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Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data--in this instance,…
Frequency counts are a measure of how much use a language makes of a linguistic unit, such as a phoneme or word. However, what is often important is not the units themselves, but the contrasts between them. A measure is therefore needed for…
Phylogenetic comparative methods are new in our field and are shrouded, for most linguists, in at least a little mystery. Yet the path that led to their discovery in comparative biology is so similar to the methodological history of…
Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between phonemic inventory size and the relative entropy of the…
The explosive growth of large language models (LLMs) has created a vast but opaque landscape: millions of models exist, yet their evolutionary relationships through fine-tuning, distillation, or adaptation are often undocumented or unclear,…
Lateral transfer, a process whereby species exchange evolutionary traits through non-ancestral relationships, is a frequent source of model misspecification in phylogenetic inference. Lateral transfer obscures the phylogenetic signal in the…
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…
Advances of modern sensing and sequencing technologies generate a deluge of high dimensional space-temporal physiological and next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. Physiological traits are observed either as continuous random functions, or…
In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…
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…
Phenotypic noise underpins homeostasis and fitness of individual cells. Yet, the extent to which noise shapes cell-to-population properties in microbial active matter remains poorly understood. By quantifying variability in confluent…
Federated Learning (FL) has recently received a lot of attention for large-scale privacy-preserving machine learning. However, high communication overheads due to frequent gradient transmissions decelerate FL. To mitigate the communication…
Growing digital archives and improving algorithms for automatic analysis of text and speech create new research opportunities for fundamental research in phonetics. Such empirical approaches allow statistical evaluation of a much larger set…
Landau's Fermi-liquid (FL) theory has been successful at the phenomenological description of the normal phase of many different Fermi systems. Using a dilute atomic Fermi fluid with tunable interactions, we investigate the microscopic basis…
Phylogenetic comparative methods explore the relationships between quantitative traits adjusting for shared evolutionary history. This adjustment often occurs through a Brownian diffusion process along the branches of the phylogeny that…
The statistical over-representation of phonological features in the basic vocabulary of languages is often interpreted as reflecting potentially universal sound symbolic patterns. However, most of those results have not been tested…
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for preserving client data ownership and control over distributed Internet of Things (IoT) environments. While discriminative models dominate most FL use cases, recent advances in…
Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…
Historically, researchers and consumers have noticed a decrease in quality when applying NLP tools to minority variants of languages (i.e. Puerto Rican Spanish or Swiss German), but studies exploring this have been limited to a select few…
In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not…