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The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements…
Cross-situational word learning, wherein a learner combines information about possible meanings of a word across multiple exposures, has previously been shown to be a very powerful strategy to acquire a large lexicon in a short time.…
Traditionally, the formation of vocabularies has been studied by agent-based models (specially, the Naming Game) in which random pairs of agents negotiate word-meaning associations at each discrete time step. This paper proposes a first…
How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers.…
Language is not only a tool for communication but also a medium for human cognition and reasoning. If, as linguistic relativity suggests, the structure of language shapes cognitive patterns, then large language models (LLMs) trained on…
Methods for learning word representations using large text corpora have received much attention lately due to their impressive performance in numerous natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as, semantic similarity measurement, and…
The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…
Recent developments in sensing technologies have enabled us to examine the nature of human social behavior in greater detail. By applying an information theoretic method to the spatiotemporal data of cell-phone locations, [C. Song et al.…
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…
Pretrained language models have been shown to significantly predict brain recordings of people comprehending language. Recent work suggests that the prediction of the next word is a key mechanism that contributes to this alignment. What is…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
Linguistic coordination is a well-established phenomenon in spoken conversations and often associated with positive social behaviors and outcomes. While there have been many attempts to measure lexical coordination or entrainment in…
Cross-lingual representations of words enable us to reason about word meaning in multilingual contexts and are a key facilitator of cross-lingual transfer when developing natural language processing models for low-resource languages. In…
New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community's lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a…
A dialogue is successful when there is alignment between the speakers at different linguistic levels. In this work, we consider the dialogue occurring between interlocutors engaged in a collaborative learning task, where they are not only…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
Word2vec is one of the most used algorithms to generate word embeddings because of a good mix of efficiency, quality of the generated representations and cognitive grounding. However, word meaning is not static and depends on the context in…
Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…
In this paper, we try to explore the evolution of language through case calculations. First, we chose the novels of eleven British writers from 1400 to 2005 and found the corresponding works; Then, we use the natural language processing…
Topic evolution modeling has been researched for a long time and has gained considerable interest. A state-of-the-art method has been recently using word modeling algorithms in combination with community detection mechanisms to achieve…