Related papers: Evolution of the lexicon: a probabilistic point of…
Phylogenetic trees can be reconstructed from the matrix which contains the distances between all pairs of languages in a family. Recently, we proposed a new method which uses normalized Levenshtein distances among words with same meaning…
Recent years have witnessed a surge of publications aimed at tracing temporal changes in lexical semantics using distributional methods, particularly prediction-based word embedding models. However, this vein of research lacks the cohesion,…
The senses of words evolve. The sense of the same word may change from today to tomorrow, and multiple senses of the same word may be the result of the evolution of each other, that is, they may be parents and children. If we view Juba as…
Language models are essentially probability distributions over token sequences. Auto-regressive models generate sentences by iteratively computing and sampling from the distribution of the next token. This iterative sampling introduces…
Newberry et al. (Detecting evolutionary forces in language change, Nature 551, 2017) tackle an important but difficult problem in linguistics, the testing of selective theories of language change against a null model of drift. Having…
Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…
Lexical Semantic Change (LSC) is the phenomenon in which the meaning of a word change over time. Most studies on LSC focus on improving the performance of estimating the degree of LSC, however, it is often difficult to interpret how the…
One proposed mechanism of language change concerns the role played by second-language (L2) learners in situations of language contact. If sufficiently many L2 speakers are present in a speech community in relation to the number of…
The use of language is subject to variation over time as well as across social groups and knowledge domains, leading to differences even in the monolingual scenario. Such variation in word usage is often called lexical semantic change…
We present a probabilistic language model for time-stamped text data which tracks the semantic evolution of individual words over time. The model represents words and contexts by latent trajectories in an embedding space. At each moment in…
Is it possible to develop a `physics of language' which can explain the spatial, temporal and social patterns we see, and which can predict future change like we forecast the weather? Such a theory is likely to involve ideas from…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
We propose a new computational approach for tracking and detecting statistically significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words. Such linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where the rapid exchange of…
Recently, researchers started to pay attention to the detection of temporal shifts in the meaning of words. However, most (if not all) of these approaches restricted their efforts to uncovering change over time, thus neglecting other…
Meanings of words change over time and across domains. Detecting the semantic changes of words is an important task for various NLP applications that must make time-sensitive predictions. We consider the problem of predicting whether a…
In a physical system, changing parameters such as temperature can induce a phase transition: an abrupt change from one state of matter to another. Analogous phenomena have recently been observed in large language models. Typically, the task…
Discovering and quantifying the drivers of language change is a major challenge. Hypotheses about causal factors proliferate, but are difficult to rigorously test. Here we ask a simple question: can 20th Century changes in English English…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
We study density of rational languages under shift invariant probability measures on spaces of two-sided infinite words, which generalizes the classical notion of density studied in formal languages and automata theory. The density for a…
The time variation of the rank $k$ of words for six Indo-European languages is obtained using data from Google Books. For low ranks the distinct languages behave differently, maybe due to syntaxis rules, whereas for $k>50$ the law of large…