Related papers: Metaphorical Language Change Is Self-Organized Cri…
Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…
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…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
This paper concerns the development of metatheory for extensible languages. It uses as its starting point a view that programming languages tailored to specific application domains are to be constructed by composing components from an open…
A new type of spatial-temporal correlation in the process approaching to the self-organized criticality is investigated for the two simple models for biological evolution. The change behaviors of the position with minimum barrier are shown…
Metonymy and metaphor often co-occur in natural language, yet computational work has studied them largely in isolation. We introduce a framework that transforms a literal sentence into three figurative variants: metonymic, metaphoric, and…
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…
This paper presents the first unsupervised approach to lexical semantic change that makes use of contextualised word representations. We propose a novel method that exploits the BERT neural language model to obtain representations of word…
The disorder and a simple convex measure of complexity are studied for rank ordered power law distributions, indicative of criticality, in the case where the total number of ranks is large. It is found that a power law distribution may…
There are several linguistic claims about situations where words are more likely to be used as metaphors. However, few studies have sought to verify such claims with large corpora. This study entails a large-scale, corpus-based analysis of…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
Research on metaphorical language has shown ties between abstractness and emotionality with regard to metaphoricity; prior work is however limited to the word and sentence levels, and up to date there is no empirical study establishing the…
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…
Metaphors are everywhere. They appear extensively across all domains of natural language, from the most sophisticated poetry to seemingly dry academic prose. A significant body of research in the cognitive science of language argues for the…
We show that the laws of autocorrelations decay in texts are closely related to applicability limits of language models. Using distributional semantics we empirically demonstrate that autocorrelations of words in texts decay according to a…
Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining…
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…
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…
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 basic laws of physics are simple, so why is the world complex? The theory of self-organized criticality posits that complex behavior in nature emerges from the dynamics of extended, dissipative systems that evolve through a sequence of…