Related papers: Inferring the drivers of language change using spa…
Our languages are in constant flux driven by external factors such as cultural, societal and technological changes, as well as by only partially understood internal motivations. Words acquire new meanings and lose old senses, new words are…
Many large cities are found at locations with certain first nature advantages. Yet, those exogenous locational features may not be the most potent forces governing the spatial pattern of cities. In particular, population size, spacing and…
Generated images of score-based models can suffer from errors in their spatial means, an effect, referred to as a color shift, which grows for larger images. This paper investigates a previously-introduced approach to mitigate color shifts…
Semantics, morphology and syntax are strongly interdependent. However, the majority of computational methods for semantic change detection use distributional word representations which encode mostly semantics. We investigate an alternative…
Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks and domains. Despite this promise, spatial understanding and reasoning -- a fundamental component of human…
Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression…
Diffusion models have achieved great success in modeling continuous data modalities such as images, audio, and video, but have seen limited use in discrete domains such as language. Recent attempts to adapt diffusion to language have…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
This chapter is about Complexity and Spatial Dynamics in Urban Systems. Strong inequalities in the size of cities and the apparent difficulty of limiting their growth raise practical issues for spatial planning. At a time when new…
For a substance diffusing on a curved surface, we obtain an explicit relation valid for very small values of the time, between the local concentration, the diffusion coefficient, the intrinsic spatial curvature and the time. We recover the…
As input data distributions evolve, the predictive performance of machine learning models tends to deteriorate. In practice, new input data tend to come without target labels. Then, state-of-the-art techniques model input data distributions…
Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the `descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages,…
Populations have often been perceived as a structuring component for language to emerge and evolve: the larger the population, the more structured the language. While this observation is widespread in the sociolinguistic literature, it has…
Transformer-based language models have recently achieved remarkable results in many natural language tasks. However, performance on leaderboards is generally achieved by leveraging massive amounts of training data, and rarely by encoding…
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…
Programming languages are engineered languages that allow to instruct a machine and share algorithmic information; they have a great influence on the society since they underlie almost every information technology artefact, and they are at…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
Morphological and syntactic changes in word usage (as captured, e.g., by grammatical profiles) have been shown to be good predictors of a word's meaning change. In this work, we explore whether large pre-trained contextualised language…
Language is not only a tool for communication but also a medium for human cognition and reasoning. If, as linguistic relativity suggests, the structure of language shapes cognitive patterns, then large language models (LLMs) trained on…
The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We…