Related papers: Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical co…
We study the time taken by a language learner to correctly identify the meaning of all words in a lexicon under conditions where many plausible meanings can be inferred whenever a word is uttered. We show that the most basic form of…
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. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…
In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
Existing algorithms for aligning cross-lingual word vector spaces assume that vector spaces are approximately isomorphic. As a result, they perform poorly or fail completely on non-isomorphic spaces. Such non-isomorphism has been…
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 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…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
This position paper looks into the formation of language and shows ties between structural properties of the words in the English language and their polysemy. Using Ollivier-Ricci curvature over a large graph of synonyms to estimate…
Cross-lingual alignment in pretrained language models enables knowledge transfer across languages. Similar alignment has been reported in Whisper-style speech encoders, based on spoken translation retrieval using representational…
Finding and facilitating commonalities between the linguistic behaviors of large language models and humans could lead to major breakthroughs in our understanding of the acquisition, processing, and evolution of language. However, most…
Context-Free Grammars (CFGs) and Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) have several similarities and a few differences in both their syntax and semantics, but they are usually presented through formalisms that hinder a proper comparison. In…
The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…
Contemporary deep learning models effectively handle languages with diverse morphology despite not being directly integrated into them. Morphology and word order are closely linked, with the latter incorporated into transformer-based models…
Biases in molecular evolution can significantly influence evolutionary trajectories. They have been described in a variety of contexts such as development and mutation, but not for acquiring new functions (i.e. emergence). Here, we…
Much like sentences are composed of words, words themselves are composed of smaller units. For example, the English word questionably can be analyzed as question+able+ly. However, this structural decomposition of the word does not directly…
Large language models trained under diverse objectives and architectures have been shown to develop increasingly similar internal representations, an observation formalized as the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Whether this…
This work develops a computational model (by Automata Networks) of phonological similarity effects involved in the formation of word-meaning associations on artificial populations of speakers. Classical studies show that in recalling…
With widening deployments of natural language processing (NLP) in daily life, inherited social biases from NLP models have become more severe and problematic. Previous studies have shown that word embeddings trained on human-generated…
Natural language allows us to refer to novel composite concepts by combining expressions denoting their parts according to systematic rules, a property known as \emph{compositionality}. In this paper, we study whether the language emerging…