Related papers: Human Communication Systems Evolve by Cultural Sel…
We examine a naming game on an adaptive weighted network. A weight of connection for a given pair of agents depends on their communication success rate and determines the probability with which the agents communicate. In some cases,…
One of the fundamental questions of cultural evolutionary research is how individual-level processes scale up to generate population-level patterns. Previous studies in music have revealed that frequency-based bias (e.g. conformity and…
Emergent communication research often focuses on optimizing task-specific utility as a driver for communication. However, human languages appear to evolve under pressure to efficiently compress meanings into communication signals by…
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…
Humans communicate with graphical sketches apart from symbolic languages. Primarily focusing on the latter, recent studies of emergent communication overlook the sketches; they do not account for the evolution process through which symbolic…
Language carries implicit human biases, functioning both as a reflection and a perpetuation of stereotypes that people carry with them. Recently, ML-based NLP methods such as word embeddings have been shown to learn such language biases…
Communication of information in complex systems can be considered as major driver of systems evolution. What matters is not the communicated information by itself but rather the meaning that is supplied to the information. However…
As LLMs become increasingly integrated into daily life, understanding how their presence will shape human linguistic behavior is an open question. We present a large-scale study of linguistic convergence in human-LLM dialogue, examining how…
People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity…
We study the introduction of lexical innovations into a community of language users. Lexical innovations, i.e., new terms added to people's vocabulary, play an important role in the process of language evolution. Nowadays, information is…
Cultural evolution allows ideas and technologies to accumulate across generations, reaching their most complex and open-ended form in humans. While social learning enables the transmission of such innovations, the cognitive processes that…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
How do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast,…
The distribution of human linguistic groups presents a number of interesting and non-trivial patterns. The distributions of the number of speakers per language and the area each group covers follow log-normal distributions, while population…
Dialogue systems in the form of chatbots and personal assistants are being increasingly integrated into people's lives. Modern dialogue systems may consider adopting anthropomorphic personas, mimicking societal demographic groups to appear…
The profound impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on biology has led to the acceptance of the theory in many complex systems that lie well beyond its original domain. Culture is one example that also exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary…
This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson (2008). First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons…
Mutation and drift play opposite roles in genetics. While mutation creates diversity, drift can cause gene variants to disappear, especially when they are rare. In the absence of natural selection and migration, the balance between the…
Language model representations often contain linear directions that correspond to high-level concepts. Here, we study the dynamics of these representations: how representations evolve along these dimensions within the context of (simulated)…
Word embeddings have recently been shown to reflect many of the pronounced societal biases (e.g., gender bias or racial bias). Existing studies are, however, limited in scope and do not investigate the consistency of biases across relevant…