Related papers: Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in lan…
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,…
Stochastic models of sequential mutation acquisition are widely used to quantify cancer and bacterial evolution. Across manifold scenarios, recurrent research questions are: how many cells are there with $n$ alterations, and how long will…
We study the time taken by a language learner to correctly identify the meaning of all words in a lexicon under conditions where many plausible meanings can be inferred whenever a word is uttered. We show that the most basic form of…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
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…
Understanding if and how mutants reach fixation in populations is an important question in evolutionary biology. We study the impact of population growth has on the success of mutants. To systematically understand the effects of growth we…
Studies of the overall structure of vocabulary and its dynamics became possible due to creation of diachronic text corpora, especially Google Books Ngram. This article discusses the question of core change rate and the degree to which the…
We propose a stochastic model for the number of different words in a given database which incorporates the dependence on the database size and historical changes. The main feature of our model is the existence of two different classes of…
Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) degrades from the temporal drift between data used for model training and newer text seen during inference. One understudied avenue of language change causing data drift is the emergence of…
Language evolves over time in many ways relevant to natural language processing tasks. For example, recent occurrences of tokens 'BERT' and 'ELMO' in publications refer to neural network architectures rather than persons. This type of…
Learning structural information from observational data is central to producing new knowledge outside the training corpus. This holds for mechanistic understanding in scientific discovery as well as flexible test-time compositional…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in an evolving population are punctuated by a sudden burst of change, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We analyze the population dynamics for a…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
Populations are made up of an integer number of individuals and are subject to stochastic birth-death processes whose rates may vary in time. Useful quantities, like the chance of ultimate fixation, satisfy an appropriate difference…
We study the competition between several advantageous mutants in an asexual population (clonal interference) as a function of the time between the appearance of the mutants, their selective advantages, and the rate of deleterious mutations.…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
The statistical over-representation of phonological features in the basic vocabulary of languages is often interpreted as reflecting potentially universal sound symbolic patterns. However, most of those results have not been tested…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
Understanding the statistical dynamics of growth and inequality is a fundamental challenge to ecology and society. Recent analyses of wealth and income dynamics in contemporary societies show that economic inequality is very dynamic and…