Related papers: Investigating Lexical Change through Cross-Linguis…

Languages continually evolve in response to societal events, resulting in new terms and shifts in meanings. These changes have significant implications for computer applications, including automatic translation and chatbots, making it…

Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…

Word similarity has many applications to social science and cultural analytics tasks like measuring meaning change over time and making sense of contested terms. Yet traditional similarity methods based on cosine similarity between word…

We generalize the word analogy task across languages, to provide a new intrinsic evaluation method for cross-lingual semantic spaces. We experiment with six languages within different language families, including English, German, Spanish,…

Language models are often used as the backbone of modern dialogue systems. These models are pre-trained on large amounts of written fluent language. Repetition is typically penalised when evaluating language model generations. However, it…

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,…

Language models obtain extensive capabilities through pre-training. However, the pre-training process remains a black box. In this work, we track linear interpretable feature evolution across pre-training snapshots using a sparse dictionary…

Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in their…

The noun lexica of many natural languages are divided into several declension classes with characteristic morphological properties. Class membership is far from deterministic, but the phonological form of a noun and/or its meaning can often…

We suggest an information-theoretic approach for measuring stylistic coordination in dialogues. The proposed measure has a simple predictive interpretation and can account for various confounding factors through proper conditioning. We…

Memorization in language models is typically treated as a homogenous phenomenon, neglecting the specifics of the memorized data. We instead model memorization as the effect of a set of complex factors that describe each sample and relate it…

According to the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), people are better at discriminating between speakers of their native language. Although this cognitive effect was largely studied in the literature, experiments have only been conducted on…

Code-mixing or code-switching are the effortless phenomena of natural switching between two or more languages in a single conversation. Use of a foreign word in a language; however, does not necessarily mean that the speaker is…

Many words have evolved in meaning as a result of cultural and social change. Understanding such changes is crucial for modelling language and cultural evolution. Low-dimensional embedding methods have shown promise in detecting words'…

Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…

Various measures of dispersion have been proposed to paint a fuller picture of a word's distribution in a corpus, but only little has been done to validate them externally. We evaluate a wide range of dispersion measures as predictors of…

Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…

Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…

Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the…

Since many real-world concepts are associated with colour, for example danger with red, linguistic information is often complimented with the use of appropriate colours in information visualization and product marketing. Yet, there is no…