Related papers: How individuals change language
The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…
Phase transitions have been proposed as the origin of emergent abilities in large language models (LLMs), where new capabilities appear abruptly once models surpass critical thresholds of scale. Prior work, such as that of Wei et al.,…
We explore which linguistic factors -- at the sentence and token level -- play an important role in influencing language model predictions, and investigate whether these are reflective of results found in humans and human corpora (Gries and…
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…
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…
Conversations allow the quick transfer of short bits of information and it is reasonable to expect that changes in communication medium affect how we converse. Using conversations in works of fiction and in an online social networking…
Language changes over time, including in the hate speech domain, which evolves quickly following social dynamics and cultural shifts. While NLP research has investigated the impact of language evolution on model training and has proposed…
What makes an interaction with the LLM more preferable for the user? While it is intuitive to assume that information accuracy in the LLM's responses would be one of the influential variables, recent studies have found that inaccurate LLM's…
While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures…
Our usage of language is not solely reliant on cognition but is arguably determined by myriad external factors leading to a global variability of linguistic patterns. This issue, which lies at the core of sociolinguistics and is backed by…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
The iterated learning model simulates the transmission of language from generation to generation in order to explore how the constraints imposed by language transmission facilitate the emergence of language structure. Despite each modelled…
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…
Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before…
New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community's lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a…
Intimacy is a fundamental aspect of how we relate to others in social settings. Language encodes the social information of intimacy through both topics and other more subtle cues (such as linguistic hedging and swearing). Here, we introduce…
Machine learning techniques have conquered many different tasks in speech and natural language processing, such as speech recognition, information extraction, text and speech generation, and human machine interaction using natural language…
We introduce a class of stochastic models for the dynamics of two linguistic variants that are competing to become the single, shared convention within an unstructured community of speakers. Different instances of the model are…
Understanding social interaction within groups is key to analyzing online communities. Most current work focuses on structural properties: who talks to whom, and how such interactions form larger network structures. The interactions…
Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…