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The literature in modern machine learning has only negative results for learning to communicate between competitive agents using standard RL. We introduce a modified sender-receiver game to study the spectrum of partially-competitive…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
In the process of collectively inventing new words for new concepts in a population, conflicts can quickly become numerous, in the form of synonymy and homonymy. Remembering all of them could cost too much memory, and remembering too few…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to…
Competition between synapses arises in some forms of correlation-based plasticity. Here we propose a game theory-inspired model of synaptic interactions whose dynamics is driven by competition between synapses in their weak and strong…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
Language similarities can be caused by genetic relatedness, areal contact, universality, or chance. Colexification, i.e. a type of similarity where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings, is underexplored. In our work, we…
A quantitative method is suggested, where meanings of words, and grammatic rules about these, of a vocabulary are represented by real numbers. People meet randomly, and average their vocabularies if they are equal; otherwise they either…
With the prospect of autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents, studying their tendency for cooperative behavior becomes an increasingly relevant topic. This study is inspired by the super-additive cooperation theory, where the…
Proverbs are an essential component of language and culture, and though much attention has been paid to their history and currency, there has been comparatively little quantitative work on changes in the frequency with which they are used…
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…
A neural language model trained on a text corpus can be used to induce distributed representations of words, such that similar words end up with similar representations. If the corpus is multilingual, the same model can be used to learn…
Morphological and syntactic changes in word usage (as captured, e.g., by grammatical profiles) have been shown to be good predictors of a word's meaning change. In this work, we explore whether large pre-trained contextualised language…
Languages continually evolve in response to societal events, resulting in new terms and shifts in meanings. These changes have significant implications for computer applications, including automatic translation and chatbots, making it…
Environmental variation can play an important role in ecological competition by influencing the relative advantage between competing species. Here, we consider such effects by extending a classical, competitive Moran model to incorporate an…
The computational study of lexical semantic change (LSC) has taken off in the past few years and we are seeing increasing interest in the field, from both computational sciences and linguistics. Most of the research so far has focused on…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
Most words have several senses and connotations which evolve in time due to semantic shift, so that closely related words may gain different or even opposite meanings over the years. This evolution is very relevant to the study of language…
In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody--the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry…