thought that was just so obvious that it must be true. That there's nothing more to say about that, that this is how auxiliary verbs work in English. There's a movement rule such that you're move like to get from the declarative to the interrogative, you're moving the auxiliary to the front. And it's a little more complicated as soon as you go to simple present and simple past because if I say John slept, you have to say, did John sleep not slept John, right? And so you have to somehow get an auxiliary verb and I guess underlyingly, it's like...”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so here's the movement is Chomsky basically sees English and he says, okay, I said, you know, we had that sentence earlier. Like it was like two dogs entered the room. It's changed a little bit. Say two dogs will enter the room. And he notices that, hey, English, if I want to make a question, a yes-no question from that same sentence, I say instead of two dogs will enter the room, I say, will two dogs enter the room? Okay, there's a different way to say the same idea. And it's like, well, the auxiliary verb that will thing, it's at the front as opposed to in the middle, okay? And so, and he looked, you know, if you look at English, you see that that's true for all those modal verbs and for other kinds of auxiliary verbs in English. You always do that. You always put an auxiliary verb at the front. And what he, when he saw that, so, you know, if I say I can win this bet, can I win this bet? So I move a can to the front. So actually that's a theory. I just gave you a...”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're very close. So phrase structure grammar and dependency grammar aren't that far apart. I like dependency grammar because it's more perspicuous, it's more transparent about representing the connections between the words. It's just a little harder to see in phrase structure grammar. The place where Chomsky sort of devolved or went off from this is he also thought there was something called movement. And that's where we disagree. Okay. That's the place where I would say we disagree. And I mean, maybe we'll get into that later. But the idea is if you want to, do you want me to explain that now?”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Type of thing. It's a particular formalism for describing language. Okay, so in Chomsky was the first one. He's the one who figured that stuff out back in the 50s. But that's equivalent actually, the context-free grammar is kind of equivalent in the sense that it generates the same sentences as a dependency grammar would. The dependency grammar is a little simpler in some way. You just have a root and it goes like we don't have any of these. The rules are implicit, I guess, and we just have connections between words. The phrase structure grammar is a kind of a different way to think about the dependency grammar. So it's slightly more complicated, but it's kind of the same in some ways.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and have been heavily studied using this formalism. There's a big field of programming languages within the formal language”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and it doesn't have to be human language there. We can have computer languages, any kind of system which is generating some set of expressions in a language and those could be like the... The statements in a computer language, for example, so formally, it could be that, or it could be human language.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A way to sort of cover human languages. And then he actually figured out that, well, depending on the formalization of those grammars, you might get more complicated or less complicated languages. And so he said, well, these are things called context-free languages that rule. He thought human languages tend to be what he calls context-free languages. But there are simpler languages, which are so-called regular languages, and they have a more constrained form to the rules of the phrase structure of these particular rules. So he basically discovered and kind of invented ways to describe the language. And those are phrase structure, a human language. And he was mostly interested in English initially in his work in the 50s.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will look like this. They will have a left hand side and will have a right hand side. Something will on the left hand side will expand to the thing on the right-hand side. So we'll say we'll start with an S, which is like the root, which is a sentence. And then we're going to expand to things like a noun phrase and a verb phrase is what he would say, for instance. Okay. An S goes to an NP and a VP is a kind of a phrase structure rule. And we figure out when an NP is, and NP is a determiner, an noun, for instance, and verb phrase is something else is a verb and another noun phrase, another NP, for instance. Those are the rules of a very simple phrase structure. He proposed phrase structure grammar.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are other parameters in the mix such that some people think there's a more complicated grammar than just a dependency structure. And so, you know, like Noam Chomsky, he's the most famous linguist ever. And he is famous for proposing a slightly more complicated syntax. And so he invented phrase structure grammar. well known for many, many things, but in the 50s and early 60s, like the late 50s, he was basically figuring out what's called formal language theory. A certain type of language might be, so-called phrase structure grammars of language might be. And so his idea was that maybe we can think about the complexity of a language by how complicated the rules are. And the rules.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. You were asking me before about how do I figure out what a dependency structure is. I'd say the dependency structures aren't that hard generally. I think there's a lot of agreement of what they are for almost any sentence in most languages. I think people will agree on a lot of that.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Order of English changed a lot over a thousand years, right? So it used to look like German. It used to be a verb final language with case marking, and it shifted to a verb medial language. A lot of contact, so a lot of contact with French, and it became verb medial language with no case marking. And so it became this verb initially thing. It's evolving. It totally evolved. And so it may very well, I mean, you know, it doesn't evolve maybe very much in 20 years is maybe what you're talking about. But over 50 and 100 years, things change a lot, I think.