Related papers: Investigating Lexical Change through Cross-Linguis…
Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross-linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim…
Language similarities can be caused by genetic relatedness, areal contact, universality, or chance. Colexification, i.e. a type of similarity where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings, is underexplored. In our work, we…
Lexical resources are crucial for cross-linguistic analysis and can provide new insights into computational models for natural language learning. Here, we present an advanced database for comparative studies of words with multiple meanings,…
The past years have seen a drastic rise in studies devoted to the investigation of colexification patterns in individual languages families in particular and the languages of the world in specific. Specifically computational studies have…
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…
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…
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…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
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…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
While the embedding of words has revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing, the embedding of concepts has received much less attention so far. A dense and meaningful representation of concepts, however, could prove useful for…
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…
Colexification refers to linguistic phenomena where multiple concepts (meanings) are expressed by the same lexical form, such as polysemy or homophony. Colexifications have been found to be pervasive across languages and cultures. The…
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…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
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…
How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major…
Colexification refers to the linguistic phenomenon where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings. By studying cross-lingual colexifications, researchers have gained valuable insights into fields such as psycholinguistics…
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…
Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task. Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional -- i.e., express meaning by…