Related papers: Inferring the drivers of language change using spa…

Language models (LMs) exhibit and amplify many types of undesirable biases learned from the training data, including gender bias. However, we lack tools for effectively and efficiently changing this behavior without hurting general language…

Of basic interest is the quantification of the long term growth of a language's lexicon as it develops to more completely cover both a culture's communication requirements and knowledge space. Here, we explore the usage dynamics of words in…

It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…

In a physical system, changing parameters such as temperature can induce a phase transition: an abrupt change from one state of matter to another. Analogous phenomena have recently been observed in large language models. Typically, the task…

Spatial confounding is a fundamental issue in spatial regression models which arises because spatial random effects, included to approximate unmeasured spatial variation, are typically not independent of covariates in the model. This can…

Pretrained multilingual models exhibit the same social bias as models processing English texts. This systematic review analyzes emerging research that extends bias evaluation and mitigation approaches into multilingual and non-English…

This paper studies spatial patterns formed by proximate population migration driven by real wage gradients and other idiosyncratic factors. The model consists of a tractable core-periphery model incorporating a quasi-linear log utility…

Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…

Spatial linguistic surveys often reveal well defined geographical zones where certain linguistic forms are dominant over their alternatives. It has been suggested that these patterns may be understood by analogy with coarsening in models of…

The purpose of this study is to find evidence for supporting the hypothesis that language is the mirror of our thinking, our prejudices and cultural stereotypes. In this analysis, a questionnaire was administered to 537 people. The answers…

Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…

Language Models (LMs) have emerged as powerful sources of evidence for linguists seeking to develop theories of syntax. In this paper, we argue that causal interpretability methods, applied to LMs, can greatly enhance the value of such…

This research aims to investigate the dynamic nature of linguistic style throughout various stages of life, from post teenage to old age. By employing linguistic analysis tools and methodologies, the study will delve into the intricacies of…

Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state…

Understanding natural language requires common sense, one aspect of which is the ability to discern the plausibility of events. While distributional models -- most recently pre-trained, Transformer language models -- have demonstrated…

Diffusion models are able to generate photorealistic images in arbitrary scenes. However, when applying diffusion models to image translation, there exists a trade-off between maintaining spatial structure and high-quality content. Besides,…

Spatial expressions in situated communication can be ambiguous, as their meanings vary depending on the frames of reference (FoR) adopted by speakers and listeners. While spatial language understanding and reasoning by vision-language…

Large language models present challenges for principled uncertainty quantification, in part due to their complexity and the diversity of their outputs. Semantic dispersion, or the variance in the meaning of sampled answers, has been…

During embryonic development, differentiating cells respond via gene expression to positional cues from morphogen gradients. While gene expression is often highly erratic, embryonic development is precise. We show by theory and simulations…

We propose a stochastic model to study phonetic changes as an evolutionary process driven by social interactions between two groups of individuals with different phonological systems. Particularly, we focus on the changes in the place of…