Related papers: Phylogenetic typology
Phylogenetic comparative methods explore the relationships between quantitative traits adjusting for shared evolutionary history. This adjustment often occurs through a Brownian diffusion process along the branches of the phylogeny that…
We propose a new computational approach for tracking and detecting statistically significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words. Such linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where the rapid exchange of…
The reconstruction of phylogenetic trees based on viral genetic sequence data sequentially sampled from an epidemic provides estimates of the past transmission dynamics, by fitting epidemiological models to these trees. To our knowledge,…
Is it possible to develop a `physics of language' which can explain the spatial, temporal and social patterns we see, and which can predict future change like we forecast the weather? Such a theory is likely to involve ideas from…
We introduce a methodology for performing parameter inference in high-dimensional, non-linear diffusion processes. We illustrate its applicability for obtaining insights into the evolution of and relationships between species, including…
Phylogenetic networks provide a means of describing the evolutionary history of sets of species believed to have undergone hybridization or gene flow during their evolution. The mutation process for a set of such species can be modeled as a…
Phylogenetic trees elucidate evolutionary relationships among species, but phylogenetic inference remains challenging due to the complexity of combining continuous (branch lengths) and discrete parameters (tree topology). Traditional Markov…
Modelling the substitution of nucleotides along a phylogenetic tree is usually done by a hidden Markov process. This allows to define a distribution of characters at the leaves of the trees and one might be able to obtain polynomial…
Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data--in this instance,…
The traditional approach to morphological inflection (the task of modifying a base word (lemma) to express grammatical categories) has been, for decades, to consider lexical entries of lemma-tag-form triples uniformly, lacking any…
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…
We address the issue of how to associate frequency information with lexicalized grammar formalisms, using Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar as a representative framework. We consider systematically a number of alternative probabilistic…
We study a density-dependent Markov jump process describing a population where each individual is characterized by a type, and reproduces at rates depending both on its type and on the population type distribution. We are interested in the…
We probe the layers in multilingual BERT (mBERT) for phylogenetic and geographic language signals across 100 languages and compute language distances based on the mBERT representations. We 1) employ the language distances to infer and…
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…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
Stochastic models of evolution (Markov random fields on trivalent trees) generally assume that different characters (different runs of the stochastic process) are independent and identically distributed. In this paper we take the first…
A new language model for speech recognition inspired by linguistic analysis is presented. The model develops hidden hierarchical structure incrementally and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history - thus enabling the…
We characterize the meaning of words with language-independent numerical fingerprints, through a mathematical analysis of recurring patterns in texts. Approximating texts by Markov processes on a long-range time scale, we are able to…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…