Related papers: Evolutionary forces in language change
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in different contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the essential dynamics of survival analysis,…
The evolution of grammatical systems of syntactic and semantic composition is modeled here with a novel application of reinforcement learning theory. To test the functionalist thesis that speakers' expressive purposes shape their language,…
An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…
A language dynamics model on a square lattice, which is an extension of the one popularized by Abrams and Strogatz [1], is analyzed using ODE bifurcation theory. For this model we are interested in the existence and spectral stability of…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state…
When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…
Word embeddings are powerful representations that form the foundation of many natural language processing architectures, both in English and in other languages. To gain further insight into word embeddings, we explore their stability (e.g.,…
Evolutionary dynamics and patterns of molecular evolution are strongly influenced by selection on linked regions of the genome, but our quantitative understanding of these effects remains incomplete. Recent work has focused on predicting…
Linguistic norms emerge in human communities because people imitate each other. A shared linguistic system provides people with the benefits of shared knowledge and coordinated planning. Once norms are in place, why would they ever change?…
Recent experiments have shown that stochastic effects exerted at the level of translation contribute a substantial portion of the variation in abundance of proteins expressed at moderate to high levels. This study analyzes translational…
Questions related to the evolution of language have recently known an impressive increase of interest (Briscoe, 2002). This short paper aims at questioning the scientific status of these models and their relations to attested data. We show…
We examine the switching dynamics of a stochastic population subjected to a deterministically time-varying environment. Our approach is demonstrated in the realm of ecology on a problem of population establishment. Here, by assuming a…
Genomic evolution can be viewed as string-editing processes driven by mutations. An understanding of the statistical properties resulting from these mutation processes is of value in a variety of tasks related to biological sequence data,…
The evolution of complex molecular traits such as disulphide bridges often requires multiple mutations. The intermediate steps in such evolutionary trajectories are likely to be selectively neutral or deleterious. Therefore, large…
When a biological population expands into new territory, genetic drift develops an enormous influence on evolution at the propagating front. In such range expansion processes, fluctuations in allele frequencies occur through stochastic…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
We explore which linguistic factors -- at the sentence and token level -- play an important role in influencing language model predictions, and investigate whether these are reflective of results found in humans and human corpora (Gries and…
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…