Related papers: The "negative end" of change in grammar: terminolo…
Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change of human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or \textbf{semantic changes} of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
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…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) degrades from the temporal drift between data used for model training and newer text seen during inference. One understudied avenue of language change causing data drift is the emergence of…
Emergent language is unique among fields within the discipline of machine learning for its open-endedness, not obviously presenting well-defined problems to be solved. As a result, the current research in the field has largely been…
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,…
Language has been a dynamic system and word meanings always have been changed over times. Every time a novel concept or sense is introduced, we need to assign it a word to express it. Also, some changes have happened because the result of a…
Existing works have studied the impacts of the order of words within natural text. They usually analyze it by destroying the original order of words to create a scrambled sequence, and then comparing the models' performance between the…
In this paper, we address the problem of change in an abstract argumentation system. We focus on a particular change: the addition of a new argument which interacts with previous arguments. We study the impact of such an addition on the…
Innovation and obsolescence describe the dynamics of ever-churning social and biological systems, from the development of economic markets to scientific and technological progress to biological evolution. They have been widely discussed,…
Architectural degradation, also known as erosion, decay, or aging, impacts system quality, maintainability, and adaptability. Although widely acknowledged, current literature shows fragmented definitions, metrics, and remediation…
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…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
One of the most intriguing features of language is its constant change, with ongoing shifts in how meaning is expressed. Despite decades of research, the factors that determine how and why meanings evolve remain only partly understood.…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Multilingual Large Language Models considerably changed how technologies influence language. While previous technologies could mediate or assist humans, there is now a tendency to offload the task of writing itself to these technologies,…
There are a number of diverging hypotheses about the neural text degeneration problem, i.e., generating repetitive and dull loops, which makes this problem both interesting and confusing. In this work, we aim to advance our understanding by…
Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying…