Related papers: Bilingualism beyond a transitional state and its s…
With language models becoming increasingly ubiquitous, it has become essential to address their inequitable treatment of diverse demographic groups and factors. Most research on evaluating and mitigating fairness harms has been concentrated…
The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…
Language and cultural diversity is a fundamental aspect of the present world. We study three modern multilingual societies -- the Basque Country, Ireland and Wales -- which are endowed with two, linguistically distant, official languages:…
This position paper discusses the problem of multilingual evaluation. Using simple statistics, such as average language performance, might inject linguistic biases in favor of dominant language families into evaluation methodology. We argue…
Realignment is a promising strategy to improve cross-lingual transfer in multilingual language models. However, empirical results are mixed and often unreliable, particularly for typologically distant or low-resource languages (LRLs)…
I study the interplay between language competition and ideology struggle in a country where there is a native high-status language and a low-status language spoken by immigrants. Language transition is governed by a three-state model…
Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…
Although the multilingual capability of LLMs offers new opportunities to overcome the language barrier, do these capabilities translate into real-life scenarios where linguistic divide and knowledge conflicts between multilingual sources…
Mainstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has ignored the majority of the world's languages. In moving from excluding the majority of the world's languages to blindly adopting what we make for English, we first risk importing…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…
Proficient multilingual speakers often intentionally switch languages in the middle of a conversation. Similarly, recent reasoning-focused bilingual large language models (LLMs) with strong capabilities in both languages exhibit language…
In this work, we present a simple and elegant approach to language modeling for bilingual code-switched text. Since code-switching is a blend of two or more different languages, a standard bilingual language model can be improved upon by…
Linguistic diversity is a human attribute which, with the advance of generative AIs, is coming under threat. This paper, based on the contributions of sociolinguistics, examines the consequences of the variety selection bias imposed by…
Code-switching, the alternation of languages within a conversation or utterance, is a common communicative phenomenon that occurs in multilingual communities across the world. This survey reviews computational approaches for code-switched…
Social media enables the rapid spread of many kinds of information, from memes to social movements. However, little is known about how information crosses linguistic boundaries. We apply causal inference techniques on the European Twitter…
Contact between languages has the potential to transmit vocabulary and other language features; however, this does not always happen. Here, an iterated learning model is used to examine, in a simple way, the resistance of languages to…
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 use Monte Carlo simulations and assumptions from evolutionary game theory in order to study the evolution of words and the population dynamics of a system comprising two interacting species which initially speak two different languages.…
Bilingual word embeddings, which representlexicons of different languages in a shared em-bedding space, are essential for supporting se-mantic and knowledge transfers in a variety ofcross-lingual NLP tasks. Existing approachesto training…