Related papers: Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical co…
Word embeddings are usually derived from corpora containing text from many individuals, thus leading to general purpose representations rather than individually personalized representations. While personalized embeddings can be useful to…
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…
Syntax connects words to each other in very specific ways. Two words are syntactically connected if they depend directly on each other. Syntactic connections usually happen within a sentence. Gathering all those connection across several…
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…
Evolutionary synthesis models have been used to study the physical properties of unresolved populations in a wide range of scenarios. Unfortunately, their self-consistency are difficult to test and there are some theoretical open questions…
Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synthetic word-order variants of natural languages. We observe…
Most words have several senses and connotations which evolve in time due to semantic shift, so that closely related words may gain different or even opposite meanings over the years. This evolution is very relevant to the study of language…
Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to…
Natural languages display a trade-off among different strategies to convey syntactic structure, such as word order or inflection. This trade-off, however, has not appeared in recent simulations of iterated language learning with neural…
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. Length constraints restrict valid substitutions of…
We study a minimal model for genome evolution whose elementary processes are single site mutation, duplication and deletion of sequence regions and insertion of random segments. These processes are found to generate long-range correlations…
Different evolutionary models are known to make disparate predictions for the success of an invading mutant in some situations. For example, some evolutionary mechanics lead to amplification of selection in structured populations, while…
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…
Using a series of computer simulations we have demonstrated a scenario of the early evolution of the bird-type primitive language. We do not assume wise agents who can use a grammar and manage an evolution without a grammar. Duplication and…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of natural language and constantly being added to a language. Owing to their non-compositionality and their ability to take on a figurative or literal meaning depending on the sentential context,…
All natural languages exhibit a distinction between content words (like nouns and adjectives) and function words (like determiners, auxiliaries, prepositions). Yet surprisingly little has been said about the emergence of this universal…
Statistical regularities in human language have fascinated researchers for decades, suggesting deep underlying principles governing its evolution and information structuring for efficient communication. While Zipf's Law describes the…
We report experiments about the syntactic variations of support verb constructions, a special type of multiword expressions (MWEs) containing predicative nouns. In these expressions, the noun can occur with or without the verb, with no…
We introduce a method to measure uncertainty in large language models. For tasks like question answering, it is essential to know when we can trust the natural language outputs of foundation models. We show that measuring uncertainty in…
In a combinatorial communication system, some signals consist of the combinations of other signals. Such systems are more efficient than equivalent, non-combinatorial systems, yet despite this they are rare in nature. Why? Previous…