Related papers: Subdiffusive semantic evolution in Indo-European l…
Though languages can evolve slowly, they can also react strongly to dramatic world events. By studying the connection between words and events, it is possible to identify which events change our vocabulary and in what way. In this work, we…
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…
Scientific English has undergone rapid and unprecedented changes in recent years, with words such as "delve," "intricate," and "crucial" showing significant spikes in frequency since around 2022. These changes are widely attributed to the…
Poetic traditions across languages evolved differently, but we find that certain semantic topics occur in several of them, albeit sometimes with temporal delay, or with diverging trajectories over time. We apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation…
Based on the Aristotelian concept of potentiality vs. actuality allowing for the study of energy and dynamics in language, we propose a field approach to lexical analysis. Falling back on the distributional hypothesis to statistically model…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
We consider the spreading and competition of languages that are spoken by a population of individuals. The individuals can change their mother tongue during their lifespan, pass on their language to their offspring and finally die. The…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
The historical and geographical spread from older to more modern languages has long been studied by examining textual changes and in terms of changes in phonetic transcriptions. However, it is more difficult to analyze language change from…
Indian languages are inflectional and agglutinative and typically follow clause-free word order. The structure of sentences across most major Indian languages are similar when their dependency parse trees are considered. While some…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
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…
In a physical system, changing parameters such as temperature can induce a phase transition: an abrupt change from one state of matter to another. Analogous phenomena have recently been observed in large language models. Typically, the task…
Word embeddings represent language vocabularies as clouds of $d$-dimensional points. We investigate how information is conveyed by the general shape of these clouds, instead of representing the semantic meaning of each token. Specifically,…
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…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
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…
Directly sending audio signals from a transmitter to a receiver across a noisy channel may absorb consistent bandwidth and be prone to errors when trying to recover the transmitted bits. On the contrary, the recent semantic communication…
The study of spoken languages comprises phonology, morphology, and grammar. The languages can be classified as root languages, inflectional languages, and stem languages. In addition, languages continually change over time and space by…
Diffusion models do not recover semantic structure uniformly over time. Instead, samples transition from semantic ambiguity to class commitment within a narrow regime. Recent theoretical work attributes this transition to dynamical…