YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Gibson

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2024-04-17
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2024-04-17
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  1. “Well, in English, it's one or two. In English, it tends to be one or two. There can be more. In other languages, a language like Finnish, which has a very elaborate morphology, there may be 10 morphemes on the end of a root. And so there may be millions of forms of a given word.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Morphology is the connections between the morphemes onto the roots. The roots. So in English, we mostly have suffixes. We have endings on the words, not very much, but a little bit, as opposed to prefixes. Some words, depending on your language, can have mostly prefixes, mostly suffixes or mostly or both. And then even languages, several languages have things called infixes where you have some kind of a general form for the root and you put stuff in the middle, you change the vowels. That's fascinating.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “There's a lot of regulators in English, the frequent ones, the common words, tend to be irregular. There's many, many more”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Tell you, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we have a little bit of that in English, very little, you have much more in Russian, for instance, and but we have a little bit in English. And so we have a little on the nouns. You can say it's either singular or plural. And you can say, same thing for verbs. Like simple past tense, for example. So notice in English, we say drinks, he drinks, but everyone else is, I drink, you drink, we drink. It's unmarked in a way. But in the past tense, it's just drank for everyone. There's no morphology at all for past tense. There is morphology, it's marking past tense, but it's kind of an irregular now. So we don't even, you know, drink to drink. It's not even a regular word. So in most verbs, many verbs, there's an ed we kind of add. So walk to walk, we add that to say it's the past tense. I just happened to choose an irregular because it's a high frequency word and the high frequency words tend to have irregulars in English for”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Morphemes are just the minimal meaning units within a language. And a word is just kind of the things we put spaces between English. They have a little bit more. They have the morphology as well. They have the endings, this inflectional morphology on the endings on the roots.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think it's pretty automatable at this point. People can figure out the words are. They can figure out what the morphemes, which are technically morphemes, are the minimal meaning units within a language. And so when you say eats or drinks, it actually has two morphemes in English. There's the root, which is the verb, and then there's some ending on it, which tells you, you know, that's this third person singular. You say what morphemes are.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Those are for kind of meaning. Those are meaning. And subject and object are generally used for position. So subject is just like the thing that comes before the verb and the object is the one that comes after the verb. The agent is kind of like the thing doing. That's kind of what that means, right? The subject is often the person doing the action, right? The thing.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You can just mess with different things in each language. And so in Russian, you have case markers, which are just these endings on the nouns, which tell you how it connects each noun connects to the verb, right? We don't have that in English. And so when I say Mary kissed John, I don't know who the agent or the patient is except by the order of the words, right? In Russian, you actually have a marker on the end if you're using a Russian name, and each of those names, you'll also say, is it nominative, which is marking the subject, or an accusative will mark the object. And you could put them in the reverse order. You could put accusative first, you could put subject, you could put the patient first, and then the verb, and then the subject, and that would be a perfectly good Russian sentence. And it would still mean, Mary, I could say John kissed Mary, meaning Mary kissed John.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I told you that English has the subject, verb, object, word order. So does Russian, but Russian is much freer than English. And so you can actually mess around with the word order. So probably Russian poetry is going to be quite different from English poetry because the word order is much less constrained.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “No, no, no, no. You're constrained by whatever language you're dealing with. Probably you have other constraints in poetry such that you're like usually in poetry there's multiple constraints that you want to usually convey multiple meanings is the idea and maybe you have like a rhythm or a rhyming structure as well and depending on so but you usually are constrained by your the rules of your language for the most part and so you don't violate those too much you can violate them somewhat, but not too much so it has to be recognizable as your language like in English I can't say dogs to entered room a I mean I meant that you know two dogs entered a room and I can't mess with the order of the the articles the articles and the nouns you just can't do that in some languages you can you can mess around with the order of words much more I mean you speak Russian Russian has a much freer word order than English and so in fact you can move around”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “How they get you, the category, the part of speech of a word is how it gets used in language. That's how you decide what the category of a word is, not by the meaning, but how it gets used.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And we connect a room somehow to entered. And so I'm going to connect to room and then room back to enter. That's the tree. The root is entered. The thing is like an entering event. That's what we're saying here. And the subject, which is whatever that dog is, is two dogs it was. And the connection goes back to dogs, which goes back to two. That's my tree. It starts at entered, goes to dogs down to two. And on the other side, after the verb, the object, it goes to room, and then that goes back to the determiner or article, whatever you want to call that word. So it's a bunch of categories of words here we're noticing. So there are verbs. Those are these things that typically mark, they refer to events and states in the world. And they're nouns, which typically refer to people, places, and things is what people say, but they can refer to other more, they can refer to events themselves as well. They're marked by...”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, this is where, you know, depending on what your, there's different theoretical notions, I'm going to say the simplest thing, dependency grammar. It's like a bunch of people invented this tennier was the first French guy back in, I mean, the paper was published in 1959, but he was working on the 30s and stuff. So, and it goes back to philologist Pinini was doing this in ancient India. And so doing something like this. The simplest thing we can think of is that there's just connections between the words to make The utterance. And so it's just say I have like two dogs entered a room. Okay, here's a sentence. And so we're connecting two and dogs together. That's like there's some dependency between those words to make some bigger meaning. And then we're connecting dogs now to entered.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “There's no linguist sitting there mad at this. In every language, I think everyone agrees that all sentences are trees at some level.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It turns out they are connected so that every word is connected to just one other word in that sentence. And so you end up with what's called technically a tree. It's a tree structure. Where there's a root of that utterance, of that sentence. And then there's a bunch of dependence like branches from that root that go down to the words, the words are the leaves in this metaphor for a tree.