Related papers: Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline
The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic…
Languages disfavor word forms containing sequences of similar or identical consonants, due to the biomechanical and cognitive difficulties posed by patterns of this sort. However, the specific evolutionary processes responsible for this…
Despite their linguistic prowess, LLMs have been shown to be vulnerable to small input perturbations. While robustness to local adversarial changes has been studied, robustness to global modifications such as different linguistic styles…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Many efforts have been devoted to extracting constituency trees from pre-trained language models, often proceeding in two stages: feature definition and parsing. However, this kind of methods may suffer from the branching bias issue, which…
Morphologically rich languages accentuate two properties of distributional vector space models: 1) the difficulty of inducing accurate representations for low-frequency word forms; and 2) insensitivity to distinct lexical relations that…
Maintaining information in context is essential in successful real-time language comprehension, but maintenance is cognitively costly and can slow processing. We hypothesize that rational language users selectively maintain information that…
We reexamine the generalized cognitive homunculus, an organism's internalized image of its physiological, psychological, and social state, which, when properly adjusted, can quickly detect subtle deviations from a reference configuration.…
We show that the laws of autocorrelations decay in texts are closely related to applicability limits of language models. Using distributional semantics we empirically demonstrate that autocorrelations of words in texts decay according to a…
Lexical Semantic Change is the study of how the meaning of words evolves through time. Another related question is whether and how lexical relations over pairs of words, such as synonymy, change over time. There are currently two competing,…
Existing works have studied the impacts of the order of words within natural text. They usually analyze it by destroying the original order of words to create a scrambled sequence, and then comparing the models' performance between the…
While there is a large amount of research in the field of Lexical Semantic Change Detection, only few approaches go beyond a standard benchmark evaluation of existing models. In this paper, we propose a shift of focus from change detection…
Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish…
The interpretation of the lexical aspect of verbs in English plays a crucial role for recognizing textual entailment and learning discourse-level inferences. We show that two elementary dimensions of aspectual class, states vs. events, and…
Languages continually evolve in response to societal events, resulting in new terms and shifts in meanings. These changes have significant implications for computer applications, including automatic translation and chatbots, making it…
Motivated by the dramatic disappearance of endangered languages observed in recent years, a great deal of attention has been given to the modeling of language competition in order to understand the factors that promote the disappearance of…
In terminology work, natural language processing, and digital humanities, several studies address the analysis of variations in context and meaning of terms in order to detect semantic change and the evolution of terms. We distinguish three…
We propose a cognitively and linguistically motivated set of sorts for lexical semantics in a compositional setting: the classifiers in languages that do have such pronouns. These sorts are needed to include lexical considerations in a…
We present a qualitative analysis of the (potentially erroneous) outputs of contextualized embedding-based methods for detecting diachronic semantic change. First, we introduce an ensemble method outperforming previously described…
Recent research has revealed that neural language models at scale suffer from poor temporal generalization capability, i.e., the language model pre-trained on static data from past years performs worse over time on emerging data. Existing…