Related papers: Creolizing the Web
Lurking is a complex user-behavioral phenomenon that occurs in all large-scale online communities and social networks. It generally refers to the behavior characterizing users that benefit from the information produced by others in the…
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…
There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three…
Efforts have been made to make machines converse like humans in the past few decades. The recent techniques of Large Language Models (LLMs) make it possible to have human-like conversations with machines, but LLM's flaws of lacking…
Word embeddings are a powerful approach for unsupervised analysis of language. Recently, Rudolph et al. (2016) developed exponential family embeddings, which cast word embeddings in a probabilistic framework. Here, we develop dynamic…
The hallmark of effective language use lies in consistency: expressing similar meanings in similar contexts and avoiding contradictions. While human communication naturally demonstrates this principle, state-of-the-art language models (LMs)…
The absence of standardized spelling conventions and the organic evolution of human language present an inherent linguistic challenge within historical documents, a longstanding concern for scholars in the humanities. Addressing this issue,…
The goal of this paper is to provide a complete representation of regional linguistic variation on a global scale. To this end, the paper focuses on removing three constraints that have previously limited work within…
Forecasting conversation derailment can be useful in real-world settings such as online content moderation, conflict resolution, and business negotiations. However, despite language models' success at identifying offensive speech present in…
We propose an alternate approach to quantifying how well language models learn natural language: we ask how well they match the statistical tendencies of natural language. To answer this question, we analyze whether text generated from…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
Predicting the future direction of community evolution is a problem with high theoretical and practical significance. It allows to determine which characteristics describing communities have importance from the point of view of their future…
Our world is constantly evolving, and so is the content on the web. Consequently, our languages, often said to mirror the world, are dynamic in nature. However, most current contextual language models are static and cannot adapt to changes…
Estimating the semantic similarity between text data is one of the challenging and open research problems in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The versatility of natural language makes it difficult to define rule-based methods…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can be deployed in situations where they process positive/negative interactions with other agents. We study how this is done under the sociological framework of social balance, which explains the emergence of…
Evolution of beliefs of a society are a product of interactions between people (horizontal transmission) in the society over generations (vertical transmission). Researchers have studied both horizontal and vertical transmission separately.…
Can we describe social systems quantitatively and predictively, when we know all the actions, interactions, and states of individuals? We interpret human societies as co-evolutionary systems of individuals and their interactions. Based on…
We study the dynamics of an epidemic-like model for the spread of a rumor on a small-world network. It has been shown that this model exhibits a transition between regimes of localization and propagation at a finite value of the network…
Modeling human dynamics responsible for the formation and evolution of the so-called social networks - structures comprised of individuals or organizations and indicating connectivities existing in a community - is a topic recently…
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…