Related papers: Language simulation after a conquest
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited considerable cross-lingual generalization abilities, whereby they implicitly transfer knowledge across languages. However, the transfer is not equally successful for all languages, especially for…
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…
The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic…
By positing a relationship between naturalistic reading times and information-theoretic surprisal, surprisal theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) provides a natural interface between language models and psycholinguistic models. This paper…
Transformer-based language models trained on large text corpora have enjoyed immense popularity in the natural language processing community and are commonly used as a starting point for downstream tasks. While these models are undeniably…
In recent times, the research field of language dynamics has focused on the investigation of language evolution, dividing the work in three evolutive steps, according to the level of complexity: lexicon, categories and grammar. The Naming…
In this paper, we present a neural spoken language diarization model that supports an unconstrained span of languages within a single framework. Our approach integrates a learnable query-based architecture grounded in multilingual…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
Recent studies in zero-shot cross-lingual learning using multilingual models have falsified the previous hypothesis that shared vocabulary and joint pre-training are the keys to cross-lingual generalization. Inspired by this advancement, we…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…
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…
In order to analyze the dynamics of two languages in competition, one approach is to fit historical data on their numbers of speakers with a mathematical model in which the parameters are interpreted as the similarity between those…
We introduce time variation in the flip-rates of the Voter Model. This type of generalisation is relevant to models of ageing in language change, allowing the representation of changes in speakers' learning rates over their lifetime and may…
Chinese input recommendation plays an important role in alleviating human cost in typing Chinese words, especially in the scenario of mobile applications. The fundamental problem is to predict the conditional probability of the next word…
Language models now provide an interface to express and often solve general problems in natural language, yet their ultimate computational capabilities remain a major topic of scientific debate. Unlike a formal computer, a language model is…
Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…
In order to communicate, humans flatten a complex representation of ideas and their attributes into a single word or a sentence. We investigate the impact of representation learning in artificial agents by developing graph referential…
Cross-lingual transfer in language models is difficult to study in natural corpora because lexical overlap, morphology, data imbalance, and tokenization are entangled. We introduce an in-vitro framework with two procedurally generated…
Multilingualism is incredibly common around the world, leading to many important theoretical and practical questions about how children learn multiple languages at once. For example, does multilingual acquisition lead to delays in learning?…
How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers.…