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Inflection is an essential part of every human language's morphology, yet little effort has been made to unify linguistic theory and computational methods in recent years. Methods of string manipulation are used to infer inflectional…

Here we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the population scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test both…

Perturbation experiments are carried out by contact process and its mean-field version. Here, the mortality rate is increased or decreased suddenly. It is known that the fluctuation enhancement (FE) occurs after the perturbation, where FE…

The paper introduces manually annotated test sets for the task of tracing diachronic (temporal) semantic shifts in Russian. The two test sets are complementary in that the first one covers comparatively strong semantic changes occurring to…

In this paper I propose a new way of measuring linguistic productivity that objectively assesses the ability of an affix to be used to coin new complex words and, unlike other popular measures, is not directly dependent upon token…

Large language models (LLMs) excel at operating at scale by leveraging social media and various data crawled from the web. Whereas existing corpora are diverse, their frequent lack of long-term temporal structure may however limit an LLM's…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, yet current decoding strategies discard rich intermediate predictions in favor of the final output. Our work here reveals a critical phenomenon, temporal…

We study how environmental stochasticity influences the long-term population size in certain one- and two-species models. The difficulty is that even when one can prove that there is persistence, it is usually impossible to say anything…

We propose a mathematical framework for natural selection in finite populations. Traditionally, many of the selection-based processes used to describe cultural and genetic evolution (such as imitation and birth-death models) have been…

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of semantic change computation, one emerging research field in computational linguistics, proposing a framework that summarizes the literature by identifying and expounding five essential components…

It is widely accepted that population genetics theory is the cornerstone of evolutionary analyses. Empirical tests of the theory, however, are challenging because of the complex relationships between space, dispersal, and evolution.…

Is it possible to develop a `physics of language' which can explain the spatial, temporal and social patterns we see, and which can predict future change like we forecast the weather? Such a theory is likely to involve ideas from…

I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying…

We consider an exponentially growing population of cells undergoing mutations and ask about the effect of reproductive fluctuations (genetic drift) on its long-term evolution. We combine first step analysis with the stochastic dynamics of a…

Large language models can exhibit unexpected behavior in the blink of an eye. In a recent computer use demo, a language model switched from coding to Googling pictures of Yellowstone, and these sudden shifts in behavior have also been…

Word similarity has many applications to social science and cultural analytics tasks like measuring meaning change over time and making sense of contested terms. Yet traditional similarity methods based on cosine similarity between word…

Biological populations are subject to two types of noise: demographic stochasticity due to fluctuations in the reproductive success of individuals, and environmental variations that affect coherently the relative fitness of entire…

Static word embeddings are ubiquitous in computational social science applications and contribute to practical decision-making in a variety of fields including law and healthcare. However, assessing the statistical uncertainty in downstream…

Statistical analysis of corpora provides an approach to quantitatively investigate natural languages. This approach has revealed that several power laws consistently emerge across different corpora and languages, suggesting universal…

Computational modeling plays an essential role in the study of language emergence. It aims to simulate the conditions and learning processes that could trigger the emergence of a structured language within a simulated controlled…