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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…
Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…
Language changes over time, including in the hate speech domain, which evolves quickly following social dynamics and cultural shifts. While NLP research has investigated the impact of language evolution on model training and has proposed…
Lexical Semantic Change (LSC) is the phenomenon in which the meaning of a word change over time. Most studies on LSC focus on improving the performance of estimating the degree of LSC, however, it is often difficult to interpret how the…
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…
Language is not only a tool for communication but also a medium for human cognition and reasoning. If, as linguistic relativity suggests, the structure of language shapes cognitive patterns, then large language models (LLMs) trained on…
Historical linguists have identified multiple forms of lexical semantic change. We present a three-dimensional framework for integrating these forms and a unified computational methodology for evaluating them concurrently. The dimensions…
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…
Recent research has shown that static word embeddings can encode word frequency information. However, little has been studied about this phenomenon and its effects on downstream tasks. In the present work, we systematically study the…
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
The way the words are used evolves through time, mirroring cultural or technological evolution of society. Semantic change detection is the task of detecting and analysing word evolution in textual data, even in short periods of time. In…
Language similarities can be caused by genetic relatedness, areal contact, universality, or chance. Colexification, i.e. a type of similarity where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings, is underexplored. In our work, we…
The dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is measured…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
This paper introduces how human languages can be studied in light of recent development of network theories. There are two directions of exploration. One is to study networks existing in the language system. Various lexical networks can be…
The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…
The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is…
Semantics, morphology and syntax are strongly interdependent. However, the majority of computational methods for semantic change detection use distributional word representations which encode mostly semantics. We investigate an alternative…
The use of language is subject to variation over time as well as across social groups and knowledge domains, leading to differences even in the monolingual scenario. Such variation in word usage is often called lexical semantic change…