Related papers: Evolution of the lexicon: a probabilistic point of…
Given a finite set of words w1,...,wn independently drawn according to a fixed unknown distribution law P called a stochastic language, an usual goal in Grammatical Inference is to infer an estimate of P in some class of probabilistic…
We study fixation probabilities and times as a consequence of neutral genetic drift in subdivided populations, motivated by a model of the cultural evolutionary process of language change that is described by the same mathematics as the…
Differentiating intrinsic language words from transliterable words is a key step aiding text processing tasks involving different natural languages. We consider the problem of unsupervised separation of transliterable words from native…
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…
The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that…
We present a method of finding and analyzing shifts in grammatical relations found in diachronic corpora. Inspired by the econometric technique of measuring return and volatility instead of relative frequencies, we propose them as a way to…
The goal of this paper is to provide a complete representation of regional linguistic variation on a global scale. To this end, the paper focuses on removing three constraints that have previously limited work within…
Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…
In order to demonstrate why it is important to correctly account for the (serial dependent) structure of temporal data, we document an apparently spectacular relationship between population size and lexical diversity: for five out of seven…
Natural language processing has made significant inroads into learning the semantics of words through distributional approaches, however representations learnt via these methods fail to capture certain kinds of information implicit in the…
We propose a model of the speech perception of individual words in the presence of mishearings. This phenomenological approach is based on concepts used in linguistics, and provides a formalism that is universal across languages. We put…
In foundational works of generative phonology it is claimed that subjects can reliably discriminate between possible but non-occurring words and words that could not be English. In this paper we examine the use of a probabilistic…
Transformer-based language models have recently achieved remarkable results in many natural language tasks. However, performance on leaderboards is generally achieved by leveraging massive amounts of training data, and rarely by encoding…
This paper explores the space of (propositional) probabilistic logical languages, ranging from a purely `qualitative' comparative language to a highly `quantitative' language involving arbitrary polynomials over probability terms. While…
Linguistic typology studies the range of structures present in human language. The main goal of the field is to discover which sets of possible phenomena are universal, and which are merely frequent. For example, all languages have vowels,…
Detecting temporal semantic changes of words is an important task for various NLP applications that must make time-sensitive predictions. Lexical Semantic Change Detection (SCD) task involves predicting whether a given target word, $w$,…
A key challenge when trying to understand innovation is that it is a dynamic, ongoing process, which can be highly contingent on ephemeral factors such as culture, economics, or luck. This means that any analysis of the real-world process…
Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express an unbounded set of emerging ideas. One result of this tension is the formation of new compositions, such that existing linguistic units can be combined with emerging items into novel…
Language modeling has shifted in recent years from a distribution over strings to prediction models with textual inputs and outputs for general-purpose tasks. This position paper highlights the often overlooked implications of this shift…
Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…