Related papers: Identity-Based Language Shift Modeling
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…
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…
Referential games offer a grounded learning environment for neural agents which accounts for the fact that language is functionally used to communicate. However, they do not take into account a second constraint considered to be fundamental…
Preserving a speaker's voice identity while generating speech in a different language remains a fundamental challenge in spoken language technology, particularly in specialized domains such as scientific communication. In this paper, we…
The identity of a speaker influences language comprehension through modulating perception and expectation. This review explores speaker effects and proposes an integrative model of language and speaker processing that integrates distinct…
Distributed linguistic representations are powerful tools for modelling the uncertainty and complexity of preference information in linguistic decision making. To provide a comprehensive perspective on the development of distributed…
Of the over 7,000 languages spoken in the world, commercial language identification (LID) systems only reliably identify a few hundred in written form. Research-grade systems extend this coverage under certain circumstances, but for most…
Cross-lingual synthesis can be defined as the task of letting a speaker generate fluent synthetic speech in another language. This is a challenging task, and resulting speech can suffer from reduced naturalness, accented speech, and/or loss…
Multilingual spoken dialogue systems have gained prominence in the recent past necessitating the requirement for a front-end Language Identification (LID) system. Most of the existing LID systems rely on modeling the language discriminative…
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have become a cornerstone of modern natural language processing, with their capabilities extending across a wide range of applications and languages. However, the fine-tuning of multilingual LLMs,…
Historical linguistics aims at inferring the most likely language phylogenetic tree starting from information concerning the evolutionary relatedness of languages. The available information are typically lists of homologous (lexical,…
Idioms are common in everyday language, but often pose a challenge to translators because their meanings do not follow from the meanings of their parts. Despite significant advances, machine translation systems still struggle to translate…
Providing better language tools for low-resource and endangered languages is imperative for equitable growth. Recent progress with massively multilingual pretrained models has proven surprisingly effective at performing zero-shot transfer…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Lately, the problem of code-switching has gained a lot of attention and has emerged as an active area of research. In bilingual communities, the speakers commonly embed the words and phrases of a non-native language into the syntax of a…
Motivated by the dramatic disappearance of endangered languages observed in recent years, a great deal of attention has been given to the modeling of language competition in order to understand the factors that promote the disappearance of…
Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…
Most Transformer language models are primarily pretrained on English text, limiting their use for other languages. As the model sizes grow, the performance gap between English and other languages with fewer compute and data resources…
For the longest time, languages have been competing for their speakers to survive, although this problem has only recently gained rigorous attention from the scholarly community as a means to address the risk of losing speakers for the…
Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology…