Related papers: Syntactic Evolution in Language Usage
We train a diachronic long short-term memory (LSTM) part-of-speech tagger on a large corpus of American English from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. We analyze the tagger's ability to implicitly learn temporal structure between years,…
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…
The semantics of emoji has, to date, been considered from a static perspective. We offer the first longitudinal study of how emoji semantics changes over time, applying techniques from computational linguistics to six years of Twitter data.…
The emergence of syntax during childhood is a remarkable example of how complex correlations unfold in nonlinear ways through development. In particular, rapid transitions seem to occur as children reach the age of two, which seems to…
Individuals signal aspects of their identity and beliefs through linguistic choices. Studying these choices in aggregate allows us to examine large-scale attitude shifts within a population. Here, we develop computational methods to study…
Active languages such as Bangla (or Bengali) evolve over time due to a variety of social, cultural, economic, and political issues. In this paper, we analyze the change in the written form of the modern phase of Bangla quantitatively in…
We analyze the dynamic properties of 10^7 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800--2008 in order to gain insight into the coevolution of language and culture. We report language independent patterns useful as…
There are two main methodologies for constructing the knowledge base of a natural language analyser: the linguistic and the data-driven. Recent state-of-the-art part-of-speech taggers are based on the data-driven approach. Because of the…
The field of Text-to-Speech has experienced huge improvements last years benefiting from deep learning techniques. Producing realistic speech becomes possible now. As a consequence, the research on the control of the expressiveness,…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user…
In the last half-decade, the field of natural language processing (NLP) has undergone two major transitions: the switch to neural networks as the primary modeling paradigm and the homogenization of the training regime (pre-train, then…
Our languages are in constant flux driven by external factors such as cultural, societal and technological changes, as well as by only partially understood internal motivations. Words acquire new meanings and lose old senses, new words are…
Due to its popularity and availability, social media data may present a new way to identify individuals who are experiencing mental illness. By analysing blog content, this study aimed to investigate the associations between linguistic…
Understanding which information is encoded in deep models of spoken and written language has been the focus of much research in recent years, as it is crucial for debugging and improving these architectures. Most previous work has focused…
Discourse varies with age, education, psychiatric state and historical epoch, but the ontogenetic and cultural dynamics of discourse structure remain to be quantitatively characterized. To this end we investigated word graphs obtained from…
We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
This chapter critically examines the potential contributions of modern language models to theoretical linguistics. Despite their focus on engineering goals, these models' ability to acquire sophisticated linguistic knowledge from mere…
Over the past century, personality theory and research has successfully identified core sets of characteristics that consistently describe and explain fundamental differences in the way people think, feel and behave. Such characteristics…