Related papers: Evolutionary forces in language change
We give a overview of stochastic models of evolution that have found applications in genetics, ecology and linguistics for an audience of nonspecialists, especially statistical physicists. In particular, we focus mostly on neutral models in…
By exploiting an analogy between population genetics and statistical mechanics, we study the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing selection, mutation, and genetic drift. This requires us to track only four macroscopic variables,…
This paper measures variation in embedding spaces which have been trained on different regional varieties of English while controlling for instability in the embeddings. While previous work has shown that it is possible to distinguish…
The characterization of plasticity, robustness, and evolvability, an important issue in biology, is studied in terms of phenotypic fluctuations. By numerically evolving gene regulatory networks, the proportionality between the phenotypic…
As an integral part of our culture and way of life, language is intricately related to migrations of people. To understand whether and how migration shapes language formation processes we examine the dynamics of the naming game with…
The biological theory of adaptive dynamics proposes a description of the long-term evolution of a structured asexual population. It is based on the assumptions of large population, rare mutations and small mutation steps, that lead to a…
We study an atomic signaling game under stochastic evolutionary dynamics. There is a finite number of players who repeatedly update from a finite number of available languages/signaling strategies. Players imitate the most fit agents with…
Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synthetic word-order variants of natural languages. We observe…
We introduce a theory of sequential causal inference in which learners in a chain estimate a structural model from their upstream teacher and then pass samples from the model to their downstream student. It extends the population dynamics…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…
Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…
Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…
Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we inhabit, and reinforcement learning is a powerful tool used in artificial intelligence to develop intelligent agents that learn from their environment. In recent years,…
Evolutionary analyses of large populations commonly incorporate stochasticity through temporal variation in selection while treating genetic transmission as fixed. Much less attention has been given to stochasticity in transmission itself.…
In multilingual societies, it is common to encounter different language varieties. Various approaches have been proposed to discuss different mechanisms of language shift. However, current models exploring language shift in languages in…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
Horizontal gene transfer consists in exchanging genetic materials between microorganisms during their lives. This is a major mechanism of bacterial evolution and is believed to be of main importance in antibiotics resistance. We consider a…
Environmental variations can significantly influence how populations compete for resources, and hence shape their evolution. Here, we study population dynamics subject to a fluctuating environment modeled by a varying carrying capacity…
Language models (LMs) tend to show human-like preferences on a number of syntactic phenomena, but the extent to which these are attributable to direct exposure to the phenomena or more general properties of language is unclear. We explore…