Related papers: Human language reveals a universal positivity bias
Natural language processing (NLP) systems have become a central technology in communication, education, medicine, artificial intelligence, and many other domains of research and development. While the performance of NLP methods has grown…
The nouns of our language refer to either concrete entities (like a table) or abstract concepts (like justice or love), and cognitive psychology has established that concreteness influences how words are processed. Accordingly,…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
The cognitive constraints that humans exhibit in their social interactions have been extensively studied by anthropologists, who have highlighted their regularities across different types of social networks. We postulate that similar…
Human biases have been shown to influence the performance of models and algorithms in various fields, including Natural Language Processing. While the study of this phenomenon is garnering focus in recent years, the available resources are…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
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.…
Zipf's law has been found in many human-related fields, including language, where the frequency of a word is persistently found as a power law function of its frequency rank, known as Zipf's law. However, there is much dispute whether it is…
Some aspects of the physical nature of language are discussed. In particular, physical models of language must exist that are efficiently implementable. The existence requirement is essential because without physical models no communication…
When humans read a text, their eye movements are influenced by the structural complexity of the input sentences. This cognitive phenomenon holds across languages and recent studies indicate that multilingual language models utilize…
Gender bias represents a form of systematic negative treatment that targets individuals based on their gender. This discrimination can range from subtle sexist remarks and gendered stereotypes to outright hate speech. Prior research has…
Bringing together considerations from three research trends (honest signals of collaboration, socio-semantic networks and homophily theory), we hypothesise that word use similarity and having similar social network positions are linked with…
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…
Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…
The phenomenon of sound symbolism, the non-arbitrary mapping between word sounds and meanings, has long been demonstrated through anecdotal experiments like Bouba Kiki, but rarely tested at scale. We present the first computational…
The task of sentiment analysis of reviews is carried out using manually built / automatically generated lexicon resources of their own with which terms are matched with lexicon to compute the term count for positive and negative polarity.…
Centrality of emotion for the stories told by humans is underpinned by numerous studies in literature and psychology. The research in automatic storytelling has recently turned towards emotional storytelling, in which characters' emotions…
Social psychologists have shown that Warmth (W) and Competence (C) are the primary dimensions along which we assess other people and groups. These dimensions impact various aspects of our lives from social competence and emotion regulation…
We study the selection of transfer languages for different Natural Language Processing tasks, specifically sentiment analysis, named entity recognition and dependency parsing. In order to select an optimal transfer language, we propose to…
Anxiety, the anticipatory unease about a potential negative outcome, is a common and beneficial human emotion. However, there is still much that is not known, such as how anxiety relates to our body and how it manifests in language. This is…