Related papers: A model for phonetic changes driven by social inte…
Spoken language evolves constrained by the economy of speech, which depends on factors such as the structure of the human mouth. This gives rise to local phonetic correlations in spoken words. Here we demonstrate that these local…
One of the most intriguing features of language is its constant change, with ongoing shifts in how meaning is expressed. Despite decades of research, the factors that determine how and why meanings evolve remain only partly understood.…
Far beyond its relevance for commercial and political marketings, opinion formation and decision making processes are central for representative democracy, government functioning, and state organization. In the present report, a stochastic…
The proposed stochastic model for pedestrian dynamics is based on existing approaches using cellular automata, combined with substantial extensions, to compensate the deficiencies resulting of the discrete grid structure. This agent motion…
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…
Unspoken social rules, such as those that govern choosing a proper discussion topic and when to change discussion topics, guide conversational behaviors. We propose a computational model of conversation that can follow or break such rules,…
We propose a probabilistic framework for developing computational models of biological neural systems. In this framework, physiological recordings are viewed as discrete-time partial observations of an underlying continuous-time stochastic…
Language model representations often contain linear directions that correspond to high-level concepts. Here, we study the dynamics of these representations: how representations evolve along these dimensions within the context of (simulated)…
Studying the neurological, genetic and evolutionary basis of human vocal communication mechanisms is an important field of neuroscience. In the absence of high quality data on humans, mouse vocalization experiments in laboratory settings…
This paper introduces Linguistic Style Improvisation, a theory and set of algorithms for improvisation of spoken utterances by artificial agents, with applications to interactive story and dialogue systems. We argue that linguistic style is…
Attitude change - the process by which individuals revise their evaluative stances - has been explained by a set of influential but competing verbal theories. These accounts often function as mechanism sketches: rich in conceptual detail,…
We study an excitable active rotator with slowly adapting nonlinear feedback and noise. Depending on the adaptation and the noise level, this system may display noise-induced spiking, noise-perturbed oscillations, or stochastic busting. We…
We study contact epidemic models for the spread of infective diseases in finite populations. The size dependence enters in the infection rate. The dynamics of such models is then analyzed within the deterministic approximation, as well as…
Motivated by the dramatic disappearance of endangered languages observed in recent years, a great deal of attention has been given to the modeling of language competition in order to understand the factors that promote the disappearance of…
We give a overview of stochastic models of evolution that have found applications in genetics, ecology and linguistics for an audience of nonspecialists, especially statistical physicists. In particular, we focus mostly on neutral models in…
This paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification…
While generative methods have progressed rapidly in recent years, generating expressive prosody for an utterance remains a challenging task in text-to-speech synthesis. This is particularly true for systems that model prosody explicitly…
Discovering and quantifying the drivers of language change is a major challenge. Hypotheses about causal factors proliferate, but are difficult to rigorously test. Here we ask a simple question: can 20th Century changes in English English…
The iterated learning model is an agent-based model of language evolution notable for demonstrating the emergence of compositional language. In its original form, it modelled language evolution along a single chain of teacher-pupil…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…