Related papers: Historical Dynamics of Lexical System as Random Wa…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
The evolution of grammatical systems of syntactic and semantic composition is modeled here with a novel application of reinforcement learning theory. To test the functionalist thesis that speakers' expressive purposes shape their language,…
The study discusses modeling diachronic processes by logistic regression. The phenomenon of nonlinear changes in language was first observed by Raimund Piotrowski (hence labelled as Piotrowski's law), even if actual linguistic evidence…
We study a one-dimensional random walk with memory in which the step lengths to the left and to the right evolve at each step in order to reduce the wandering of the walker. The feedback is quite efficient and lead to a non-diffusive walk.…
Random walks find applications in many areas of science and are the heart of essential network analytic tools. When defined on temporal networks, even basic random walk models may exhibit a rich spectrum of behaviours, due to the…
It is generally believed that, when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequency of use in the language rises with time with an S-shaped growth curve. Yet, this claim has only been supported by a limited number of case…
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…
In this work, we present to the NLP community, and to the wider research community as a whole, an application for the diachronic analysis of research corpora. We open source an easy-to-use tool coined: DRIFT, which allows researchers to…
Simple random walks are a basic staple of the foundation of probability theory and form the building block of many useful and complex stochastic processes. In this paper we study a natural generalization of the random walk to a process in…
Branching processes are models used to describe populations that reproduce and die over time. In the classical setting, an individual's reproductive capacity remains constant throughout its lifetime. However, in real-world situations,…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
We prove existence of asymptotic entropy of random walks on regular languages over a finite alphabet and we give formulas for it. Furthermore, we show that the entropy varies real-analytically in terms of probability measures of constant…
We consider two graph models of semantic change. The first is a time-series model that relates embedding vectors from one time period to embedding vectors of previous time periods. In the second, we construct one graph for each word: nodes…
Though languages can evolve slowly, they can also react strongly to dramatic world events. By studying the connection between words and events, it is possible to identify which events change our vocabulary and in what way. In this work, we…
Synonyms and homonyms appear in all natural languages. We analyse their evolution within the framework of the signaling game. Agents in our model use reinforcement learning, where probabilities of selection of a communicated word or of its…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
Word usage, meaning and connotation change throughout time. Diachronic word embeddings are used to grasp these changes in an unsupervised way. In this paper, we use variants of the Dynamic Bernoulli Embeddings model to learn dynamic word…
Random walks of particles on a lattice are a classical paradigm for the microscopic mechanism underlying diffusive processes. In deterministic walks, the role of space and time can be reversed, and the microscopic dynamics can produce quite…
Studies of the overall structure of vocabulary and its dynamics became possible due to creation of diachronic text corpora, especially Google Books Ngram. This article discusses the question of core change rate and the degree to which the…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…