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Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
Statement autoformalization, the automated translation of statements from natural language into formal languages, has become a subject of extensive research, yet the development of robust automated evaluation metrics remains limited.…
Predicting upcoming words is a core mechanism of language comprehension and may be quantified using Shannon entropy. There is currently no empirical consensus on how many human responses are required to obtain stable and unbiased entropy…
Motivation: Word-based or `alignment-free' methods for phylogeny reconstruction are much faster than traditional approaches, but they are generally less accurate. Most of these methods calculate pairwise distances for a set of input…
We propose a model of the evolution of a matrix along a phylogenetic tree, in which transformations affect either entire rows or columns of the matrix. This represents the change of both lexical and phonological aspects of linguistic data,…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not…
Lexical resemblances among a group of languages indicate that the languages could be genetically related, i.e., they could have descended from a common ancestral language. However, such resemblances can arise by chance and, hence, need not…
We propose a model for the evolutionary ecology of words as one attempt to extend evolutionary game theory and agent-based models by utilizing the rich linguistic expressions of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our model enables the emergence…
The syntactic structure of a sentence is often represented using syntactic dependency trees. The sum of the distances between syntactically related words has been in the limelight for the past decades. Research on dependency distances led…
An evolutionary tree is a cascade of bifurcations starting from a single common root, generating a growing set of daughter species as time goes by. Species here is a general denomination for biological species, spoken languages or any other…
Concrete/abstract words are used in a growing number of psychological and neurophysiological research. For a few languages, large dictionaries have been created manually. This is a very time-consuming and costly process. To generate large…
In many applications, it is necessary to determine the similarity of two strings. A widely-used notion of string similarity is the edit distance: the minimum number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one…
Many words have evolved in meaning as a result of cultural and social change. Understanding such changes is crucial for modelling language and cultural evolution. Low-dimensional embedding methods have shown promise in detecting words'…
We introduce the notion of Levenshtein graphs, an analog to Hamming graphs but using the edit distance instead of the Hamming distance; in particular, Levenshtein graphs allow for underlying strings (nodes) of different lengths. We…
An attractive mechanism to specify global constraints in rostering and other domains is via formal languages. For instance, the Regular and Grammar constraints specify constraints in terms of the languages accepted by an automaton and a…
In this paper we examine the usefulness of two classes of algorithms Distance Methods, Discrete Character Methods (Felsenstein and Felsenstein 2003) widely used in genetics, for predicting the family relationships among a set of related…
Conjecturing formulas and other symbolic relations occurs frequently in number theory and combinatorics. If we could automate conjecturing, we could benefit not only from speeding up, but also from finding conjectures previously out of our…
It is often stated that human languages, as other biological systems, are shaped by cost-cutting pressures but, to what extent? Attempts to quantify the degree of optimality of languages by means of an optimality score have been scarce and…
Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have produced general models that can perform complex tasks such as summarizing long passages and translating across languages. Here, we introduce a method to extract adjective…