Related papers: Investigating Lexical Change through Cross-Linguis…
The way the words are used evolves through time, mirroring cultural or technological evolution of society. Semantic change detection is the task of detecting and analysing word evolution in textual data, even in short periods of time. In…
We consider two graph models of semantic change. The first is a time-series model that relates embedding vectors from one time period to embedding vectors of previous time periods. In the second, we construct one graph for each word: nodes…
In multilingual societies, it is common to encounter different language varieties. Various approaches have been proposed to discuss different mechanisms of language shift. However, current models exploring language shift in languages in…
The language we use over the course of conversation changes as we establish common ground and learn what our partner finds meaningful. Here we draw upon recent advances in natural language processing to provide a finer-grained…
We study the introduction of lexical innovations into a community of language users. Lexical innovations, i.e., new terms added to people's vocabulary, play an important role in the process of language evolution. Nowadays, information is…
This thesis investigates the generation of new concepts from combinations of existing concepts as a language evolves. We give a method for combining concepts, and will be investigating the utility of composite concepts in language evolution…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
n this paper, we attempt to explain the emergence of the linguistic diversity that exists across the consonant inventories of some of the major language families of the world through a complex network based growth model. There is only a…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
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…
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…
Lexical semantic change has primarily been investigated with observational and experimental methods; however, observational methods (corpus analysis, distributional semantic modeling) cannot get at causal mechanisms, and experimental…
We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two…
We propose a model for the evolutionary ecology of words as one attempt to extend evolutionary game theory and agent-based models by utilizing the rich linguistic expressions of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our model enables the emergence…
Word embeddings are powerful representations that form the foundation of many natural language processing architectures, both in English and in other languages. To gain further insight into word embeddings, we explore their stability (e.g.,…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
Large language models trained under diverse objectives and architectures have been shown to develop increasingly similar internal representations, an observation formalized as the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Whether this…
Morphologically rich languages accentuate two properties of distributional vector space models: 1) the difficulty of inducing accurate representations for low-frequency word forms; and 2) insensitivity to distinct lexical relations that…