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Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the `descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages,…
Languages encode distinct abstractions and inductive priors, yet most large language models (LLMs) overlook this diversity by reasoning in a single dominant language. In this work, we introduce x1, a family of reasoning models that can…
We present the first comprehensive study of Memorization in Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs), analyzing 95 languages using models across diverse model scales, architectures, and memorization definitions. As MLLMs are increasingly…
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…
Deception detection is a task with many applications both in direct physical and in computer-mediated communication. Our focus is on automatic deception detection in text across cultures. We view culture through the prism of the…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
Diffusion models offer appealing properties for language generation, such as parallel decoding and iterative refinement, but the discrete and highly structured nature of text challenges the direct application of diffusion principles. In…
What makes some types of languages more probable than others? For instance, we know that almost all spoken languages contain the vowel phoneme /i/; why should that be? The field of linguistic typology seeks to answer these questions and,…
Despite their outstanding performance, large language models (LLMs) suffer notorious flaws related to their preference for simple, surface-level textual relations over full semantic complexity of the problem. This proposal investigates a…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as alternatives to traditional search engines given their capacity to generate text that resembles human language. However, this shift is concerning, as LLMs often generate hallucinations,…
We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency distributions closely follow the order statistics of a…
In order to demonstrate why it is important to correctly account for the (serial dependent) structure of temporal data, we document an apparently spectacular relationship between population size and lexical diversity: for five out of seven…
Discourse understanding is essential for many NLP tasks, yet most existing work remains constrained by framework-dependent discourse representations. This work investigates whether large language models (LLMs) capture discourse knowledge…
One proposed mechanism of language change concerns the role played by second-language (L2) learners in situations of language contact. If sufficiently many L2 speakers are present in a speech community in relation to the number of…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…
The driving factors behind the development of large language models (LLMs) with impressive learning capabilities are their colossal model sizes and extensive training datasets. Along with the progress in natural language processing, LLMs…
Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…
A unified theory of language combines a Bayesian cognitive linguistic model of language processing, with the proposal that language evolved by sexual selection for the display of intelligence. The theory accounts for the major facts of…