Related papers: Statistical field theory for dialectology
Infinitely many distinct trait values may arise in populations bearing quantitative traits, and modeling their population dynamics is thus a formidable task. While classical models assume fixed or infinite population size, models in which…
The historical and geographical spread from older to more modern languages has long been studied by examining textual changes and in terms of changes in phonetic transcriptions. However, it is more difficult to analyze language change from…
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…
Deep learning algorithms have made incredible strides in the past decade, yet due to their complexity, the science of deep learning remains in its early stages. Being an experimentally driven field, it is natural to seek a theory of deep…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
In this article we propose a novel method to estimate the frequency distribution of linguistic variables while controlling for statistical non-independence due to shared ancestry. Unlike previous approaches, our technique uses all available…
Phonetics is the scientific field concerned with the study of how speech is produced, heard and perceived. It abounds with data, such as acoustic speech recordings, neuroimaging data, or articulatory data. In this paper, we provide an…
Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state…
Stochastic process models for spatiotemporal data underlying random fields find substantial utility in a range of scientific disciplines. Subsequent to predictive inference on the values of the random field (or spatial surface indexed…
Topological statistical theory provides the foundation for a modern mathematical reformulation of classical statistical theory: Structural Statistics emphasizes the structural assumptions that accompany distribution families and the set of…
This paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification…
Syntactic structures used to play a vital role in natural language processing (NLP), but since the deep learning revolution, NLP has been gradually dominated by neural models that do not consider syntactic structures in their design. One…
The evolution of language has been a hotly debated subject with contradicting hypotheses and unreliable claims. Drawing from signalling games, dynamic population mechanics, machine learning and algebraic topology, we present a method for…
A formulation of bit-string models of language evolution, based on differential equations for the population speaking each language, is introduced and preliminarily studied. Connections with replicator dynamics and diffusion processes are…
Dialect variation is of considerable interest in linguistics and other social sciences. However, traditionally it has been studied using proxies (transcriptions) rather than acoustic recordings directly. We introduce novel statistical…
Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish…
We explore which linguistic factors -- at the sentence and token level -- play an important role in influencing language model predictions, and investigate whether these are reflective of results found in humans and human corpora (Gries and…
Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…
We address the problem of predicting spatio-temporal processes with temporal patterns that vary across spatial regions, when data is obtained as a stream. That is, when the training dataset is augmented sequentially. Specifically, we…
The recent availability of larger typological databases such as Haspelmath et al. (2005) has brought the linguistics community closer to having a solid, empirical foundation for making actual claims about prehistoric migrations, deep…