Where does the meaning of a sentence reside? Mathematics can tell us. Understanding the phenomenon of language through this exact science can help us better understand the world around us.
At school, they ask us: “Do you like mathematics or languages more?” Tai-Danae Bradley answered “tongues”. I didn’t like math.
In 2008, he joined the New York City College, where he expected to start a career in the area of sports nutrition. I saw the mathematics disciplines as a curriculum obstacle in which only the geniuses could really stand out.
“I would rather get me all teeth to have to do this as a profession,” he told. But in the second year, your calculation teacher made her change ideas.
Bradley had discovered that mathematics was the language in which the rest of the sciences were written. After all, “there was something deeper than what was in school manuals,” he said.
After this “shock” decided to make a double degree in Mathematics and Physics. Today, he is a teacher at Master’s University in California.
Language: a category of mathematics
Bradley now has the mission to serve the language of mathematics to try to better understand our language-and has even created a model.
In an interview with Quanta Magazine, mathematics tells you that it has taken this way because “it was interested in realizing it: What is the mathematical structure of language? What are its basic units? How do mathematical relationships between words and phrases lead to significant content?”
When thinking about language as a mathematical category, the researcher has been able to apply established tools for studying and gaining new knowledge.
Linguists expect their model to help them prove certain theories about how grammar and meaning emerge from word chains and to identify how the text generated by AI differs from human language.
It is itself deeply interested in the way language study can allow it develop new mathematical tools.
Bradley explained in the interview how language and mathematics go hand in hand; He exemplified, “The number of times the word ‘cat’ appears next to other words. If I say ‘curiosity killed ____’, I can calculate the probability of the next word being” cat “and not ‘helicopter’.
“We can then think of all possible words or phrases (or combinations of letters, in fact) as objects of a more general type of category called enriched category. And each object is related to all other objects because of the likelihood of following it – these are the enriched versions of their morphisms. You can think of them as arrows between words, each identified with a number,” he explained.
If we look at the words that tend to follow the “blue” – like “blue ocean” or “blue sky”, but not “blue avocado” – can we get an idea of what the word “blue” means?
In the linguistic community, the answer to this question is not consensual.
As a human being, we can extract meaning from a sentence on the page, but the Words on paper are not everything I have access. I have access to the world.
Linguists have debated if a “world manual” is needed to extract meaning from written language.
“The idea that meaning lies in the disposition of words is an old idea in linguisticsbut that has been falling fashion in recent decades, ”said the math.
Bradley’s work supports the idea that there is meaning in statistics as words are used together. Therefore, it can contribute to widen the conversation that linguists are having.
Bradley hopes that his investigation can lead us to a deeper understanding of his own mathematics. Perceiving the phenomenon of language, it can help us better understand the world around us.
“Perhaps studying language in this way helps us to discover a mathematical structure that we don’t know yet. This is always happening in mathematics. The mathematicians are faced with things that have no name, structures that are in the hands of sowing, ”said the researcher.
“I think that, within five years, we can have new mathematical ideas inspired by language,” he said.
