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Short-term phonetic accommodation is a fundamental driver behind accent change, but how does real-time input from another speaker's voice shape the speech planning representations of an interlocutor? We advance a computational model of…
The iterated learning model is an agent model which simulates the transmission of of language from generation to generation. It is used to study how the language adapts to pressures imposed by transmission. In each iteration, a language…
Speakers' referential expressions often depart from communicative ideals in ways that help illuminate the nature of pragmatic language use. Patterns of overmodification, in which a speaker uses a modifier that is redundant given their…
We introduce and analyze a general model of a population evolving over a network of selectively neutral genotypes. We show that the population's limit distribution on the neutral network is solely determined by the network topology and…
We propose a stochastic model to study phonetic changes as an evolutionary process driven by social interactions between two groups of individuals with different phonological systems. Particularly, we focus on the changes in the place of…
This paper measures variation in embedding spaces which have been trained on different regional varieties of English while controlling for instability in the embeddings. While previous work has shown that it is possible to distinguish…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
The Hopfield model is a paradigmatic model of neural networks that has been analyzed for many decades in the statistical physics, neuroscience, and machine learning communities. Inspired by the manifold hypothesis in machine learning, we…
Grammatical rules in natural languages are often characterized by exceptions. How do language learners learn these exceptions to otherwise general patterns? Here, we study this question through the case study of English passivization. While…
Synonyms and homonyms appear in all natural languages. We analyse their evolution within the framework of the signaling game. Agents in our model use reinforcement learning, where probabilities of selection of a communicated word or of its…
This paper proposes a framework for modeling sound change that combines deep learning and iterative learning. Acquisition and transmission of speech is modeled by training generations of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on unannotated…
Training deep neural networks on well-understood dependencies in speech data can provide new insights into how they learn internal representations. This paper argues that acquisition of speech can be modeled as a dependency between random…
Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptable instance of their language. Acceptability provides a means of evaluating whether computational language models are processing language in a human-like manner. We test the ability…
The distribution of human linguistic groups presents a number of interesting and non-trivial patterns. The distributions of the number of speakers per language and the area each group covers follow log-normal distributions, while population…
We study the stable phases of an attractor neural network model, with binary units, for hippocampal place cells encoding 1D or 2D spatial maps or environments. Using statistical mechanics tools we show that, below critical values for the…
Language changes over time, including in the hate speech domain, which evolves quickly following social dynamics and cultural shifts. While NLP research has investigated the impact of language evolution on model training and has proposed…
We introduce a class of stochastic models for the dynamics of two linguistic variants that are competing to become the single, shared convention within an unstructured community of speakers. Different instances of the model are…
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…
Spoken communication occurs in a "noisy channel" characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input,…
Computer model has been extensively adopted to overcome the time limitation of language evolution by transforming language theory into physical modeling mechanism, which helps to explore the general laws of the evolution. In this paper, a…