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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…
The use of abusive language online has become an increasingly pervasive problem that damages both individuals and society, with effects ranging from psychological harm right through to escalation to real-life violence and even death.…
Diffusion models have emerged as the leading paradigm in generative modeling, excelling in various applications. Despite their success, these models often misalign with human intentions and generate results with undesired properties or even…
This work examines the impact of cross-linguistic transfer on grammatical errors in English as Second Language (ESL) texts. Using a computational framework that formalizes the theory of Contrastive Analysis (CA), we demonstrate that…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
It is generally believed that, when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequency of use in the language rises with time with an S-shaped growth curve. Yet, this claim has only been supported by a limited number of case…
Recent advances in data-driven models for grounded language understanding have enabled robots to interpret increasingly complex instructions. Two fundamental limitations of these methods are that most require a full model of the environment…
During the last decade, much attention has been paid to language competition in the complex systems community, that is, how the fractions of speakers of several competing languages evolve in time. In this paper we review recent advances in…
As input data distributions evolve, the predictive performance of machine learning models tends to deteriorate. In the past, predictive performance was considered the key indicator to monitor. However, explanation aspects have come to…
Large language models can exhibit unexpected behavior in the blink of an eye. In a recent computer use demo, a language model switched from coding to Googling pictures of Yellowstone, and these sudden shifts in behavior have also been…
Prior research has investigated the impact of various linguistic features on cross-lingual transfer performance. In this study, we investigate the manner in which this effect can be mapped onto the representation space. While past studies…
I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying…
The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements…
Stochastic process models for spatiotemporal data underlying random fields find substantial utility in a range of scientific disciplines. Subsequent to predictive inference on the values of the random field (or spatial surface indexed…
Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task. Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional -- i.e., express meaning by…
The dynamics of urban systems can be understood from an evolutionary perspective, in some sense extending biological and cultural evolution. Models for systems of cities implementing elementary evolutionary processes remain however to be…
While cross-linguistic model transfer is effective in many settings, there is still limited understanding of the conditions under which it works. In this paper, we focus on assessing the role of lexical semantics in cross-lingual transfer,…
We study the limit of many small mutations of a model of population dynamics. The population is structured by phonological traits and is spatially inhomogeneous. The various sub-populations compete for the same nutrient which diffuses…
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…
The evolution of language has been a hotly debated subject with contradicting hypotheses and unreliable claims. Drawing from signalling games, dynamic population mechanics, machine learning and algebraic topology, we present a method for…