Related papers: Interlinguistic similarity and language death dyna…
A formulation of bit-string models of language evolution, based on differential equations for the population speaking each language, is introduced and preliminarily studied. Connections with replicator dynamics and diffusion processes are…
Classical language dynamics explains language shift as a process in which speakers adopt a higher status language in lieu of a lower status language. This is well documented with English having out-competed languages such as Scottish…
Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the `descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages,…
We investigate different approaches to translate between similar languages under low resource conditions, as part of our contribution to the WMT 2020 Similar Languages Translation Shared Task. We submitted Transformer-based bilingual and…
The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…
The evolution of language has been a hotly debated subject with contradicting hypotheses and unreliable claims. Drawing from signalling games, dynamic population mechanics, machine learning and algebraic topology, we present a method for…
Cultural diversity encoded within languages of the world is at risk, as many languages have become endangered in the last decades in a context of growing globalization. To preserve this diversity, it is first necessary to understand what…
Language and cultural diversity is a fundamental aspect of the present world. We study three modern multilingual societies -- the Basque Country, Ireland and Wales -- which are endowed with two, linguistically distant, official languages:…
In recent years, the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) has been boosted by the recent advances in deep learning technologies. Nonetheless, these new data-intensive methods introduce language-dependent disparities in NLG as the main…
A language dynamics model on a square lattice, which is an extension of the one popularized by Abrams and Strogatz [1], is analyzed using ODE bifurcation theory. For this model we are interested in the existence and spectral stability of…
Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…
People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity…
Language similarities can be caused by genetic relatedness, areal contact, universality, or chance. Colexification, i.e. a type of similarity where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings, is underexplored. In our work, we…
We generalize the word analogy task across languages, to provide a new intrinsic evaluation method for cross-lingual semantic spaces. We experiment with six languages within different language families, including English, German, Spanish,…
Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…
Probabilistic topic models like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) have been previously extended to the bilingual setting. A fundamental modeling assumption in several of these extensions is that the input corpora are in the form of document…
One proposed mechanism of language change concerns the role played by second-language (L2) learners in situations of language contact. If sufficiently many L2 speakers are present in a speech community in relation to the number of…
Closely related languages show linguistic similarities that allow speakers of one language to understand speakers of another language without having actively learned it. Mutual intelligibility varies in degree and is typically tested in…
I propose a novel Ising-like model of language evolution. In a simple way, Ising-like models represent the countervailing tendencies towards convergence and change present in language evolution. In the ordinary Ising-model, a node on a…
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…