Simulated Language Acquisition in a Biologically Realistic Model of the Brain

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mitropolsky, Daniel, Papadimitriou, Christos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mitropolsky, Daniel
Papadimitriou, Christos
author_facet Mitropolsky, Daniel
Papadimitriou, Christos
contents Despite tremendous progress in neuroscience, we do not have a compelling narrative for the precise way whereby the spiking of neurons in our brain results in high-level cognitive phenomena such as planning and language. We introduce a simple mathematical formulation of six basic and broadly accepted principles of neuroscience: excitatory neurons, brain areas, random synapses, Hebbian plasticity, local inhibition, and inter-area inhibition. We implement a simulated neuromorphic system based on this formalism, which is capable of basic language acquisition: Starting from a tabula rasa, the system learns, in any language, the semantics of words, their syntactic role (verb versus noun), and the word order of the language, including the ability to generate novel sentences, through the exposure to a modest number of grounded sentences in the same language. We discuss several possible extensions and implications of this result.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_11788
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulated Language Acquisition in a Biologically Realistic Model of the Brain
Mitropolsky, Daniel
Papadimitriou, Christos
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Computation and Language
Despite tremendous progress in neuroscience, we do not have a compelling narrative for the precise way whereby the spiking of neurons in our brain results in high-level cognitive phenomena such as planning and language. We introduce a simple mathematical formulation of six basic and broadly accepted principles of neuroscience: excitatory neurons, brain areas, random synapses, Hebbian plasticity, local inhibition, and inter-area inhibition. We implement a simulated neuromorphic system based on this formalism, which is capable of basic language acquisition: Starting from a tabula rasa, the system learns, in any language, the semantics of words, their syntactic role (verb versus noun), and the word order of the language, including the ability to generate novel sentences, through the exposure to a modest number of grounded sentences in the same language. We discuss several possible extensions and implications of this result.
title Simulated Language Acquisition in a Biologically Realistic Model of the Brain
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11788