Related papers: Do language change rates depend on population size…

Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…

The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…

The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer…

Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…

Large Language Models are affected by the phenomena of memorizing and forgetting their training data. But how do these vary by model size? We work towards this question by investigating how the model size affects the model's ability to…

Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…

Recently, individual-based models originally used for biological purposes revealed interesting insights into processes of the competition of languages. Within this new field of population dynamics a model considering sexual populations with…

While large language models (LLMs) are generally considered proficient in generating language, how similar their language usage is to that of humans remains understudied. In this paper, we test whether models exhibit linguistic convergence,…

(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of…

Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…

Large-scale pretrained language models are the major driving force behind recent improvements in performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge, a widely employed test of common sense reasoning ability. We show, however, with a new diagnostic…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly impacting human society, particularly in textual information. Based on more than 30,000 papers and 1,000 presentations from machine learning conferences, we examined and compared the words used…

In psycholinguistic modeling, surprisal from larger pre-trained language models has been shown to be a poorer predictor of naturalistic human reading times. However, it has been speculated that this may be due to data leakage that caused…

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between subword vocabulary size and the performance of large language models (LLMs) to provide insights on how to define the vocabulary size. Experimental results show that larger…

Motivated by the dramatic disappearance of endangered languages observed in recent years, a great deal of attention has been given to the modeling of language competition in order to understand the factors that promote the disappearance of…

Much of the success of modern language models depends on finding a suitable prompt to instruct the model. Until now, it has been largely unknown how variations in the linguistic expression of prompts affect these models. This study…

We use Monte Carlo simulations and assumptions from evolutionary game theory in order to study the evolution of words and the population dynamics of a system comprising two interacting species which initially speak two different languages.…

This paper studies the effect of linguistic constraints on the large scale organization of language. It describes the properties of linguistic networks built using texts of written language with the words randomized. These properties are…

The World Wide Web has grown so big, in such an anarchic fashion, that it is difficult to describe. One of the evident intrinsic characteristics of the World Wide Web is its multilinguality. Here, we present a technique for estimating the…

In the current landscape of language model research, larger models, larger datasets and more compute seems to be the only way to advance towards intelligence. While there have been extensive studies of scaling laws and models' scaling…