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Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…
We present work in progress on the temporal progression of compositionality in noun-noun compounds. Previous work has proposed computational methods for determining the compositionality of compounds. These methods try to automatically…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using simple designs in which neural responses to expected and unexpected words are compared in a categorical fashion. However, these designs have been contested as being `prediction…
We use large-scale corpora in six different gendered languages, along with tools from NLP and information theory, to test whether there is a relationship between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjectives used to describe…
We consider a population of agents competing for finite resources using strategies based on two channels of signals. The model is applicable to financial markets, ecosystems and computer networks. We find that the dynamics of the system is…
The syntactic structures of sentences can be readily read-out from the activations of large language models (LLMs). However, the ``structural probes'' that have been developed to reveal this phenomenon are typically evaluated on an…
We have analyzed the interplay between noise and periodic modulations in a classical Lotka-Volterra model of two-species competition. We have found that the consideration of noise changes drastically the behavior of the system and leads to…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
Conversations allow the quick transfer of short bits of information and it is reasonable to expect that changes in communication medium affect how we converse. Using conversations in works of fiction and in an online social networking…
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…
According to the competitive exclusion principle, in a finite ecosystem, extinction occurs naturally when two or more species compete for the same resources. An important question that arises is: when coexistence is not possible, which…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
Studies of discrete languages emerging when neural agents communicate to solve a joint task often look for evidence of compositional structure. This stems for the expectation that such a structure would allow languages to be acquired faster…
In multilingual societies, it is common to encounter different language varieties. Various approaches have been proposed to discuss different mechanisms of language shift. However, current models exploring language shift in languages in…
Speakers often face choices as to how to structure their intended message into an utterance. Here we investigate the influence of contextual predictability on the encoding of linguistic content manifested by speaker choice in a classifier…
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…
Emergent communication protocols among humans and artificial neural network agents do not yet share the same properties and show some critical mismatches in results. We describe three important phenomena with respect to the emergence and…