Related papers: Capturing the diversity of multilingual societies
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…
Profiting from the emergence of web-scale social data sets, numerous recent studies have systematically explored human mobility patterns over large populations and large time scales. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to…
Words are malleable objects, influenced by events that are reflected in written texts. Situated in the global outbreak of COVID-19, our research aims at detecting semantic shifts in social media language triggered by the health crisis. With…
Superdiversity refers to large cultural diversity in a population due to immigration. In this paper, we introduce a superdiversity index based on the changes in the emotional content of words used by a multi-cultural community, compared to…
Crosslingual transfer is crucial to contemporary language models' multilingual capabilities, but how it occurs is not well understood. We ask what happens to a monolingual language model when it begins to be trained on a second language.…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts' acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the…
Recently, emergence of signaling conventions, among which language is a prime example, draws a considerable interdisciplinary interest ranging from game theory, to robotics to evolutionary linguistics. Such a wide spectrum of research is…
More than half of the 7,000 languages in the world are in imminent danger of going extinct. Traditional methods of documenting language proceed by collecting audio data followed by manual annotation by trained linguists at different levels…
Linguistic disparity in the NLP world is a problem that has been widely acknowledged recently. However, different facets of this problem, or the reasons behind this disparity are seldom discussed within the NLP community. This paper…
The psycholinguistic theory of communication accommodation accounts for the general observation that participants in conversations tend to converge to one another's communicative behavior: they coordinate in a variety of dimensions…
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.…
The goal of this paper is to provide a complete representation of regional linguistic variation on a global scale. To this end, the paper focuses on removing three constraints that have previously limited work within…
Word embeddings are powerful representations that form the foundation of many natural language processing architectures, both in English and in other languages. To gain further insight into word embeddings, we explore their stability (e.g.,…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
Social media are transforming global communication and coordination and provide unprecedented opportunities for studying socio-technical domains. Here we study global dynamical patterns of communication on Twitter across many scales.…
Contact between languages has the potential to transmit vocabulary and other language features; however, this does not always happen. Here, an iterated learning model is used to examine, in a simple way, the resistance of languages to…
Language use changes over time, and this impacts the effectiveness of NLP systems. This phenomenon is even more prevalent in social media data during crisis events where meaning and frequency of word usage may change over the course of…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…