Related papers: Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline
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…
Natural languages display a trade-off among different strategies to convey syntactic structure, such as word order or inflection. This trade-off, however, has not appeared in recent simulations of iterated language learning with neural…
Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using simple designs in which neural responses to expected and unexpected words are compared in a categorical fashion. However, these designs have been contested as being `prediction…
Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…
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…
We present a probabilistic language model for time-stamped text data which tracks the semantic evolution of individual words over time. The model represents words and contexts by latent trajectories in an embedding space. At each moment in…
Understanding how the brain represents the multifaceted properties of words in context is essential for explaining the neural architecture of human language. Here, we combine large-scale psycholinguistic modeling with naturalistic fMRI to…
One way to resolve the actuation problem of metaphorical language change is to provide a statistical profile of metaphorical constructions and generative rules with antecedent conditions. Based on arguments from the view of language as…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
We propose a stochastic model for the number of different words in a given database which incorporates the dependence on the database size and historical changes. The main feature of our model is the existence of two different classes of…
Dynamics of average length of words in Russian and English is analysed in the article. Words belonging to the diachronic text corpus Google Books Ngram and dated back to the last two centuries are studied. It was found out that average word…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is…
We present the new empirical parameter $f_c$, the most probable usage frequency of a word in a language, computed via the distribution of documents over frequency $x$ of the word. This parameter allows for filtering the core lexicon of a…
The occurrence of unknown words in texts significantly hinders reading comprehension. To improve accessibility for specific target populations, computational modelling has been applied to identify complex words in texts and substitute them…
Ho et. al (2024) attempts to estimate the degree of algorithmic progress from language models. They collect observational data on language models' loss and compute over time, and argue that as time has passed, language models' algorithmic…
Language is far more than a communication tool. A wealth of information - including but not limited to the identities, psychological states, and social contexts of its users - can be gleaned through linguistic markers, and such insights are…
Discovering and quantifying the drivers of language change is a major challenge. Hypotheses about causal factors proliferate, but are difficult to rigorously test. Here we ask a simple question: can 20th Century changes in English English…
Background: Subtle changes in spontaneous language production are among the earliest indicators of cognitive decline. Identifying linguistically interpretable markers of dementia can support transparent and clinically grounded screening…