Related papers: Simulation of language competition by physicists
We examine the effects of instantiating Lewis signaling games within a population of speaker and listener agents with the aim of producing a set of general and robust representations of unstructured pixel data. Preliminary experiments…
We present a theoretical and empirical investigation of the statistical behaviour of the words in a text produced by human language. To this aim, we analyse the word distribution of various texts of Italian language selected from a specific…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have drawn a lot of attention due to their strong performance on a wide range of natural language tasks, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. LLMs' ability of general-purpose language understanding and…
Language modeling studies the probability distributions over strings of texts. It is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). It has been widely used in text generation, speech recognition, machine…
We argue that newly-developed large language models (LLMs), because of how they are trained and designed, are implicit computational models of humans -- a Homo silicus. LLMs can be used like economists use Homo economicus: they can be given…
Zipf's law on word frequency is observed in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and so on, yet it does not hold for Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters. A model for writing process is proposed to explain the above difference, which takes…
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and…
Modern Artificial Intelligence applications show great potential for language-related tasks that rely on next-word prediction. The current generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) have been linked to claims about human-like linguistic…
Since language is tied to cognition, we expect the linguistic structures to reflect patterns we encounter in nature and analyzed by physics. Within this realm we investigate the process of protolanguage acquisition, using analytical and…
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…
Language models are increasingly being deployed as user simulators, but their memory is far more reliable than that of real users. To measure this gap, we run a series of classic memory experiments from psychology on both humans and…
Computational simulations are a popular method for testing hypotheses about the emergence of communication. This kind of research is performed in a variety of traditions including language evolution, developmental psychology, cognitive…
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…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
Large Language Models (LLMs) do not differentially represent numbers, which are pervasive in text. In contrast, neuroscience research has identified distinct neural representations for numbers and words. In this work, we investigate how…
Language provides simple ways of communicating generalizable knowledge to each other (e.g., "Birds fly", "John hikes", "Fire makes smoke"). Though found in every language and emerging early in development, the language of generalization is…
The absence of standardized spelling conventions and the organic evolution of human language present an inherent linguistic challenge within historical documents, a longstanding concern for scholars in the humanities. Addressing this issue,…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention due to their high performance on a wide range of natural language tasks since the release of ChatGPT. The LLMs learn to understand and generate language by training billions of…
People have long hoped for a conversational system that can assist in real-life situations, and recent progress on large language models (LLMs) is bringing this idea closer to reality. While LLMs are often impressive in performance, their…