Related papers: Investigating Lexical Change through Cross-Linguis…
Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression…
As an integral part of our culture and way of life, language is intricately related to migrations of people. To understand whether and how migration shapes language formation processes we examine the dynamics of the naming game with…
Individuals signal aspects of their identity and beliefs through linguistic choices. Studying these choices in aggregate allows us to examine large-scale attitude shifts within a population. Here, we develop computational methods to study…
The evolution of language has been a hotly debated subject with contradicting hypotheses and unreliable claims. Drawing from signalling games, dynamic population mechanics, machine learning and algebraic topology, we present a method for…
Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variability across words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-based…
We propose a model of the evolution of a matrix along a phylogenetic tree, in which transformations affect either entire rows or columns of the matrix. This represents the change of both lexical and phonological aspects of linguistic data,…
We perform statistical analysis of the phenomenon of neology, the process by which new words emerge in a language, using large diachronic corpora of English. We investigate the importance of two factors, semantic sparsity and frequency…
The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation…
Language enables humans to share knowledge, reason about the world, and pass on strategies for survival and innovation across generations. At the heart of this process is not just the ability to communicate but also the remarkable…
Questions related to the evolution of language have recently known an impressive increase of interest (Briscoe, 2002). This short paper aims at questioning the scientific status of these models and their relations to attested data. We show…
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…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
Languages encode distinct abstractions and inductive priors, yet most large language models (LLMs) overlook this diversity by reasoning in a single dominant language. In this work, we introduce x1, a family of reasoning models that can…
Morphological and syntactic changes in word usage (as captured, e.g., by grammatical profiles) have been shown to be good predictors of a word's meaning change. In this work, we explore whether large pre-trained contextualised language…
Computer vision often treats human perception as homogeneous: an implicit assumption that visual stimuli are perceived similarly by everyone. This assumption is reflected in the way researchers collect datasets and train vision models. By…
The extent to which individual language characteristics influence tokenization and language modeling is an open question. Differences in morphological systems have been suggested as both unimportant and crucial to consider (Cotterell et…
In this work we extend previous analyses of linguistic networks by adopting a multi-layer network framework for modelling the human mental lexicon, i.e. an abstract mental repository where words and concepts are stored together with their…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…
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…