Related papers: Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
What statistical properties might support learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function words. Function words have been argued to aid acquisition…
Historical linguists have identified multiple forms of lexical semantic change. We present a three-dimensional framework for integrating these forms and a unified computational methodology for evaluating them concurrently. The dimensions…
Statistical regularities in human language have fascinated researchers for decades, suggesting deep underlying principles governing its evolution and information structuring for efficient communication. While Zipf's Law describes the…
Various measures of dispersion have been proposed to paint a fuller picture of a word's distribution in a corpus, but only little has been done to validate them externally. We evaluate a wide range of dispersion measures as predictors of…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…
A standard measure of the influence of a research paper is the number of times it is cited. However, papers may be cited for many reasons, and citation count offers limited information about the extent to which a paper affected the content…
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…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
We study the role of linguistic context in predicting quantifiers (`few', `all'). We collect crowdsourced data from human participants and test various models in a local (single-sentence) and a global context (multi-sentence) condition.…
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…
Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variability across words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-based…
Language has been a dynamic system and word meanings always have been changed over times. Every time a novel concept or sense is introduced, we need to assign it a word to express it. Also, some changes have happened because the result of a…
This paper presents a data-driven study focusing on analyzing and predicting sentence deletion -- a prevalent but understudied phenomenon in document simplification -- on a large English text simplification corpus. We inspect various…
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…
This chapter examines current developments in linguistic theory and methods, focusing on the increasing integration of computational, cognitive, and evolutionary perspectives. We highlight four major themes shaping contemporary linguistics:…
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…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…