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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…
We investigate the dynamics of two agent based models of language competition. In the first model, each individual can be in one of two possible states, either using language $X$ or language $Y$, while the second model incorporates a third…
While most machine translation systems to date are trained on large parallel corpora, humans learn language in a different way: by being grounded in an environment and interacting with other humans. In this work, we propose a communication…
Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…
We consider the spreading and competition of languages that are spoken by a population of individuals. The individuals can change their mother tongue during their lifespan, pass on their language to their offspring and finally die. The…
Formal modelling provides a toolkit for understanding cultural dynamics, from individual decisions to recurring patterns of change. This chapter explains what models are and why they matter. Using a precise, shared language, they aid…
Can unicellular organisms survive a drastic temperature change, and adapt to it after many generations? In simulations of the Penna model of biological ageing, both extinction and adaptation were found for asexual and sexual reproduction as…
Children learn word meanings by tapping into the commonalities across different situations in which words are used and overcome the high level of uncertainty involved in early word learning experiences. We propose a modeling framework to…
An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…
English pretrained language models, which make up the backbone of many modern NLP systems, require huge amounts of unlabeled training data. These models are generally presented as being trained only on English text but have been found to…
This paper describes an agent-based model of a finite group of agents in a single population who each choose which convention to advocate, and which convention to practice. Influences or dependencies in agents choice exists in the form of…
We perform simulations based on the Penna model for biological ageing, now with the purpose of studying sympatric speciation, that is, the division of a single species into two or more populations, reproductively isolated, but without any…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
In this paper, we investigate what types of stereotypical information are captured by pretrained language models. We present the first dataset comprising stereotypical attributes of a range of social groups and propose a method to elicit…
Most Transformer language models are primarily pretrained on English text, limiting their use for other languages. As the model sizes grow, the performance gap between English and other languages with fewer compute and data resources…
During the last decade, much attention has been paid to language competition in the complex systems community, that is, how the fractions of speakers of several competing languages evolve in time. In this paper we review recent advances in…
Phase transitions have been proposed as the origin of emergent abilities in large language models (LLMs), where new capabilities appear abruptly once models surpass critical thresholds of scale. Prior work, such as that of Wei et al.,…
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…
We propose a model for the evolutionary ecology of words as one attempt to extend evolutionary game theory and agent-based models by utilizing the rich linguistic expressions of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our model enables the emergence…