Related papers: Linguistically Grounded Models of Language Change
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…
Many of the thousands of attested languages share common configurations of features, creating a spectrum from typologically very rare (e.g., object-verb-subject word order) or impossible languages to very common combinations of features…
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…
The preservation of endangered languages is a widely discussed issue nowadays. Languages represent essential cultural heritage and can provide valuable botanical, biological, and geographical information. Therefore, it is necessary to…
Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational…
In this paper, our focus is the connection and influence of language technologies on the research in neurolinguistics. We present a review of brain imaging-based neurolinguistic studies with a focus on the natural language representations,…
Recent successes in language modeling, notably with deep learning methods, coincide with a shift from probabilistic to weighted representations. We raise here the question of the importance of this evolution, in the light of the practical…
Understanding the neural basis of language comprehension in the brain has been a long-standing goal of various scientific research programs. Recent advances in language modelling and in neuroimaging methodology promise potential…
Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female…
This paper investigates the inherent knowledge in language models from the perspective of epistemological holism. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether LLMs exhibit characteristics consistent with epistemological holism. These…
In this paper, the second of two companion pieces, we explore novel philosophical questions raised by recent progress in large language models (LLMs) that go beyond the classical debates covered in the first part. We focus particularly on…
Much of the success of modern language models depends on finding a suitable prompt to instruct the model. Until now, it has been largely unknown how variations in the linguistic expression of prompts affect these models. This study…
Since language models are used to model a wide variety of languages, it is natural to ask whether the neural architectures used for the task have inductive biases towards modeling particular types of languages. Investigation of these biases…
This paper attempts to connects the evolution of computer languages with the evolution of life, where the later has been dictated by \emph{theory of evolution of species}, and tries to give supportive evidence that the new languages are…
This article discusses open scientific challenges for understanding development and evolution of speech forms, as a commentary to Moulin-Frier et al. (Moulin-Frier et al., 2015). Based on the analysis of mathematical models of the origins…
Progress in pre-trained language models has led to a surge of impressive results on downstream tasks for natural language understanding. Recent work on probing pre-trained language models uncovered a wide range of linguistic properties…
Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…
Value trade-offs are an integral part of human decision-making and language use, however, current tools for interpreting such dynamic and multi-faceted notions of values in language models are limited. In cognitive science, so-called…