Related papers: Capturing the diversity of multilingual societies
The explosion in the availability of natural language data in the era of social media has given rise to a host of applications such as sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Simultaneously, the growing availability of precise geolocation…
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…
This paper introduces how human languages can be studied in light of recent development of network theories. There are two directions of exploration. One is to study networks existing in the language system. Various lexical networks can be…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly increased in size and apparent capabilities in the last three years, but their training data is largely English text. There is growing interest in multilingual LLMs, and various efforts are striving…
In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…
People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity…
Translations capture important information about languages that can be used as implicit supervision in learning linguistic properties and semantic representations. In an information-centric view, translated texts may be considered as…
Language and cultural diversity is a fundamental aspect of the present world. We study three modern multilingual societies -- the Basque Country, Ireland and Wales -- which are endowed with two, linguistically distant, official languages:…
The socioeconomic background of people and how they use standard forms of language are not independent, as demonstrated in various sociolinguistic studies. However, the extent to which these correlations may be influenced by the mixing of…
Social media provide access to behavioural data at an unprecedented scale and granularity. However, using these data to understand phenomena in a broader population is difficult due to their non-representativeness and the bias of…
We consider the spreading and competition of languages that are spoken by a population of individuals. The individuals can change their mother tongue during their lifespan, pass on their language to their offspring and finally die. The…
Modern NLP breakthrough includes large multilingual models capable of performing tasks across more than 100 languages. State-of-the-art language models came a long way, starting from the simple one-hot representation of words capable of…
Code-switching, the alternation of languages within a conversation or utterance, is a common communicative phenomenon that occurs in multilingual communities across the world. This survey reviews computational approaches for code-switched…
The ability to cooperate through language is a defining feature of humans. As the perceptual, motory and planning capabilities of deep artificial networks increase, researchers are studying whether they also can develop a shared language to…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
In the era of globalization and digital networks, the so-called ''minored'' or ''endangered'' languages are facing a twofold dilemma: either succeed in their digital modernity by accepting a ''painful'' linguistic management or slide…
Linguistic diversity is a human attribute which, with the advance of generative AIs, is coming under threat. This paper, based on the contributions of sociolinguistics, examines the consequences of the variety selection bias imposed by…
The cornerstone of multilingual neural translation is shared representations across languages. Given the theoretically infinite representation power of neural networks, semantically identical sentences are likely represented differently.…
Why is our society multicultural? Based on the two mechanisms of homophily and social influence, the classical model for the dissemination of cultures proposed by Axelrod predicts the existence of a fragmented regime where different…