Related papers: Conceptual similarity and communicative need shape…
One of the most intriguing features of language is its constant change, with ongoing shifts in how meaning is expressed. Despite decades of research, the factors that determine how and why meanings evolve remain only partly understood.…
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…
The past years have seen a drastic rise in studies devoted to the investigation of colexification patterns in individual languages families in particular and the languages of the world in specific. Specifically computational studies have…
Lexical resources are crucial for cross-linguistic analysis and can provide new insights into computational models for natural language learning. Here, we present an advanced database for comparative studies of words with multiple meanings,…
While the embedding of words has revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing, the embedding of concepts has received much less attention so far. A dense and meaningful representation of concepts, however, could prove useful for…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
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…
In comparative linguistics, colexification refers to the phenomenon of a lexical form conveying two or more distinct meanings. Existing work on colexification patterns relies on annotated word lists, limiting scalability and usefulness in…
Colexification refers to linguistic phenomena where multiple concepts (meanings) are expressed by the same lexical form, such as polysemy or homophony. Colexifications have been found to be pervasive across languages and cultures. The…
Learning word embeddings using distributional information is a task that has been studied by many researchers, and a lot of studies are reported in the literature. On the contrary, less studies were done for the case of multiple languages.…
Gibson et al. (2017) argued that color naming is shaped by patterns of communicative need. In support of this claim, they showed that color naming systems across languages support more precise communication about warm colors than cool…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive rule systems and statistical learning to explain our ability to learn new concepts from just a few examples. The aim of most…
Colexification refers to the linguistic phenomenon where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings. By studying cross-lingual colexifications, researchers have gained valuable insights into fields such as psycholinguistics…
Cross-lingual representations of words enable us to reason about word meaning in multilingual contexts and are a key facilitator of cross-lingual transfer when developing natural language processing models for low-resource languages. In…
Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…
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…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a…