Related papers: Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in lan…
Of basic interest is the quantification of the long term growth of a language's lexicon as it develops to more completely cover both a culture's communication requirements and knowledge space. Here, we explore the usage dynamics of words in…
In this paper, a method for measuring synchronic corpus (dis-)similarity put forward by Kilgarriff (2001) is adapted and extended to identify trends and correlated changes in diachronic text data, using the Corpus of Historical American…
The influence of migration on the stochastic dynamics of subdivided populations is still an open issue in various evolutionary models. We develop here a self-consistent mean-field-like method in order to determine the effects of migration…
Language is dynamic, constantly evolving and adapting with respect to time, domain or topic. The adaptability of language is an active research area, where researchers discover social, cultural and domain-specific changes in language using…
Our languages are in constant flux driven by external factors such as cultural, societal and technological changes, as well as by only partially understood internal motivations. Words acquire new meanings and lose old senses, new words are…
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…
In large asexual populations, multiple beneficial mutations arise in the population, compete, interfere with each other, and accumulate on the same genome, before any of them fix. The resulting dynamics, although studied by many authors, is…
Many languages' inflectional morphological systems are replete with irregulars, i.e., words that do not seem to follow standard inflectional rules. In this work, we quantitatively investigate the conditions under which irregulars can…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
We introduce and analyse an individual-based evolutionary model, in which a population of genetically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources. Through theoretical analysis and stochastic simulations, we show that the…
The study of language emergence aims to understand how human languages are shaped by perceptual grounding and communicative intent. Computational approaches to emergent communication (EC) predominantly consider referential games in limited…
Using more test-time computation during language model inference, such as generating more intermediate thoughts or sampling multiple candidate answers, has proven effective in significantly improving model performance. This paper takes an…
In recent years, the availability of large-scale annotated datasets, such as the Stanford Natural Language Inference and the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference, coupled with the advent of pre-trained language models, has significantly…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential as tools for scientific discovery. This has engendered growing interest in their use in humanistic disciplines, such as historical linguistics and literary studies. These fields often…
We study fixation probabilities and times as a consequence of neutral genetic drift in subdivided populations, motivated by a model of the cultural evolutionary process of language change that is described by the same mathematics as the…
Diachronic word embeddings -- vector representations of words over time -- offer remarkable insights into the evolution of language and provide a tool for quantifying sociocultural change from text documents. Prior work has used such…
Terms in diachronic text corpora may exhibit a high degree of semantic dynamics that is only partially captured by the common notion of semantic change. The new measure of context volatility that we propose models the degree by which terms…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
One proposed mechanism of language change concerns the role played by second-language (L2) learners in situations of language contact. If sufficiently many L2 speakers are present in a speech community in relation to the number of…
Language models can learn sophisticated language understanding skills from fitting raw text. They also unselectively learn useless corpus statistics and biases, especially during finetuning on domain-specific corpora. In this paper, we…