Related papers: Analyzing language development from a network appr…
Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variability across words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-based…
Recently, the focus of complex networks research has shifted from the analysis of isolated properties of a system toward a more realistic modeling of multiple phenomena - multilayer networks. Motivated by the prosperity of multilayer…
Sequence-processing neural networks led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks. As a consequence, there has been increasing interest in understanding to what extent they process language as humans do. We aim here to uncover which biases…
Human communication is often executed in the form of a narrative, an account of connected events composed of characters, actions, and settings. A coherent narrative structure is therefore a requisite for a well-formulated narrative -- be it…
The evolution of human language allowed the efficient propagation of nongenetic information, thus creating a new form of evolutionary change. Language development in children offers the opportunity of exploring the emergence of such complex…
Much information available to applied researchers is contained within written language or spoken text. Deep language models such as BERT have achieved unprecedented success in many applications of computational linguistics. However, much…
Many real systems have been modelled in terms of network concepts, and written texts are a particular example of information networks. In recent years, the use of network methods to analyze language has allowed the discovery of several…
The cognitive constraints that humans exhibit in their social interactions have been extensively studied by anthropologists, who have highlighted their regularities across different types of social networks. We postulate that similar…
We define two words in a language to be connected if they express similar concepts. The network of connections among the many thousands of words that make up a language is important not only for the study of the structure and evolution of…
This manuscript provides a short and practical introduction to the topic of language networks. This text aims at assisting researchers with no practical experience in text and/or network analysis. We provide a practical tutorial on how to…
In this era of Big Data, due to expeditious exchange of information on the web, words are being used to denote newer meanings, causing linguistic shift. With the recent availability of large amounts of digitized texts, an automated analysis…
In recent years, graph theory has been widely employed to probe several language properties. More specifically, the so-called word adjacency model has been proven useful for tackling several practical problems, especially those relying on…
Recent advancements in unsupervised feature learning have developed powerful latent representations of words. However, it is still not clear what makes one representation better than another and how we can learn the ideal representation.…
Modeling relations between languages can offer understanding of language characteristics and uncover similarities and differences between languages. Automated methods applied to large textual corpora can be seen as opportunities for novel…
Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires…
During language acquisition, children follow a typical sequence of learning stages, whereby they first learn to categorize phonemes before they develop their lexicon and eventually master increasingly complex syntactic structures. However,…
Predicting the words that a child is going to learn next can be useful for boosting language acquisition, and such predictions have been shown to be possible with both neural network techniques (looking at changes in the vocabulary state…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
The emergence of syntax during childhood is a remarkable example of how complex correlations unfold in nonlinear ways through development. In particular, rapid transitions seem to occur as children reach the age of two, which seems to…
We examine the language capabilities of language models (LMs) from the critical perspective of human language acquisition. Building on classical language development theories, we propose a three-stage framework to assess the abilities of…