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Bringing together considerations from three research trends (honest signals of collaboration, socio-semantic networks and homophily theory), we hypothesise that word use similarity and having similar social network positions are linked with…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
Multilingual speakers tend to alternate between languages within a conversation, a phenomenon referred to as "code-switching" (CS). CS is a complex phenomenon that not only encompasses linguistic challenges, but also contains a great deal…
Understanding social interaction within groups is key to analyzing online communities. Most current work focuses on structural properties: who talks to whom, and how such interactions form larger network structures. The interactions…
The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation…
Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…
Collective human behaviors are analyzed using the time series of word appearances in blogs. As expected, we confirm that the number of fluctuations is approximated by a Poisson distribution for very-low-frequency words. A non-trivial…
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…
A fundamental challenge in the cognitive sciences is discovering the dynamics that govern behaviour. Take the example of spoken language, which is characterised by a highly variable and complex set of physical movements that map onto the…
The enormous increase of popularity and use of the WWW has led in the recent years to important changes in the ways people communicate. An interesting example of this fact is provided by the now very popular social annotation systems,…
Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive rule systems and statistical learning to explain our ability to learn new concepts from just a few examples. The aim of most…
Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and…
The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication,…
Complex dynamical systems may exhibit multiple steady states, including time-periodic limit cycles, where the final trajectory depends on initial conditions. With tuning of parameters, limit cycles can proliferate or merge at an exceptional…
From a grammar point of view, the role of punctuation marks in a sentence is formally defined and well understood. In semantic analysis punctuation plays also a crucial role as a method of avoiding ambiguity of the meaning. A different…
This paper introduces new methods based on exponential families for modeling the correlations between words in text and speech. While previous work assumed the effects of word co-occurrence statistics to be constant over a window of several…
It is well known that behavioral changes in contact patterns may significantly affect the spread of an epidemic outbreak. Here we focus on simple endemic models for recurrent epidemics, by modelling the social contact rate as a function of…
We explore which linguistic factors -- at the sentence and token level -- play an important role in influencing language model predictions, and investigate whether these are reflective of results found in humans and human corpora (Gries and…
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…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…