Related papers: Word length predicts word order: "Min-max"-ing dri…
Transfer learning approaches for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) train a NMT model on the assisting-target language pair (parent model) which is later fine-tuned for the source-target language pair of interest (child model), with the…
In recent years, written language, particularly in science and education, has undergone remarkable shifts in word usage. These changes are widely attributed to the growing influence of Large Language Models (LLMs), which frequently rely on…
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…
We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…
An emotional version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that differences in language emotionalities influence differences among cultures no less than conceptual differences. Conceptual contents of languages and cultures to significant…
Search systems are often focused on providing relevant results for the "now", assuming both corpora and user needs that focus on the present. However, many corpora today reflect significant longitudinal collections ranging from 20 years of…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Word evolution refers to the changing meanings and associations of words throughout time, as a byproduct of human language evolution. By studying word evolution, we can infer social trends and language constructs over different periods of…
Zipf's law of abbreviation, the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, is one of the most solid candidates for a linguistic universal, in the sense that it has the potential for being exceptionless or with a number of exceptions…
By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…
Artificial learners often behave differently from human learners in the context of neural agent-based simulations of language emergence and change. A common explanation is the lack of appropriate cognitive biases in these learners. However,…
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…
Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…
Language models (LMs) are increasingly being studied as models of human language learners. Due to the nascency of the field, it is not well-established whether LMs exhibit similar learning dynamics to humans, and there are few direct…
Tasks that model the relation between pairs of tokens in a string are a vital part of understanding natural language. Such tasks, in general, require exhaustive pair-wise comparisons of tokens, thus having a quadratic runtime complexity in…
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…
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…
Recent studies have shown that language models pretrained and/or fine-tuned on randomly permuted sentences exhibit competitive performance on GLUE, putting into question the importance of word order information. Somewhat…
As neural language models approach human performance on NLP benchmark tasks, their advances are widely seen as evidence of an increasingly complex understanding of syntax. This view rests upon a hypothesis that has not yet been empirically…
An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…