Related papers: Language: The missing selection pressure
Self-preference is a fundamental feature of biological organisms. Since large language models (LLMs) lack sentience, they might be expected to avoid such distortions. Yet, across 72 experiments and ~41,000 queries, we discovered massive…
n this paper, we attempt to explain the emergence of the linguistic diversity that exists across the consonant inventories of some of the major language families of the world through a complex network based growth model. There is only a…
Contact between languages has the potential to transmit vocabulary and other language features; however, this does not always happen. Here, an iterated learning model is used to examine, in a simple way, the resistance of languages to…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
Natural languages have been argued to evolve under pressure to efficiently compress meanings into words by optimizing the Information Bottleneck (IB) complexity-accuracy tradeoff. However, the underlying social dynamics that could drive the…
Large language models increasingly rely on explicit reasoning chains and can produce multiple plausible responses for a given context. We study the candidate sampler that produces the set of plausible responses contrasting the ancestral…
Persuasion through conversation has been the focus of much research. Nudging is a popular strategy to influence decision-making in physical and digital settings. However, conversational agents employing "nudging" have not received…
Empirical evidence shows that human behaviour often deviates from game-theoretical rationality. For instance, humans may hold unrealistic expectations about future outcomes. As the evolutionary roots of such biases remain unclear, we…
Natural language has the universal properties of being compositional and grounded in reality. The emergence of linguistic properties is often investigated through simulations of emergent communication in referential games. However, these…
Providing plausible responses to why questions is a challenging but critical goal for language based human-machine interaction. Explanations are challenging in that they require many different forms of abstract knowledge and reasoning.…
Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the `descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages,…
Categories provide a coarse grained description of the world. A fundamental question is whether categories simply mirror an underlying structure of nature, or instead come from the complex interactions of human beings among themselves and…
Languages encode distinct abstractions and inductive priors, yet most large language models (LLMs) overlook this diversity by reasoning in a single dominant language. In this work, we introduce x1, a family of reasoning models that can…
The development of intelligent machines is one of the biggest unsolved challenges in computer science. In this paper, we propose some fundamental properties these machines should have, focusing in particular on communication and learning.…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
In this work, our goal is to train agents that can coordinate with seen, unseen as well as human partners in a multi-agent communication environment involving natural language. Previous work using a single set of agents has shown great…
Linguistic disparity in the NLP world is a problem that has been widely acknowledged recently. However, different facets of this problem, or the reasons behind this disparity are seldom discussed within the NLP community. This paper…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
We investigate the evolution of competing languages, a subject where much previous literature suggests that the outcome is always the domination of one language over all the others. Since coexistence of languages is observed in reality, we…
Information technology should have much to offer linguistics, not only through the opportunities offered by large-scale data analysis and the stimulus to develop formal computational models, but through the chance to use language in systems…