Related papers: Historical Dynamics of Lexical System as Random Wa…

In terminology work, natural language processing, and digital humanities, several studies address the analysis of variations in context and meaning of terms in order to detect semantic change and the evolution of terms. We distinguish three…

Aging refers to the property of two-time correlation functions to decay very slowly on (at least) two time scales. This phenomenon has gained recent attention due to experimental observations of the history dependent relaxation behavior in…

Dictionaries are inherently circular in nature. A given word is linked to a set of alternative words (the definition) which in turn point to further descendants. Iterating through definitions in this way, one typically finds that…

Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution \emph{rank diversity}. We calculate this diversity…

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…

We study the time taken by a language learner to correctly identify the meaning of all words in a lexicon under conditions where many plausible meanings can be inferred whenever a word is uttered. We show that the most basic form of…

Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…

Many natural and artificial networks evolve in time. Nodes and connections appear and disappear at various timescales, and their dynamics has profound consequences for any processes in which they are involved. The first empirical analysis…

Dynamical systems theory provides a framework for analyzing iterative processes and evolution over time. Within such systems, repetitive transformations can lead to stable configurations, known as attractors, including fixed points and…

Word evolution refers to the changing meanings and associations of words throughout time, as a byproduct of human language evolution. By studying word evolution, we can infer social trends and language constructs over different periods of…

We consider random walks on dynamical networks where edges appear and disappear during finite time intervals. The process is grounded on three independent stochastic processes determining the walker's waiting-time, the up-time and down-time…

The development of plot or story in novels is reflected in the content and the words used. The flow of sentiments, which is one aspect of writing style, can be quantified by analyzing the flow of words. This study explores literary works as…

The evolution of natural languages poses a riddle to any theoretical perspective based on efficiency considerations. If languages are already optimally effective means of organization and communication of thought, why do they change? And if…

Many formalisms combining ontology languages with uncertainty, usually in the form of probabilities, have been studied over the years. Most of these formalisms, however, assume that the probabilistic structure of the knowledge remains…

The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…

Semantic memory is the subsystem of human memory that stores knowledge of concepts or meanings, as opposed to life specific experiences. The organization of concepts within semantic memory can be understood as a semantic network, where the…

Many languages' inflectional morphological systems are replete with irregulars, i.e., words that do not seem to follow standard inflectional rules. In this work, we quantitatively investigate the conditions under which irregulars can…

This article presents a general description of dynamical systems using the language of enriched functors and enriched natural transformations. This framework is essential to establish the equivalence of three descriptions of dynamics -- 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…

We study the introduction of lexical innovations into a community of language users. Lexical innovations, i.e., new terms added to people's vocabulary, play an important role in the process of language evolution. Nowadays, information is…