Related papers: Communicative need modulates competition in langua…
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 evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
Representational spaces learned via language modeling are fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), however there has been limited understanding regarding how and when during training various types of linguistic information emerge…
The hypothesis that living systems can benefit from operating at the vicinity of critical points has gained momentum in recent years. Criticality may confer an optimal balance between exceedingly ordered and too noisy states. We here…
Competition for a limited resource is the hallmark of many complex systems, and often, that resource turns out to be the physical space itself. In this work, we study a novel model designed to elucidate the dynamics and emergence in complex…
We propose a model for the evolutionary ecology of words as one attempt to extend evolutionary game theory and agent-based models by utilizing the rich linguistic expressions of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our model enables the emergence…
We study the limit of many small mutations of a model of population dynamics. The population is structured by phonological traits and is spatially inhomogeneous. The various sub-populations compete for the same nutrient which diffuses…
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,…
Studies of the overall structure of vocabulary and its dynamics became possible due to creation of diachronic text corpora, especially Google Books Ngram. This article discusses the question of core change rate and the degree to which the…
Many studies have shown that human languages tend to optimize for lower complexity and increased communication efficiency. Syntactic dependency distance, which measures the linear distance between dependent words, is often considered a key…
Researchers are using deep learning models to explore the emergence of language in various language games, where agents interact and develop an emergent language to solve tasks. We focus on the factors that determine the expressivity of…
Competition between languages or cultural traits diffusing in the same geographical area is studied combining the language competition model of Abrams and Strogatz and a human dispersal model on an inhomogeneous substrate. Also, the effect…
One proposed mechanism of language change concerns the role played by second-language (L2) learners in situations of language contact. If sufficiently many L2 speakers are present in a speech community in relation to the number of…
Recent years have witnessed a surge of publications aimed at tracing temporal changes in lexical semantics using distributional methods, particularly prediction-based word embedding models. However, this vein of research lacks the cohesion,…
This paper proposes a model to explain the potential role of inter-group conflicts in determining the rise and fall of signaling norms. Individuals in a population are characterized by high and low productivity types and they are matched in…
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…
Recent conditional language models are able to continue any kind of text source in an often seemingly fluent way. This fact encouraged research in the area of open-domain conversational systems that are based on powerful language models and…
Latent semantic similarity (LSS) is a measure of the similarity of information exchanges in a conversation. Challenging the assumption that higher LSS bears more positive psychological meaning, we propose that this association might depend…
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…