On the Emergence of Syntax by Means of Local Interaction
Can syntactic processing emerge spontaneously from purely local interaction? We present a concrete instance on a minimal system: an 18,658-parameter two-dimensional neural cellular automaton (NCA), supervised by nothing more than a 1-bit boundary signal, is trained on the membership problem of an arithmetic-expression grammar. After training, its internal $L \times L$ grid spontaneously self-organizes into an ordered, spatially extended representation that we name Proto-CKY. This representation satisfies three operational criteria for syntactic processing: expressive power beyond the regular languages, structural generalization beyond the training distribution, and an internal organizatio...
| Authors | Zichao Wei |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 April 2026 |
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