Related papers: Syntactic Variation Across the Grammar: Modelling …
We introduce a class of stochastic models for the dynamics of two linguistic variants that are competing to become the single, shared convention within an unstructured community of speakers. Different instances of the model are…
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented as a graph, where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between them. In this setting, the distance between two linked words is defined as the difference…
This paper uses computational experiments to explore the role of exposure in the emergence of construction grammars. While usage-based grammars are hypothesized to depend on a learner's exposure to actual language use, the mechanisms of…
While large language models (LLMs) are generally considered proficient in generating language, how similar their language usage is to that of humans remains understudied. In this paper, we test whether models exhibit linguistic convergence,…
Lexical-syntactic flexibility, in the form of conversion (or zero-derivation) is a hallmark of English morphology. In conversion, a word with one part of speech is placed in a non-prototypical context, where it is coerced to behave as if it…
The network characteristics based on the phonological similarities in the lexicons of several languages were examined. These languages differed widely in their history and linguistic structure, but commonalities in the network…
The patterns in which the syntax of different languages converges and diverges are often used to inform work on cross-lingual transfer. Nevertheless, little empirical work has been done on quantifying the prevalence of different syntactic…
Dialects introduce syntactic and lexical variations in language that occur in regional or social groups. Most NLP methods are not sensitive to such variations. This may lead to unfair behavior of the methods, conveying negative bias towards…
The Random Language Model (De Giuli 2019) is an ensemble of stochastic context-free grammars, quantifying the syntax of human and computer languages. The model suggests a simple picture of first language learning as a type of annealing in…
It has been argued that humans rapidly adapt their lexical and syntactic expectations to match the statistics of the current linguistic context. We provide further support to this claim by showing that the addition of a simple adaptation…
This study contributes to a growing line of research in comparing LLM-generated texts with human-authored text, in this case, English news text. We focus in particular on the evaluation of syntactic properties through formal grammar…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
The distribution of human linguistic groups presents a number of interesting and non-trivial patterns. The distributions of the number of speakers per language and the area each group covers follow log-normal distributions, while population…
This paper includes a reflection on the role of networks in the study of English language acquisition, as well as a collection of practical criteria to annotate free-speech corpora from children utterances. At the theoretical level, the…
Previous work on English determiners has primarily concentrated on their semantics or scoping properties rather than their complex ordering behavior. The little work that has been done on determiner ordering generally splits determiners…
There is an increasing interest in the NLP community in capturing variations in the usage of language, either through time (i.e., semantic drift), across regions (as dialects or variants) or in different social contexts (i.e., professional…
In this article we present a multivariate model for determining the different syntactic, semantic, and form (surface-structure) processes underlying the comprehension of simple phrases. This model is applied to EEG signals recorded during a…
The phenomenon of human language is widely studied from various points of view. It is interesting not only for social scientists, antropologists or philosophers, but also for those, interesting in the network dynamics. In several recent…
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,…