Related papers: Automated languages phylogeny from Levenshtein dis…
Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component of spoken dialogue and it has a significant impact both on usability and perceived quality. Most NLG systems in common use employ rules and heuristics and tend to generate rigid and…
During their first years of life, infants learn the language(s) of their environment at an amazing speed despite large cross cultural variations in amount and complexity of the available language input. Understanding this simple fact still…
Cellular automata have been useful artificial models for exploring how relatively simple rules combined with spatial memory can give rise to complex emergent patterns. Moreover, studying the dynamics of how rules emerge under artificial…
While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures…
Meaning is the foundation stone of intercultural communication. Languages are continuously changing, and words shift their meanings for various reasons. Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. In…
Can artificial communities of agents develop language with scaling relations close to the Zipf law? As a preliminary answer to this question, we propose an Automata Networks model of the formation of a vocabulary on a population of…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
In derivational morphology, what mechanisms govern the variation in form-meaning relations between words? The answers to this type of questions are typically based on intuition and on observations drawn from limited data, even when a wide…
We study ideal languages generated by a single word. We provide an algorithm to construct a strongly connected synchronizing automaton for which such a language serves as the language of synchronizing words. Also we present a compact…
We apply decision tree induction to the problem of discourse clue word sense disambiguation with a genetic algorithm. The automatic partitioning of the training set which is intrinsic to decision tree induction gives rise to linguistically…
In biology, a phylogenetic tree is a tool to represent the evolutionary relationship between species. Unfortunately, the classical Schr\"oder tree model is not adapted to take into account the chronology between the branching nodes. In…
How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major…
The physics of randomness and regularities for languages (mother tongues) and their lifetimes and family trees and for the second languages are studied in terms of two opposite processes; random multiplicative noise [1], and fragmentation…
Futrell and Mahowald (2025) frame the success of neural language models (LMs) as supporting gradient, usage-based linguistic theories. I argue that LMs can also instantiate theories based on formal structures - the types of theories seen in…
Prompted models have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning abilities. Repeated interactions at test-time with a single model, or the composition of multiple models together, further expands capabilities. These compositions are…
A leaf path language is a Boolean combination of sets of the form $\mathsf{{}^mE}^k L$, with $k \ge 1$ and $L$ a regular word language, which consist of those forests where the node labels in at least $k$ leaf-to-root paths make up a word…
Most genes are part of larger families of evolutionary related genes. The history of gene families typically involves duplications and losses of genes as well as horizontal transfers into other organisms. The reconstruction of detailed gene…
Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow,…
This paper presents a comparison of classification methods for linguistic typology for the purpose of expanding an extensive, but sparse language resource: the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) (Dryer and Haspelmath, 2013). We…
The language commonly used in human genetics can inadvertently pose problems for multiple reasons. Terms like "ancestry", "ethnicity", and other ways of grouping people can have complex, often poorly understood, or multiple meanings within…