Related papers: Evolution of grammatical forms: some quantitative …
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
Aggregation of particles whose interaction potential depends on their mutual orientation is considered. The aggregation dynamics is derived using a version of Darcy's law and a variational principle depending on the geometric nature of the…
Traditional network generation models attempt to replicate global structural properties (degree distribution, average distance, clustering coefficient, communities, etc.) through synthetic link formation mechanisms such as triadic closure…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
This article discusses open scientific challenges for understanding development and evolution of speech forms, as a commentary to Moulin-Frier et al. (Moulin-Frier et al., 2015). Based on the analysis of mathematical models of the origins…
This paper introduces new methods based on exponential families for modeling the correlations between words in text and speech. While previous work assumed the effects of word co-occurrence statistics to be constant over a window of several…
Language models obtain extensive capabilities through pre-training. However, the pre-training process remains a black box. In this work, we track linear interpretable feature evolution across pre-training snapshots using a sparse dictionary…
This survey provides an overview of the evolution of visually grounded models of spoken language over the last 20 years. Such models are inspired by the observation that when children pick up a language, they rely on a wide range of…
Categories provide a coarse grained description of the world. A fundamental question is whether categories simply mirror an underlying structure of nature, or instead come from the complex interactions of human beings among themselves and…
One of the most intriguing features of language is its constant change, with ongoing shifts in how meaning is expressed. Despite decades of research, the factors that determine how and why meanings evolve remain only partly understood.…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
The grammars of natural languages may be learned by using genetic algorithms that reproduce and mutate grammatical rules and part-of-speech tags, improving the quality of later generations of grammatical components. Syntactic rules are…
Synonyms and homonyms appear in all natural languages. We analyse their evolution within the framework of the signaling game. Agents in our model use reinforcement learning, where probabilities of selection of a communicated word or of its…
Machine Learning produces efficient decision and prediction models based on input-output data only. Such models have the form of decision trees or neural nets and are far from transparent analytical models, based on mathematical formulas.…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
An evolutionary tree is a cascade of bifurcations starting from a single common root, generating a growing set of daughter species as time goes by. Species here is a general denomination for biological species, spoken languages or any other…
By the age of two, children tend to assume that new word categories are based on objects' shape, rather than their color or texture; this assumption is called the shape bias. They are thought to learn this bias by observing that their…
Word evolution refers to the changing meanings and associations of words throughout time, as a byproduct of human language evolution. By studying word evolution, we can infer social trends and language constructs over different periods of…
We perform statistical analysis of the phenomenon of neology, the process by which new words emerge in a language, using large diachronic corpora of English. We investigate the importance of two factors, semantic sparsity and frequency…
Language model representations often contain linear directions that correspond to high-level concepts. Here, we study the dynamics of these representations: how representations evolve along these dimensions within the context of (simulated)…