Related papers: Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical co…
Language enables humans to share knowledge, reason about the world, and pass on strategies for survival and innovation across generations. At the heart of this process is not just the ability to communicate but also the remarkable…
Many languages' inflectional morphological systems are replete with irregulars, i.e., words that do not seem to follow standard inflectional rules. In this work, we quantitatively investigate the conditions under which irregulars can…
Emergent communication protocols among humans and artificial neural network agents do not yet share the same properties and show some critical mismatches in results. We describe three important phenomena with respect to the emergence and…
Explanations are central to everyday life, and are a topic of growing interest in the AI community. To investigate the process of providing natural language explanations, we leverage the dynamics of the /r/ChangeMyView subreddit to build a…
The survival of endangered languages in complex language competition depends on socio-cultural status and honour endowed (by itself and by the other) among them. The restriction in the endorsement of this honour leads to language extinction…
A quantitative method is suggested, where meanings of words, and grammatic rules about these, of a vocabulary are represented by real numbers. People meet randomly, and average their vocabularies if they are equal; otherwise they either…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Sequence-processing neural networks led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks. As a consequence, there has been increasing interest in understanding to what extent they process language as humans do. We aim here to uncover which biases…
This paper attempts to connects the evolution of computer languages with the evolution of life, where the later has been dictated by \emph{theory of evolution of species}, and tries to give supportive evidence that the new languages are…
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…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…
Questions related to the evolution of language have recently known an impressive increase of interest (Briscoe, 2002). This short paper aims at questioning the scientific status of these models and their relations to attested data. We show…
We consider the spreading and competition of languages that are spoken by a population of individuals. The individuals can change their mother tongue during their lifespan, pass on their language to their offspring and finally die. The…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can sometimes degrade into repetitive loops, persistently generating identical word sequences. Because repetition is rare in natural human language, its frequent occurrence across diverse tasks and contexts in…
Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. Regular constraints restrict valid substitutions of…
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…
The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is…