Neural networkA neural network can refer to a neural circuit of biological neurons (sometimes also called a biological neural network), a network of artificial neurons or nodes in the case of an artificial neural network. Artificial neural networks are used for solving artificial intelligence (AI) problems; they model connections of biological neurons as weights between nodes. A positive weight reflects an excitatory connection, while negative values mean inhibitory connections. All inputs are modified by a weight and summed.
Cerebral cortexThe cerebral cortex, also known as the cerebral mantle, is the outer layer of neural tissue of the cerebrum of the brain in humans and other mammals. The cerebral cortex mostly consists of the six-layered neocortex, with just 10% consisting of allocortex. It is separated into two cortices, by the longitudinal fissure that divides the cerebrum into the left and right cerebral hemispheres. The two hemispheres are joined beneath the cortex by the corpus callosum. The cerebral cortex is the largest site of neural integration in the central nervous system.
Language acquisitionLanguage acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition involves structures, rules, and representation. The capacity to use language successfully requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary.
Great ape languageResearch into great ape language has involved teaching chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans to communicate with humans and each other using sign language, physical tokens, lexigrams, and imitative human speech. Some primatologists argue that the use of these communication methods indicate primate "language" ability, though this depends on one's definition of language. Non-human animals have produced behaviors that resemble human sentence production.
Social networkA social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for analyzing the structure of whole social entities as well as a variety of theories explaining the patterns observed in these structures. The study of these structures uses social network analysis to identify local and global patterns, locate influential entities, and examine network dynamics.
Animal languageAnimal languages are forms of non-human animal communication that show similarities to human language. Animals communicate through a variety of signs, such as sounds or movements. Signing among animals may be considered complex enough to be a form of language if the inventory of signs is large. The signs are relatively arbitrary, and the animals seem to produce them with a degree of volition (as opposed to relatively automatic conditioned behaviors or unconditioned instincts, usually including facial expressions).
Language deathIn linguistics, language death occurs when a language loses its last native speaker. By extension, language extinction is when the language is no longer known, including by second-language speakers, when it becomes known as an extinct language. A related term is linguicide, the death of a language from natural or political causes, and, rarely, glottophagy, the absorption or replacement of a minor language by a major language.
Natural language processingNatural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics and computer science. It is primarily concerned with processing natural language datasets, such as text corpora or speech corpora, using either rule-based or probabilistic (i.e. statistical and, most recently, neural network-based) machine learning approaches. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding" the contents of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them.
Cortical homunculusA cortical homunculus () is a distorted representation of the human body, based on a neurological "map" of the areas and proportions of the human brain dedicated to processing motor functions, or sensory functions, for different parts of the body. Nerve fibresconducting somatosensory information from all over the bodyterminate in various areas of the parietal lobe in the cerebral cortex, forming a representational map of the body. Findings from the 2010s and early 2020s began to call this interpretation into question, and research is ongoing in this field.
Generative pre-trained transformerGenerative pre-trained transformers (GPT) are a type of large language model (LLM) and a prominent framework for generative artificial intelligence. The first GPT was introduced in 2018 by OpenAI. GPT models are artificial neural networks that are based on the transformer architecture, pre-trained on large data sets of unlabelled text, and able to generate novel human-like content. As of 2023, most LLMs have these characteristics and are sometimes referred to broadly as GPTs.
