Is Concatenating Words a Metaphor?

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Algebraic structure is there, but it's not really everything. Statistics actually can maybe serve as a proxy for grammar. How do you know what really goes together and what's valid in your language? In english, at least, adjectives precede nouns,. You can just count the number of times that red fire truck has appeared. The other example i like to give is red ideay. Did i wake up this morning and have a red idea? Like, what does that even mean? That's not a thing that people say.

Mathematics is often thought of as the pinnacle of crisp precision: the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle isn’t “roughly” the sum of the squares of the other two sides, it’s exactly that. But we live in a world of messy imprecision, and increasingly we need sophisticated techniques to quantify and deal with approximate statistical relations rather than perfect ones. Modern mathematicians have noticed, and are taking up the challenge. Tai-Danae Bradley is a mathematician who employs very high-level ideas — category theory, topology, quantum probability theory — to analyze real-world phenomena like the structure of natural-language speech. We explore a number of cool ideas and what kinds of places they are leading us to.

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Tai-Danae Bradley received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently a research mathematician at Alphabet, visiting research professor of mathematics at The Master’s University, and executive director of the Math3ma Institute. She hosts an explanatory mathematics blog, Math3ma. She is the co-author of the graduate-level textbook Topology: A Categorical Approach.

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