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, English is changing. English changes all the time. All languages change all the time. So, you know, there's a famous result about the Queen's English. So if you look at the Queen's vowels, the Queen's English is supposed to be originally the proper way for the talk was sort of defined by however the queen talked or the king, whoever was in charge. And so if you look at how her vowels changed from when she first became queen in 1952 or 53 when she was, I mean, that's Queen Elizabeth who died recently, of course, until 50 years later, her vowels changed. Her vowels shifted a lot. And so even in the sounds of British English, in her, the way she was talking was changing. The vowels were changing slightly. So that's just in the sounds there's change. I don't know what's, you know, I'm interested. We're all interested in what's driving any of these changes.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think so A little bit of Old English to modern English because there was a writing system and we can how old English looked. So the word order changed, for instance, in Old English to Middle English to modern English. And so we could see things like that. But most languages don't even have a writing system. So of the 7,000, only a small subset of those have a writing system. And even if they have a writing system, it's not a very modern writing system. And so they don't have it. So we just basically have for Mandarin, for Chinese, we have a lot of evidence for a long time and for English and not for much else, not from in German a little bit, but not for a whole lot of like long-term language evolution. We don't have a lot. We just have snapshots is what we've got of current languages.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different, and the only way it varies is color, then I invent a word which tells you, you know, this is the one I want. So I want the red sweater off the rack, not the green sweater, right? There's two until those things will be identical because these are things we made and they're dyed, and there's nothing different about them. And so in industrialized society, we have... You know, everything we've got is pretty much arbitrarily colored. But you go to a non industrialized group, that's not true. And so they don't, suddenly they're not interested in color. You bring bright colored things to them. They like them just like we like them. Bright colors are great. They're beautiful. But they just don't need to talk about them.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different people have different words that they'll use for other parts of the space. Anyway, it's probably related to what they want to talk, what they see, because they see the same colors as we see. So it's not like they have a weak, a low color palette in the things they're looking at. They're looking at a lot of beautiful scenery, okay? A lot of different colored flowers and berries and things. And so there's lots of things of very bright colors. But they just don't label the color in those cases. And the reason probably we don't know this, but we think probably what's going on here is that what you do, why you label something, is you need to talk to someone else about it. And why do I need to talk about a color?”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Words that the group knows. Okay, and again, they're black and white. Everyone knows those. And red, red is, you know, like that tends to be the third word that everyone, that cultures bring in. If there's a word, it's always read, the third one. And then after that, it's kind of all bets are off about what they bring in. And so after that, they bring in a sort of a big blue-green group. They have one for that. And then they”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And depending on your, but you go to different cultures, especially the non industrialized cultures, and there'll be many fewer. So some cultures will have only two, believe it or not, that Danai in Papua New Guinea have only two labels that the group uses for color. And those are roughly black and white. They are very, very dark and very, very light, which are roughly black and white. And you might think, oh, they're dividing the whole color space into light and dark or something. And that's not really true. They mostly just only label the black and the white things. They just don't talk about the colors for the other ones. And so then there's other groups I've worked with a group called the Chimani down in Bolivia, in South America, and they have three words that everyone knows, but there's a few others that several people that many people know. And so they have made kind of depending on how you count between three and seven.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, we don't have that. So it's somehow useful for English to have evolved in some way to such that there's 11 terms that people find useful to talk about, you know, black, white, red, blue, green, yellow, purple. Gray, pink, and I probably missed something there. Anyway, there's 11 that everyone knows.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are smart. Humans are smart, and they take on whatever is useful in the other group. And so any kind of contrast which you're talking about, which I find useful, I'm going to start using as well. So I worked a little bit in specific areas of words, in number words and in color words. And in color words, so we have in English, we have around 11 words that everyone knows for colors. and many more if you happen to be interested in color for some reason or other if you're a fashion designer or an artist or something you may have many many more words but we can see millions like if you have normal color vision normal trichrometric color vision you can see millions of distinctions in color so we don't have millions of words you know the most efficient no the most you know detailed color vocabulary would have over a million terms to distinguish all the different colors that we can see but”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, these are very interesting questions. We don't know. Really about how words, even words get invented very much about, you know, we don't really, I mean, assuming they get invented, we don't really know how that process works and how these things evolve. What we have is kind of a current picture, a current picture of a few thousand languages, a few thousand instances. We don't have any pictures of really how these things are evolving, really. And then the evolution is massively confused by contact, right? So as soon as one language group, one group runs into another.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question. That's a very good question. It's like why do languages have more morphology versus less morphology? And I don't think we know the answer to this. I think there's just like a lot of good solutions to the problem of communication. So I believe, as you hinted, that Language is an invented system by humans for communicating their ideas. And I think it comes down to we label the things we want to talk about. Those are the morphemes and words. Those are things we want to talk about in the world and we invent those things. And then we put them together in ways that are easy for us to convey, to process. But that's like a naive view. And I don't, I mean, I think it's probably right, right? It's naive and probably right.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source