Related papers: On the accuracy of language trees

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…

In historical linguistics, the affiliation of languages to a common language family is traditionally carried out using a complex workflow that relies on manually comparing individual languages. Large-scale standardized collections of…

Correlations between two variables of a high-dimensional system can be indicative of an underlying interaction, but can also result from indirect effects. Inverse Ising inference is a method to distinguish one from the other. Essentially,…

Automatic phylogenetic inference plays an increasingly important role in computational historical linguistics. Most pertinent work is currently based on expert cognate judgments. This limits the scope of this approach to a small number of…

Phylogenetic networks extend phylogenetic trees to allow for modeling reticulate evolutionary processes such as hybridization. They take the shape of a rooted, directed, acyclic graph, and when parameterized with evolutionary parameters,…

Phylogenetic reconstruction aims at finding plausible hypotheses of the evolutionary history of genes or species based on genomic sequence information. The distinction of orthologous genes (genes that having a common ancestry and diverged…

Natural Language Inference is an important task for Natural Language Understanding. It is concerned with classifying the logical relation between two sentences. In this paper, we propose several text generative neural networks for…

The general trace reconstruction problem seeks to recover an original sequence from its noisy copies independently corrupted by deletions, insertions, and substitutions. This problem arises in applications such as DNA data storage, a…

Cyber-physical systems come with increasingly complex architectures and failure modes, which complicates the task of obtaining accurate system reliability models. At the same time, with the emergence of the (industrial) Internet-of-Things,…

Inferring evolutionary histories (phylogenetic trees) has important applications in biology, criminology and public health. However, phylogenetic trees are complex mathematical objects that reside in a non-Euclidean space, which complicates…

We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms for automatic cognate detection by comparing how useful automatically inferred cognates are for the task of phylogenetic inference compared to classical manually annotated cognate…

Interpretability is often pointed out as a key requirement for trustworthy machine learning. However, learning and releasing models that are inherently interpretable leaks information regarding the underlying training data. As such…

We present a method for constructing taxonomic trees (e.g., WordNet) using pretrained language models. Our approach is composed of two modules, one that predicts parenthood relations and another that reconciles those predictions into trees.…

Numerous previous studies have sought to determine to what extent language models, pretrained on natural language text, can serve as useful models of human cognition. In this paper, we are interested in the opposite question: whether we can…

This paper introduces PhyloLM, a method adapting phylogenetic algorithms to Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore whether and how they relate to each other and to predict their performance characteristics. Our method calculates a…

Transformer-based language models have recently achieved remarkable results in many natural language tasks. However, performance on leaderboards is generally achieved by leveraging massive amounts of training data, and rarely by encoding…

Estimating phylogenetic trees is an important problem in evolutionary biology, environmental policy and medicine. Although trees are estimated, their uncertainties are discarded by mathematicians working in tree space. Here we explicitly…

Historical linguists have identified regularities in the process of historic sound change. The comparative method utilizes those regularities to reconstruct proto-words based on observed forms in daughter languages. Can this process be…

Despite the remarkable advances in language modeling, current mainstream decoding methods still struggle to generate texts that align with human texts across different aspects. In particular, sampling-based methods produce less-repetitive…

Evolutionary relationships between species are usually inferred through phylogenetic analysis, which provides phylogenetic trees computed from allelic profiles built by sequencing specific regions of the sequences and abstracting them to…