Related papers: Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline
Distributed linguistic representations are powerful tools for modelling the uncertainty and complexity of preference information in linguistic decision making. To provide a comprehensive perspective on the development of distributed…
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…
Sequence-processing neural networks led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks. As a consequence, there has been increasing interest in understanding to what extent they process language as humans do. We aim here to uncover which biases…
Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…
Language models (LMs) are increasingly being studied as models of human language learners. Due to the nascency of the field, it is not well-established whether LMs exhibit similar learning dynamics to humans, and there are few direct…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
Is it possible to develop a `physics of language' which can explain the spatial, temporal and social patterns we see, and which can predict future change like we forecast the weather? Such a theory is likely to involve ideas from…
Human processing of idioms relies on understanding the contextual sentences in which idioms occur, as well as language-intrinsic features such as frequency and speaker-intrinsic factors like familiarity. While LLMs have shown high…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
Large language models (LLMs) are ubiquitous in modern day natural language processing. However, previous work has shown degraded LLM performance for under-represented English dialects. We analyze the effects of typifying "standard" American…
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
This study aims to comprehend linguistic and socio-demographic features, encompassing English language styles, conveyed sentiments, and lexical diversity within spatial online social media review data. To this end, we undertake a case study…
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…
Lexical resources are crucial for cross-linguistic analysis and can provide new insights into computational models for natural language learning. Here, we present an advanced database for comparative studies of words with multiple meanings,…
We analyze the dynamic properties of 10^7 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800--2008 in order to gain insight into the coevolution of language and culture. We report language independent patterns useful as…
Large language models are trained with tokenizers, and the resulting token distribution is highly imbalanced: a few words dominate the stream while most occur rarely. Recent practice favors ever-larger vocabularies, but it is unclear where…
Speech, language, and communication deficits are present in most neurodegenerative syndromes. They enable the early detection, diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring of neurocognitive disease progression as part of traditional…
Beyond bibliometrics, there is interest in characterizing the evolution of the number of ideas in scientific papers. A common approach for investigating this involves analyzing the titles of publications to detect vocabulary changes over…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…