Related papers: Evolution of grammatical forms: some quantitative …
Language has been a dynamic system and word meanings always have been changed over times. Every time a novel concept or sense is introduced, we need to assign it a word to express it. Also, some changes have happened because the result of a…
The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic…
Cellular automata have been useful artificial models for exploring how relatively simple rules combined with spatial memory can give rise to complex emergent patterns. Moreover, studying the dynamics of how rules emerge under artificial…
Human language emerged abruptly. Diverse body forms evolved suddenly. Seed-bearing plants spread rapidly. How do complex evolutionary innovations arise so quickly? Resolving alternative claims remains difficult. The great events of the past…
A standard form of analysis for linguistic typology is the universal implication. These implications state facts about the range of extant languages, such as ``if objects come after verbs, then adjectives come after nouns.'' Such…
Linguistic norms emerge in human communities because people imitate each other. A shared linguistic system provides people with the benefits of shared knowledge and coordinated planning. Once norms are in place, why would they ever change?…
A growing body of work studies how to answer a question or verify a claim by generating a natural language "proof": a chain of deductive inferences yielding the answer based on a set of premises. However, these methods can only make sound…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
The senses of words evolve. The sense of the same word may change from today to tomorrow, and multiple senses of the same word may be the result of the evolution of each other, that is, they may be parents and children. If we view Juba as…
Much of the success of modern language models depends on finding a suitable prompt to instruct the model. Until now, it has been largely unknown how variations in the linguistic expression of prompts affect these models. This study…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
We introduce Language World Models, a class of language-conditional generative model which interpret natural language messages by predicting latent codes of future observations. This provides a visual grounding of the message, similar to an…
A number of studies carried out on different languages have found that tongue movements in speech are made along two primary degrees of freedom (d.f.s): the high-front to low-back axis and the high-back to low-front axis. We explore the…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Influencing various aspects of human activity, migration is associated also with language formation. To examine the mutual interaction of these processes, we study a Naming Game with migrating agents. The dynamics of the model leads to…
We study the evolution of graphs densifying by adding edges: Two vertices are chosen randomly, and an edge is (i) established if each vertex belongs to a tree; (ii) established with probability $p$ if only one vertex belongs to a tree;…
Many formalisms combining ontology languages with uncertainty, usually in the form of probabilities, have been studied over the years. Most of these formalisms, however, assume that the probabilistic structure of the knowledge remains…
Categorization is a core component of human linguistic competence. We investigate how a transformer-based language model (LM) learns linguistic categories by comparing its behaviour over the course of training to behaviours which…
The mechanisms of comprehension during language processing remains an open question. Classically, building the meaning of a linguistic utterance is said to be incremental, step-by-step, based on a compositional process. However, many…
In this paper we provide a first analysis of the research questions that arise when dealing with the problem of communicating pieces of formal argumentation through natural language interfaces. It is a generally held opinion that formal…