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Can physics shed new light on understanding language? We talked to theoretical physicist Sanjaye Ramgoolam, from Queen Mary, University of London, about how his work as a physicist directly inspired the development of an exciting new approach to understanding language – linguistic matrix theory.
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The physics of language: writing words as numbers — "You shall know a word by the company it keeps," said John Rupert Firth. And this idea is key to the vast wealth of data arising in natural language processing (NLP).
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The physics of language: matrix statistics — When Ramgoolam saw the NLP data, consisting of matrix representations of the words of a language, he recognised something familiar, something from his background as a physicist.
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The physics of language: signature of a language — Inspired directly by techniques from particle physics and cosmology, linguistic matrix theory might offer us a way to capture the essence of a language.
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The physics of language: the video — Watch this video to find out how Ramgoolam is using this surprising connection between physics, maths and language.