Related papers: Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical co…

Linguistic norms emerge in human communities because people imitate each other. A shared linguistic system provides people with the benefits of shared knowledge and coordinated planning. Once norms are in place, why would they ever change?…

The noun lexica of many natural languages are divided into several declension classes with characteristic morphological properties. Class membership is far from deterministic, but the phonological form of a noun and/or its meaning can often…

Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…

Sexual reproduction is not always synonymous with the existence of two morphologically different sexes; isogamous species produce sex cells of equal size, typically falling into multiple distinct self-incompatible classes, termed mating…

The real-world information sources are inherently multilingual, which naturally raises a question about whether language models can synthesize information across languages. In this paper, we introduce a simple two-hop question answering…

Researchers are using deep learning models to explore the emergence of language in various language games, where agents interact and develop an emergent language to solve tasks. We focus on the factors that determine the expressivity of…

The ever-growing size of the foundation language model has brought significant performance gains in various types of downstream tasks. With the existence of side-effects brought about by the large size of the foundation language model such…

I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying…

Language change involves the competition between alternative linguistic forms (1). The spontaneous evolution of these forms typically results in monotonic growths or decays (2, 3) like in winner-take-all attractor behaviors. In the case of…

In multilingual societies, it is common to encounter different language varieties. Various approaches have been proposed to discuss different mechanisms of language shift. However, current models exploring language shift in languages in…

In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…

Methods for learning word representations using large text corpora have received much attention lately due to their impressive performance in numerous natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as, semantic similarity measurement, and…

Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…

We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of carefully…

When generating natural language from neural probabilistic models, high probability does not always coincide with high quality: It has often been observed that mode-seeking decoding methods, i.e., those that produce high-probability text…

Multilingual reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), with performance disproportionately favoring high-resource languages. Drawing inspiration from cognitive neuroscience, which suggests that human…

Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…

Morphologically rich languages accentuate two properties of distributional vector space models: 1) the difficulty of inducing accurate representations for low-frequency word forms; and 2) insensitivity to distinct lexical relations that…

An infinte word w avoids a pattern p with the involution t if there is no substitution for the variables in p and no involution t such that the resulting word is a factor of w. We investigate the avoidance of patterns with respect to the…

We examine the effect of noise on societies of agents using an agent-based model of evolutionary norm emergence. Generally, we see that noisy societies are more selfish, smaller and discontent, and are caught in rounds of perpetual…