Related papers: Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in lan…
The words of a language are randomly replaced in time by new ones, but it has long been known that words corresponding to some items (meanings) are less frequently replaced than others. Usually, the rate of replacement for a given item is…
The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
Word meaning change can be inferred from drifts of time-varying word embeddings. However, temporal data may be too sparse to build robust word embeddings and to discriminate significant drifts from noise. In this paper, we compare three…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
A simple spatial computer simulation model was recently introduced to study the evolution of the linguistic diversity. The model considers processes of selective geographic colonization, linguistic anomalous diffusion and mutation. In the…
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.…
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…
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…
Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…
The study of language variation examines how language varies between and within different groups of speakers, shedding light on how we use language to construct identities and how social contexts affect language use. A common method is to…
We study a general setting of neutral evolution in which the population is of finite, constant size and can have spatial structure. Mutation leads to different genetic types ("traits"), which can be discrete or continuous. Under minimal…
Contextualized word embeddings have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in various natural language processing tasks including those that concern historical semantic change. However, language models such as BERT was trained primarily…
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…
The use of abusive language online has become an increasingly pervasive problem that damages both individuals and society, with effects ranging from psychological harm right through to escalation to real-life violence and even death.…
We propose a scheme for self-training of grammaticality models for constituency analysis based on linguistic tests. A pre-trained language model is fine-tuned by contrastive estimation of grammatical sentences from a corpus, and…
The traditional approach to morphological inflection (the task of modifying a base word (lemma) to express grammatical categories) has been, for decades, to consider lexical entries of lemma-tag-form triples uniformly, lacking any…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Word embeddings are a powerful approach for unsupervised analysis of language. Recently, Rudolph et al. (2016) developed exponential family embeddings, which cast word embeddings in a probabilistic framework. Here, we develop dynamic…
We present work in progress on the temporal progression of compositionality in noun-noun compounds. Previous work has proposed computational methods for determining the compositionality of compounds. These methods try to automatically…