Related papers: Evolution of grammatical forms: some quantitative …
Understanding how latent representations evolve during generation is a central open problem in large language model interpretability. We introduce \textbf{Dynamical Manifold Evolution Theory} (DMET), a phenomenological framework that models…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
Decoder-only language models have the ability to dynamically switch between various computational tasks based on input prompts. Despite many successful applications of prompting, there is very limited understanding of the internal mechanism…
Autonomous morphology, such as inflection class systems and paradigmatic distribution patterns, is widespread and diachronically resilient in natural language. Why this should be so has remained unclear given that autonomous morphology…
A wide range of constraints can be compactly specified using automata or formal languages. In a sequence of recent papers, we have shown that an effective means to reason with such specifications is to decompose them into primitive…
In this thesis, we investigate three problems involving the probabilistic modeling of language: smoothing n-gram models, statistical grammar induction, and bilingual sentence alignment. These three problems employ models at three different…
Recent advances in neural network-based generative modeling have reignited the hopes in having computer systems capable of seamlessly conversing with humans and able to understand natural language. Neural architectures have been employed to…
In order to analyze the dynamics of two languages in competition, one approach is to fit historical data on their numbers of speakers with a mathematical model in which the parameters are interpreted as the similarity between those…
What features characterise complex system dynamics? Power laws and scale invariance of fluctuations are often taken as the hallmarks of complexity, drawing on analogies with equilibrium critical phenomena[1-3]. Here we argue that slow,…
We study diffusion-type equations supported on structures that are randomly varying in time. After settling the issue of well-posedness, we focus on the asymptotic behavior of solutions: our main result gives sufficient conditions for…
Increasing evidence demonstrates that in many places language coexistence has become ubiquitous and essential for supporting language and cultural diversity and associated with its financial and economic benefits. The competitive evolution…
The noun lexica of many natural languages are divided into several declension classes with characteristic morphological properties. Class membership is far from deterministic, but the phonological form of a noun and/or its meaning can often…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity…
To analyze the evolutionary emergence of structural complexity in physical processes we introduce a general, but tractable, model of objects that interact to produce new objects. Since the objects--\emph{$epsilon$-machines}--have well…
A hydrodynamic formulation of the evolution of large-scale structure in the Universe is presented. It relies on the spatially coarse-grained description of the dynamical evolution of a many-body gravitating system. Because of the assumed…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
Grammar refers to the system of rules that governs the structural organization and the semantic relations among linguistic units such as sentences, phrases, and words within a given language. In natural language processing, there remains a…
While language progresses through a sequence of semantic states, the underlying dynamics of this progression remain elusive. Here, we treat the semantic progression of written text as a stochastic trajectory in a high-dimensional state…