Related papers: Investigating Lexical Change through Cross-Linguis…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
This work develops a computational model (by Automata Networks) of phonological similarity effects involved in the formation of word-meaning associations on artificial populations of speakers. Classical studies show that in recalling…
Computer model has been extensively adopted to overcome the time limitation of language evolution by transforming language theory into physical modeling mechanism, which helps to explore the general laws of the evolution. In this paper, a…
The semantics used for particular terms in an academic field organically evolve over time. Tracking this evolution through inspection of published literature has either been from the perspective of Linguistic scholars or has concentrated…
A common method of making a theory more understandable, is by comparing it to another theory which has been better developed. Radical interpretation is a theory which attempts to explain how communication has meaning. Radical interpretation…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
We propose a stochastic model to study phonetic changes as an evolutionary process driven by social interactions between two groups of individuals with different phonological systems. Particularly, we focus on the changes in the place of…
The words of a language are randomly replaced in time by new ones, but it has long been known that words corresponding to some items (meanings) are less frequently replaced than others. Usually, the rate of replacement for a given item is…
We introduce a novel analysis that leverages linguistic minimal pairs to probe the internal linguistic representations of Large Language Models (LLMs). By measuring the similarity between LLM activation differences across minimal pairs, we…
Models of bags of words typically assume topic mixing so that the words in a single bag come from a limited number of topics. We show here that many sets of bag of words exhibit a very different pattern of variation than the patterns that…
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) with high multilingual coverage is becoming increasingly important -- especially when monolingual resources are scarce. Recent studies have found that LLMs process multilingual inputs in shared concept…
This paper presents the first unsupervised approach to lexical semantic change that makes use of contextualised word representations. We propose a novel method that exploits the BERT neural language model to obtain representations of word…
We introduce CLEAR-3K, a dataset of 3,000 assertion-reasoning questions designed to evaluate whether language models can determine if one statement causally explains another. Each question present an assertion-reason pair and challenge…
Language contact is a pervasive phenomenon reflected in the borrowing of words from donor to recipient languages. Most computational approaches to borrowing detection treat all languages under study as equally important, even though…
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature,…
Morphological analysis involves predicting the syntactic traits of a word (e.g. {POS: Noun, Case: Acc, Gender: Fem}). Previous work in morphological tagging improves performance for low-resource languages (LRLs) through cross-lingual…
This paper introduces how human languages can be studied in light of recent development of network theories. There are two directions of exploration. One is to study networks existing in the language system. Various lexical networks can be…
Cross-lingual transfer in language models is difficult to study in natural corpora because lexical overlap, morphology, data imbalance, and tokenization are entangled. We introduce an in-vitro framework with two procedurally generated…
There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a…
Categories such as animal or furniture are acquired at an early age and play an important role in processing, organizing, and communicating world knowledge. Categories exist across cultures: they allow to efficiently represent the…