Related papers: A model for phonetic changes driven by social inte…
Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between phonemic inventory size and the relative entropy of the…
Social dynamics is concerned primarily with interactions among individuals and the resulting group behaviors, modeling the temporal evolution of social systems via the interactions of individuals within these systems. In particular, the…
Empirical evidence shows that the rate of irregular usage of English verbs exhibits discontinuity as a function of their frequency: the most frequent verbs tend to be totally irregular. We aim to qualitatively understand the origin of this…
We review the task of aligning simple models for language dynamics with relevant empirical data, motivated by the fact that this is rarely attempted in practice despite an abundance of abstract models. We propose that one way to meet this…
We present a mathematical formulation of a theory of language change. The theory is evolutionary in nature and has close analogies with theories of population genetics. The mathematical structure we construct similarly has correspondences…
We study an atomic signaling game under stochastic evolutionary dynamics. There is a finite number of players who repeatedly update from a finite number of available languages/signaling strategies. Players imitate the most fit agents with…
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,…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…
In the last decade, stochastic models have shown to be very useful for quantitative modelling of social processes. Here, a configurational master equation for the description of behavioral changes by pair interactions of individuals is…
Phonetic production bias is the external force most commonly invoked in computational models of sound change, despite the fact that it is not responsible for all, or even most, sound changes. Furthermore, the existence of production bias…
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…
A stochastic model for behavioral changes by imitative pair interactions of individuals is developed. `Microscopic' assumptions on the specific form of the imitative processes lead to a stochastic version of the game dynamical equations.…
The goal of this paper is to provide a complete representation of regional linguistic variation on a global scale. To this end, the paper focuses on removing three constraints that have previously limited work within…
In spoken languages, speakers divide up the space of phonetic possibilities into different regions, corresponding to different phonemes. We consider a simple exemplar model of how this division of phonetic space varies over time among a…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
Two mathematical models of macroevolution are studied. These models have population dynamics at the species level, and mutations and extinction of species are also included. The population dynamics are updated by difference equations with…
Stochastic embedding transitions introduce a probabilistic mechanism for adjusting token representations dynamically during inference, mitigating the constraints imposed through static or deterministic embeddings. A transition framework was…
Random pairwise encounters often occur in large populations, or groups of mobile agents, and various types of local interactions that happen at encounters account for emergent global phenomena. In particular, in the fields of swarm…
Many intelligent user interfaces employ application and user models to determine the user's preferences, goals and likely future actions. Such models require application analysis, adaptation and expansion. Building and maintaining such…