Related papers: Modeling Language Evolution Using a Spin Glass App…
It is generally believed that, when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequency of use in the language rises with time with an S-shaped growth curve. Yet, this claim has only been supported by a limited number of case…
Human syntactic structures are usually represented as graphs. Much research has focused on the mapping between such graphs and linguistic sequences, but less attention has been paid to the shapes of the graphs themselves: their topologies.…
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…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…
Large language models can exhibit unexpected behavior in the blink of an eye. In a recent computer use demo, a language model switched from coding to Googling pictures of Yellowstone, and these sudden shifts in behavior have also been…
Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties…
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,…
Recent years have witnessed a surge of publications aimed at tracing temporal changes in lexical semantics using distributional methods, particularly prediction-based word embedding models. However, this vein of research lacks the cohesion,…
Linguistic norms emerge in human communities because people imitate each other. A shared linguistic system provides people with the benefits of shared knowledge and coordinated planning. Once norms are in place, why would they ever change?…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
Spin glasses occupy a unique place in condensed matter: they freeze collectively while remaining struc-turally disordered, and they exhibit slow, history-dependent dynamics that reflect an exceptionally rug-ged free-energy landscape. This…
This study demonstrates how hybrid neural-symbolic methods can yield significant new insights into the evolution of a morphologically rich, low-resource language. We challenge the naive assumption that linguistic change is simplification by…
The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic…
Understanding what and how causal dynamical mechanisms generate collective phenomena is a central challenge in complexity science. Recent studies have focused on identifying the mechanisms underlying the synergistic interdependencies that…
One way to resolve the actuation problem of metaphorical language change is to provide a statistical profile of metaphorical constructions and generative rules with antecedent conditions. Based on arguments from the view of language as…
Language changes over time, including in the hate speech domain, which evolves quickly following social dynamics and cultural shifts. While NLP research has investigated the impact of language evolution on model training and has proposed…
Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…
Word meaning change can be inferred from drifts of time-varying word embeddings. However, temporal data may be too sparse to build robust word embeddings and to discriminate significant drifts from noise. In this paper, we compare three…