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, what I mean is in language, there's kind of three structures, three components to the structure of language. One is the sounds, so cat is and to in English. I'm not talking about that part. I'm talking, and then there's two meaning parts, and those are the words. And you're talking about meaning earlier. So words have a form, and they have a meaning associated with them. And so cat is a full form in English, and it has a meaning associated with whatever a cat is. And then the combinations of words, that's what I'll call grammar or syntax. And that's like when I have a combination like the cat or two cats. And so that's the syntax. And in any sentence, or utterance, whatever I'm talking to you, you're talking to me. We have a bunch of words and we're putting together in a sequence.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Within a language, you can do it. It just ends up with longer dependencies than if you didn't. So languages tend to go that way. They tend to call it harmonic. So it was observed a long time ago without the explanation by a guy called Joseph Greenberg, who's a famous typologist from Stanford. He observes a lot of generalizations about how word order works. And these are some of the harmonic generalizations that he observed.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “For their meaning are close together, it's easier for you in understanding if that's also true, if they're far away, it's hard to produce that and it's hard for you to understand. And the languages of the world within a language and across languages fit that generalization, which is, you know, so it turns out that having verbs initial and then having prepositions ends up making dependencies shorter and having verbs final and having post positions ends up making dependencies shorter than if you cross them. If you cross them, it ends up you just end up, it's possible you can do it.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “45%. Yeah, it's pretty even. And those two are the most common by far. Those two worders, the subject tends to be first. There's so many interesting things, but these things are the thing I find so fascinating is there are these generalizations within and across a language. And not only those are the, and there's actually a simple explanation, I think, for a lot of that. And that is you're trying to minimize dependencies between words. That's basically the story, I think, behind a lot of why word order looks the way it is, is we're always connecting. What is a thing I'm telling you? I'm talking to you in sentences. You're talking to me in sentences. These are sequences of words which are connected. And the connections are dependencies between the words. And it turns out that what we're trying to do in a language is actually minimize those dependency lengths. It's easier for me to say things if the words that are connected.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “The marker there, the preposition it's a post position in these languages. And so the interesting thing, fascinating thing to me, is that within a language This order aligns its harmonic. And so it's one or the other, it's either verb initial or verb final, but then you'll have prepositions prepositions or post positions. And so that's across the languages that we can look at. We've got around a thousand languages. There's around 7,000 languages on the earth right now. But we have information about, say, word order on around a thousand of those. Pretty decent amount of information. And for those thousand which we know about, about 95% fit that pattern. So they will have either half and half of verb initial, like English and half or verb final, like Japanese.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Languages like Japanese or Hindi or these are so called verb final languages. Those are maybe a little more than 40%, maybe 45% of the world's languages or more, maybe 50% of the world's languages are verb final. Those tend to be postpositions. Those markers, if we have the states have the same kinds of markers as we do in English, but they put them after. So they put them first. The markers come first. So you say instead of talk about a book, you say a book about the opposite order there in Japanese or in Hindi. You do the opposite. And the talk comes at the end. So the verb will come at the end as well. So instead of Mary kicked the ball, it's Mary ball kicked. And then it says Mary kicked the ball to John. It's John to the two little...”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Dog chased the cat or Mary kicked the ball, so the subjects first, and then after the subject, there's the verb, and then we have objects. All these things come after in English. So it's generally a verb. And most of the stuff that we want to say comes after the subject. It's the objects. There's a lot of things we want to say to come after. And there's a lot of languages like that. About 40% of the languages the world look like that. They're subject-verb object languages. These languages tend to have prepositions, these little markers on the nouns that connect nouns to other nouns or nouns to verbs. So verbally prefisition like in or on or of or about, I say I talk about something. The something is the object of that preposition that we have these little markers come also just like verbs. They come before their nouns. Then we look at other languages.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “What I find beautiful about human language is some of the generalizations that happen across the human languages within and across a language. So let me give you an example of something which I find kind of remarkable, that is if a language, if it has a word order such that the verbs tend to come before their objects.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, I think that's what they're good at is form. Exactly. And that's why they're good because they can do form. Meanings are.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I mean, I probably did, but I wasn't as interested in it. I was trying to do the easier problems first, the ones I could thought maybe were handleable, which seems like the syntax is easier, like, which is just the forms as opposed to the meaning. Like you're talking about when you're starting talking about the meaning, that's a very hard problem. And it's still a really, really hard problem. But the forms is easier. And so I thought at least figuring out the forms of human language, which sounds really hard, but is actually maybe more attractable”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “An engineer, I'd say, I mean, to be frank, I had taken an AI class, I guess it was 83 or 84, somewhere 84 in there a long time ago. And there was a natural language section in there. And it didn't impress me. I thought there must be more interesting things we can do. It didn't seem very, it seemed just a bunch of hacks to me. It didn't seem like a real theory of things in any way. And so I just thought this was, this seemed like an interesting area where there wasn't enough good work.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, I think that's right. I didn't know I was going to work on this at all at that point. I was really just kind of a math geek person, a computer scientist. I really liked computer science. And then I found language as a neat puzzle to work on from an engineering perspective, actually. I sort of accidentally decided after I finished my undergraduate degree, which was computer science and math in Canada and Queen's University, I decided to go to grad school. That's what I always thought I would do. And I went to Cambridge where they had a master's program in computational linguistics. And I hadn't taken a single language class before. All I'd taken was CS, computer science, math classes, pretty much, mostly as an undergrad. And I just, oh, this was an interesting thing to do for a year because it was a single year program. And then I...”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “As a kid in school, when we had to structure sentences in English grammar, I found that process interesting. I found it confusing as to what it was I was told to do. I didn't understand what the theory was behind it, but I found it very interesting.”

    2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source