Related papers: Slangvolution: A Causal Analysis of Semantic Chang…
(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of…
Estimating the semantic similarity between text data is one of the challenging and open research problems in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The versatility of natural language makes it difficult to define rule-based methods…
The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that…
Morphological and syntactic changes in word usage (as captured, e.g., by grammatical profiles) have been shown to be good predictors of a word's meaning change. In this work, we explore whether large pre-trained contextualised language…
The article is an attempt to contribute to explorations of a common origin for language and planned-collaborative action. It gives `semantics of change' the central stage in the synthesis, from its history and recordkeeping to its…
Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task. Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional -- i.e., express meaning by…
The evolution of natural languages poses a riddle to any theoretical perspective based on efficiency considerations. If languages are already optimally effective means of organization and communication of thought, why do they change? And if…
It has been claimed that within a language, morphologically irregular words are more likely to be phonotactically simple and morphologically regular words are more likely to be phonotactically complex. This inverse correlation has been…
The semantics used for particular terms in an academic field organically evolve over time. Tracking this evolution through inspection of published literature has either been from the perspective of Linguistic scholars or has concentrated…
Causal Learning has emerged as a major theme of research in statistics and machine learning in recent years, promising specific computational techniques to apply to datasets that reveal the true nature of cause and effect in a number of…
The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements…
Terms in diachronic text corpora may exhibit a high degree of semantic dynamics that is only partially captured by the common notion of semantic change. The new measure of context volatility that we propose models the degree by which terms…
The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer…
Questions related to the evolution of language have recently known an impressive increase of interest (Briscoe, 2002). This short paper aims at questioning the scientific status of these models and their relations to attested data. We show…
Research in cultural evolution aims at providing causal explanations for the change of culture over time. Over the past decades, this field has generated an important body of knowledge, using experimental, historical, and computational…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
Slang is a predominant form of informal language making flexible and extended use of words that is notoriously hard for natural language processing systems to interpret. Existing approaches to slang interpretation tend to rely on context…
Slang is a commonly used type of informal language that poses a daunting challenge to NLP systems. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), however, have made the problem more approachable. While LLM agents are becoming more widely…
Word class flexibility refers to the phenomenon whereby a single word form is used across different grammatical categories. Extensive work in linguistic typology has sought to characterize word class flexibility across languages, but…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…