Related papers: Creolizing the Web
Increasing evidence demonstrates that in many places language coexistence has become ubiquitous and essential for supporting language and cultural diversity and associated with its financial and economic benefits. The competitive evolution…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
Slang is a common type of informal language, but its flexible nature and paucity of data resources present challenges for existing natural language systems. We take an initial step toward machine generation of slang by developing a…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
One can study communications by using Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication. In social communications, however, the channels are not "fixed", but themselves subject to change. Communication systems change by communicating…
Twitter is one of the most popular social media. Due to the ease of availability of data, Twitter is used significantly for research purposes. Twitter is known to evolve in many aspects from what it was at its birth; nevertheless, how it…
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…
In this paper, we introduce a sociolinguistic perspective on language modeling. We claim that large language models are inherently models of varieties of language, and we consider how this insight can inform the development and deployment…
Formal language techniques have been used in the past to study autonomous dynamical systems. However, for controlled systems, new features are needed to distinguish between information generated by the system and input control. We show how…
Linguistic typology aims to capture structural and semantic variation across the world's languages. A large-scale typology could provide excellent guidance for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for languages that…
A unified theory of language combines a Bayesian cognitive linguistic model of language processing, with the proposal that language evolved by sexual selection for the display of intelligence. The theory accounts for the major facts of…
Though languages can evolve slowly, they can also react strongly to dramatic world events. By studying the connection between words and events, it is possible to identify which events change our vocabulary and in what way. In this work, we…
User simulation has long played a vital role in computer science due to its potential to support a wide range of applications. Language, as the primary medium of human communication, forms the foundation of social interaction and behavior.…
Language models (LMs) are statistical models trained to assign probability to human-generated text. As such, it is reasonable to question whether they approximate linguistic variability exhibited by humans well. This form of statistical…
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…
Sociodemographic bias in language models (LMs) has the potential for harm when deployed in real-world settings. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the past decade of research on sociodemographic bias in LMs, organized into a…
Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change of human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or \textbf{semantic changes} of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning…
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…
This survey provides an overview of the evolution of visually grounded models of spoken language over the last 20 years. Such models are inspired by the observation that when children pick up a language, they rely on a wide range of…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…