Related papers: Utterance Selection Model of Language Change
In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…
The Fokker--Planck equation is a key ingredient of many models in physics, and related subjects, and arises in a diverse array of settings. Analytical solutions are limited to special cases, and resorting to numerical simulation is often…
In this work, we consider the solvability of the Fokker-Planck equation with both time-dependent drift and diffusion coefficients by means of the similarity method. By the introduction of the similarity variable, the Fokker-Planck equation…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic…
The world is evolving and so is the vocabulary used to discuss topics in speech. Analysing political speech data from more than 30 years requires the use of flexible topic models to uncover the latent topics and their change in prevalence…
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and…
We propose a model to characterize how a diffusing population adapts under a time periodic selection, while its environment undergoes shifts and size changes, leading to significant differences with classical results on fixed domains. After…
Models of population growth and extinction are an increasingly popular subject of study. However, consequences of stochasticity and noise in shaping distributions and outcomes are not sufficiently explored. Here we consider a distributed…
Contact between languages has the potential to transmit vocabulary and other language features; however, this does not always happen. Here, an iterated learning model is used to examine, in a simple way, the resistance of languages to…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
Motivated by the dramatic disappearance of endangered languages observed in recent years, a great deal of attention has been given to the modeling of language competition in order to understand the factors that promote the disappearance of…
Recent speech synthesis systems based on sampling from autoregressive neural networks models can generate speech almost undistinguishable from human recordings. However, these models require large amounts of data. This paper shows that the…
We consider the linear Wigner-Fokker-Planck equation subject to confining potentials which are smooth perturbations of the harmonic oscillator potential. For a certain class of perturbations we prove that the equation admits a unique…
The Fundamental Theorem of Language Change (Yang, 2000) implies the impossibility of stable variation in the Variational Learning framework, but only in the special case where two, and not more, grammatical variants compete. Introducing the…
We consider the spreading and competition of languages that are spoken by a population of individuals. The individuals can change their mother tongue during their lifespan, pass on their language to their offspring and finally die. The…
We consider the overdamped dynamics of a paradigmatic long-range system of particles residing on the sites of a one-dimensional lattice, in the presence of thermal noise. The internal degree of freedom of each particle is a periodic…
We discuss several models of the dynamics of interacting populations. The models are constructed by nonlinear differential equations and have two sets of parameters: growth rates and coefficients of interaction between populations. We…
We present a model for pragmatically describing scenes, in which contrastive behavior results from a combination of inference-driven pragmatics and learned semantics. Like previous learned approaches to language generation, our model uses a…
We use the formulation of equilibrium statistical mechanics in order to study some important characteristics of language. Using a simple expression for the Hamiltonian of a language system, which is directly implied by the Zipf law, we are…