Related papers: Neutral evolution: A null model for language dynam…
A key question in evolution is how likely a mutant is to take over. This depends on natural selection and on stochastic fluctuations. Population spatial structure can impact mutant fixation probabilities. We introduce a model for structured…
Given an unknown dynamical system, what is the minimum number of samples needed for effective learning of its governing laws and accurate prediction of its future evolution behavior, and how to select these critical samples? In this work,…
Language evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that…
Negation has been shown to be a major bottleneck for masked language models, such as BERT. However, whether this finding still holds for larger-sized auto-regressive language models (``LLMs'') has not been studied comprehensively. With the…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
Grammatical features across human languages show intriguing correlations often attributed to learning biases in humans. However, empirical evidence has been limited to experiments with highly simplified artificial languages, and whether…
We introduce and analyse an individual-based evolutionary model, in which a population of genetically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources. Through theoretical analysis and stochastic simulations, we show that the…
Transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, pre-training such models can take considerable resources that are almost only available…
Evolutionary branching is analysed in a stochastic, individual-based population model under mutation and selection. In such models, the common assumption is that individual reproduction and life career are characterised by values of a…
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…
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.…
A major goal of molecular evolutionary biology is to identify loci or regions of the genome under selection versus those evolving in a neutral manner. Correct identification allows accurate inference of the evolutionary process and thus…
In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait's success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This "fixation probability" is difficult to compute in general, as…
Transformer-based language models have shown to be very powerful for natural language generation (NLG). However, text generation conditioned on some user inputs, such as topics or attributes, is non-trivial. Past approach relies on either…
Multilingual pre-trained language models transfer remarkably well on cross-lingual downstream tasks. However, the extent to which they learn language-neutral representations (i.e., shared representations that encode similar phenomena across…
The Fundamental Theorem of Language Change (Yang, 2000) implies the impossibility of stable variation in the Variational Learning framework, but only in the special case where two, and not more, grammatical variants compete. Introducing the…
We examine an evolutionary naming-game model where communicating agents are equipped with an evolutionarily selected learning ability. Such a coupling of biological and linguistic ingredients results in an abrupt transition: upon a small…
This study investigates the diverse characteristics of nouns, focusing on both semantic (e.g., countable/uncountable) and morphosyntactic (e.g., masculine/feminine) distinctions. We explore inter-word variations for gender markers in noun…
Infinitely many distinct trait values may arise in populations bearing quantitative traits, and modeling their population dynamics is thus a formidable task. While classical models assume fixed or infinite population size, models in which…
Neural machine translation systems typically are trained on curated corpora and break when faced with non-standard orthography or punctuation. Resilience to spelling mistakes and typos, however, is crucial as machine translation systems are…