Related papers: Cognitive forces shape the dynamics of word usage …

Word embeddings use vectors to represent words such that the geometry between vectors captures semantic relationship between the words. In this paper, we develop a framework to demonstrate how the temporal dynamics of the embedding can be…

Children can use the statistical regularities of their environment to learn word meanings, a mechanism known as cross-situational learning. We take a computational approach to investigate how the information present during each observation…

Human language, the most powerful communication system in history, is closely associated with cognition. Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how…

Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…

Recently, numerous approaches have emerged in the social sciences to exploit the opportunities made possible by the vast amounts of data generated by online social networks (OSNs). Having access to information about users on such a scale…

To a good extent, words can be understood as corresponding to patterns or categories that appeared in order to represent concepts and structures that are particularly important or useful in a given time and space. Words are characterized by…

Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variability across words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-based…

Language encodes societal beliefs about social groups through word patterns. While computational methods like word embeddings enable quantitative analysis of these patterns, studies have primarily examined gradual shifts in Western…

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…

Over the past century, personality theory and research has successfully identified core sets of characteristics that consistently describe and explain fundamental differences in the way people think, feel and behave. Such characteristics…

Empirical evidence shows that the rate of irregular usage of English verbs exhibits discontinuity as a function of their frequency: the most frequent verbs tend to be totally irregular. We aim to qualitatively understand the origin of this…

Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…

Neural language models learn, to varying degrees of accuracy, the grammatical properties of natural languages. In this work, we investigate whether there are systematic sources of variation in the language models' accuracy. Focusing on…

We investigate the temporal patterns of human communication and its influence on the spreading of information in social networks. The analysis of mobile phone calls of 20 million people in one country shows that human communication is…

Given a random text over a finite alphabet, we study the frequencies at which fixed-length words occur as subsequences. As the data size grows, the joint distribution of word counts exhibits a rich asymptotic structure. We investigate all…

The use of statistical methods to analyze large databases of text has been useful to unveil patterns of human behavior and establish historical links between cultures and languages. In this study, we identify literary movements by treating…

People are observed to assortatively connect on a set of traits. This phenomenon, termed assortative mixing or sometimes homophily, can be quantified through assortativity coefficient in social networks. Uncovering the exact causes of…

We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…

An emotional version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that differences in language emotionalities influence differences among cultures no less than conceptual differences. Conceptual contents of languages and cultures to significant…

As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…