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The Fundamental Theorem of Language Change (Yang, 2000) implies the impossibility of stable variation in the Variational Learning framework, but only in the special case where two, and not more, grammatical variants compete. Introducing the…
Unsupervised speech representation learning has shown remarkable success at finding representations that correlate with phonetic structures and improve downstream speech recognition performance. However, most research has been focused on…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
Despite the recent popularity of word embedding methods, there is only a small body of work exploring the limitations of these representations. In this paper, we consider one aspect of embedding spaces, namely their stability. We show that…
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…
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…
Meaning is context-dependent, but many properties of language (should) remain the same even if we transform the context. For example, sentiment, entailment, or speaker properties should be the same in a translation and original of a text.…
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 wordlists play a crucial role in comparative linguistics. While many studies have been carried out to test the power of computational methods for language subgrouping or divergence time estimation, few studies have put the data…
We present a new computational technique to detect and analyze statistically significant geographic variation in language. Our meta-analysis approach captures statistical properties of word usage across geographical regions and uses…
Being able to automatically and quickly understand the user context during a session is a main issue for recommender systems. As a first step toward achieving that goal, we propose a model that observes in real time the diversity brought by…
Pretraining data curation is a cornerstone in Large Language Model (LLM) development, leading to growing research on quality filtering of large web corpora. From statistical quality flags to LLM-based labelling systems, datasets are divided…
The availability of large linguistic data sets enables data-driven approaches to study linguistic change. The Google Books corpus unigram frequency data set is used to investigate the word rank dynamics in eight languages. We observed the…
This paper evaluates global-scale dialect identification for 14 national varieties of English as a means for studying syntactic variation. The paper makes three main contributions: (i) introducing data-driven language mapping as a method…
We evaluate the robustness of several large language models on multiple datasets. Robustness here refers to the relative insensitivity of the model's answers to meaning-preserving variants of their input. Benchmark datasets are constructed…
This study presents a fascinating linguistic property related to the number of letters in words and their corresponding numerical values. By selecting any arbitrary word, counting its constituent letters, and subsequently spelling out the…
An individual's variation in writing style is often a function of both social and personal attributes. While structured social variation has been extensively studied, e.g., gender based variation, far less is known about how to characterize…
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…
Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state…
Frequency is one of the major factors for training quality word embeddings. Several work has recently discussed the stability of word embeddings in general domain and suggested factors influencing the stability. In this work, we conduct a…