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Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…

Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…

Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…

We study the introduction of lexical innovations into a community of language users. Lexical innovations, i.e., new terms added to people's vocabulary, play an important role in the process of language evolution. Nowadays, information is…

Language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to the social interactions it facilitates. Despite the incredible effectiveness of language processing models to tackle…

We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…

For the longest time, languages have been competing for their speakers to survive, although this problem has only recently gained rigorous attention from the scholarly community as a means to address the risk of losing speakers for the…

Language endangerment is a phenomenon in which approximately 40% of languages spoken worldwide are predicted to disappear within the next few decades, resulting in the loss of cultures associated with these languages. To take effective…

The evolution of natural languages poses a riddle to any theoretical perspective based on efficiency considerations. If languages are already optimally effective means of organization and communication of thought, why do they change? And if…

Diffusion models have achieved great success in modeling continuous data modalities such as images, audio, and video, but have seen limited use in discrete domains such as language. Recent attempts to adapt diffusion to language have…

Questions related to the evolution of language have recently known an impressive increase of interest (Briscoe, 2002). This short paper aims at questioning the scientific status of these models and their relations to attested data. We show…

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…

The overwhelming success of the web 2.0, with online social networks as key actors, has induced a paradigm shift in the nature of human interactions. The user-driven character of these services for the first time has allowed researchers to…

The rate of adoption of new information depends on reinforcement from multiple sources in a way that often cannot be described by simple contagion processes. In such cases, contagion is said to be complex. Complex contagion happens in the…

Spreading dynamics is a central topic in the physics of complex systems and network science, providing a unified framework for understanding how information, behaviors, and diseases propagate through interactions among system units. In many…

An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…

Understanding the decision-making processes of large language models is critical given their widespread applications. To achieve this, we aim to connect a formal mathematical framework - zigzag persistence from topological data analysis -…

Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…

In an increasingly interconnected world, a key scientific challenge is to examine mechanisms that lead to the widespread propagation of contagions, such as misinformation and pathogens, and identify risk factors that can trigger large-scale…

Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…