Related papers: Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline
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…
Distributional semantics provides multi-dimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown in a large body of work in computational linguistics;…
Although text-based large language models exhibit human-level writing ability and remarkable intelligence, speech language models (SLMs) still struggle to generate semantically coherent outputs. There are several potential reasons for this…
Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying…
We propose a model for the evolutionary ecology of words as one attempt to extend evolutionary game theory and agent-based models by utilizing the rich linguistic expressions of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our model enables the emergence…
Keywords in scientific articles have found their significance in information filtering and classification. In this article, we empirically investigated statistical characteristics and evolutionary properties of keywords in a very famous…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
Lexical Semantic Change (LSC) is the phenomenon in which the meaning of a word change over time. Most studies on LSC focus on improving the performance of estimating the degree of LSC, however, it is often difficult to interpret how the…
Many studies in the neurosciences have dealt with the semantic processing of words or categories, but few have looked into the semantic organization of the lexicon thought as a system. The present study was designed to try to move towards…
We study the time taken by a language learner to correctly identify the meaning of all words in a lexicon under conditions where many plausible meanings can be inferred whenever a word is uttered. We show that the most basic form of…
We use Monte Carlo simulations and assumptions from evolutionary game theory in order to study the evolution of words and the population dynamics of a system comprising two interacting species which initially speak two different languages.…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
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…
Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…
Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synthetic word-order variants of natural languages. We observe…
Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of…
Demographic factors (e.g., gender or age) shape our language. Previous work showed that incorporating demographic factors can consistently improve performance for various NLP tasks with traditional NLP models. In this work, we investigate…
We describe and experimentally evaluate a method for automatically clustering words according to their distribution in particular syntactic contexts. Deterministic annealing is used to find lowest distortion sets of clusters. As the…
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…
New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community's lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a…