Related papers: Evolution of grammatical forms: some quantitative …

We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…

Stochastic dynamical systems arise naturally across nearly all areas of science and engineering. Typically, a dynamical system model is based on some prior knowledge about the underlying dynamics of interest in which probabilistic features…

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…

Language is typically modelled with discrete sequences. However, the most successful approaches to language modelling, namely neural networks, are continuous and smooth function approximators. In this work, we show that Transformer-based…

Semantics, morphology and syntax are strongly interdependent. However, the majority of computational methods for semantic change detection use distributional word representations which encode mostly semantics. We investigate an alternative…

Morphological segmentation has traditionally been modeled with non-hierarchical models, which yield flat segmentations as output. In many cases, however, proper morphological analysis requires hierarchical structure -- especially in the…

We consider two graph models of semantic change. The first is a time-series model that relates embedding vectors from one time period to embedding vectors of previous time periods. In the second, we construct one graph for each word: nodes…

In contrast to conventional artificial neural networks, which are structurally static, we present two approaches for evolving small networks into larger ones during training. The first method employs an auxiliary weight that directly…

Formal modelling provides a toolkit for understanding cultural dynamics, from individual decisions to recurring patterns of change. This chapter explains what models are and why they matter. Using a precise, shared language, they aid…

It is generally believed that, when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequency of use in the language rises with time with an S-shaped growth curve. Yet, this claim has only been supported by a limited number of case…

Regardless of a system's complexity or scale, its growth can be considered to be a spontaneous thermodynamic response to a local convergence of down-gradient material flows. Here it is shown how growth can be constrained to a few distinct…

This work proposes an extension to Structured Grammatical Evolution (SGE) called Co-evolutionary Probabilistic Structured Grammatical Evolution (Co-PSGE). In Co-PSGE each individual in the population is composed by a grammar and a genotype,…

The physics of randomness and regularities for languages (mother tongues) and their lifetimes and family trees and for the second languages are studied in terms of two opposite processes; random multiplicative noise [1], and fragmentation…

Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…

What makes some types of languages more probable than others? For instance, we know that almost all spoken languages contain the vowel phoneme /i/; why should that be? The field of linguistic typology seeks to answer these questions and,…

Language models can produce fluent, grammatical text. Nonetheless, some maintain that language models don't really learn language and also that, even if they did, that would not be informative for the study of human learning and processing.…

We propose a mathematical formalisation of the ``wave model'' originally developed in historical linguistics but with further applications in human sciences. This model assumes new traits appear in a population and spread to nearby…

Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…

Language emergence and evolution has recently gained growing attention through multi-agent models and mathematical frameworks to study their behavior. Here we investigate further the Naming Game, a model able to account for the emergence of…

Using a series of computer simulations we have demonstrated a scenario of the early evolution of the bird-type primitive language. We do not assume wise agents who can use a grammar and manage an evolution without a grammar. Duplication and…