Related papers: Phylogenetic typology
Phylogenetics uses alignments of molecular sequence data to learn about evolutionary trees relating species. Along branches, sequence evolution is modelled using a continuous-time Markov process characterised by an instantaneous rate…
In a physical system, changing parameters such as temperature can induce a phase transition: an abrupt change from one state of matter to another. Analogous phenomena have recently been observed in large language models. Typically, the task…
This paper proposes methods of predicting dynamic time series (including non-stationary ones) based on a linguistic approach, namely, the study of occurrences and repetition of so-called N-grams. This approach is used in computational…
In this paper we examine the usefulness of two classes of algorithms Distance Methods, Discrete Character Methods (Felsenstein and Felsenstein 2003) widely used in genetics, for predicting the family relationships among a set of related…
We propose a new statistical model for computational linguistics. Rather than trying to estimate directly the probability distribution of a random sentence of the language, we define a Markov chain on finite sets of sentences with many…
The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that…
A number of methods have been developed to infer differential rates of species diversification through time and among clades using time-calibrated phylogenetic trees. However, we lack a general framework that can delineate and quantify…
Having a precise knowledge of the dispersal ability of a population in a heterogeneous environment is of critical importance in agroecology and conservation biology as it can provide management tools to limit the effects of pests or to…
Phylogenetic inference, the task of reconstructing how related sequences evolved from common ancestors, is a central objective in evolutionary genomics. The current state-of-the-art methods exploit probabilistic models of sequence evolution…
More than ever, today we are left with the abundance of molecular data outpaced by the advancements of the phylogenomic methods. Especially in the case of presence of many genes over a set of species under the phylogeny question, more…
We propose a model of the evolution of a matrix along a phylogenetic tree, in which transformations affect either entire rows or columns of the matrix. This represents the change of both lexical and phonological aspects of linguistic data,…
We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency distributions closely follow the order statistics of a…
We wish to estimate the total number of classes in a population based on sample counts, especially in the presence of high latent diversity. Drawing on probability theory that characterizes distributions on the integers by ratios of…
We show that short-range phoneme dependencies encode large-scale patterns of linguistic relatedness, with direct implications for quantitative typology and evolutionary linguistics. Specifically, using an information-theoretic framework, we…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
We analyze ecological systems that are influenced by random environmental fluctuations. We first provide general conditions which ensure that the species coexist and the system converges to a unique invariant probability measure (stationary…
Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
In this paper I propose a new way of measuring linguistic productivity that objectively assesses the ability of an affix to be used to coin new complex words and, unlike other popular measures, is not directly dependent upon token…
Computational phylogenetics has become an established tool in historical linguistics, with many language families now analyzed using likelihood-based inference. However, standard approaches rely on expert-annotated cognate sets, which are…