Related papers: Communicative need modulates competition in langua…
Change and its precondition, variation, are inherent in languages. Over time, new words enter the lexicon, others become obsolete, and existing words acquire new senses. Associating a word's correct meaning in its historical context is a…
In recent years several novel models were developed to process natural language, development of accurate language translation systems have helped us overcome geographical barriers and communicate ideas effectively. These models are…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
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…
Temporal information conveyed by language describes how the world around us changes through time. Events, durations and times are all temporal elements that can be viewed as intervals. These intervals are sometimes temporally related in…
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and…
We study the role of linguistic context in predicting quantifiers (`few', `all'). We collect crowdsourced data from human participants and test various models in a local (single-sentence) and a global context (multi-sentence) condition.…
We present a method of finding and analyzing shifts in grammatical relations found in diachronic corpora. Inspired by the econometric technique of measuring return and volatility instead of relative frequencies, we propose them as a way to…
Using a bit-string model similar to biological simulations, the competition between different languages is simulated both without and with spatial structure. We compare our agent-based work with differential equations and the competing…
Competition is one of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, biology and economics. Recent studies of the competition between innovations have highlighted the influence of switching costs and interaction networks, but the problem is…
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…
This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of semantic change computation, one emerging research field in computational linguistics, proposing a framework that summarizes the literature by identifying and expounding five essential components…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task. Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional -- i.e., express meaning by…
Multilingual topic models enable crosslingual tasks by extracting consistent topics from multilingual corpora. Most models require parallel or comparable training corpora, which limits their ability to generalize. In this paper, we first…
One way to resolve the actuation problem of metaphorical language change is to provide a statistical profile of metaphorical constructions and generative rules with antecedent conditions. Based on arguments from the view of language as…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
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…
We analyze language change over time in a collaborative, goal-oriented instructional task, where utility-maximizing participants form conventions and increase their expertise. Prior work studied such scenarios mostly in the context of…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…