Related papers: Modelling linguistic taxonomic dynamics
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
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…
The bit-string model of Schulze and Stauffer (2005) is applied to non-equilibrium situations and then gives better agreement with the empirical distribution of language sizes. Here the size is the number of people having this language as…
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,…
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…
We introduce a population dynamics model, where individual genomes are represented by bit-strings. Selection is described by death probabilities which depend on these genomes, and new individuals continuously replace the ones that die,…
A stochastic model for the evolution of a growing population is proposed, in order to explain empirical power-law distributions in the frequency of family names as a function of the family size. Preliminary results show that the predicted…
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…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
The time evolution of Earth with her cities, languages and countries is considered in terms of the multiplicative noise and the fragmentation- processes, where the related families, size distributions, lifetimes, bilinguals, etc. are…
Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…
This paper introduces how human languages can be studied in light of recent development of network theories. There are two directions of exploration. One is to study networks existing in the language system. Various lexical networks can be…
The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer…
Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to…
Is it possible to develop a `physics of language' which can explain the spatial, temporal and social patterns we see, and which can predict future change like we forecast the weather? Such a theory is likely to involve ideas from…
We study the limit of many small mutations of a model of population dynamics. The population is structured by phonological traits and is spatially inhomogeneous. The various sub-populations compete for the same nutrient which diffuses…
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
Modern language models define distributions over strings, but downstream tasks often require different output formats. For instance, a model that generates byte-pair strings does not directly produce word-level predictions, and a DNA model…
A simple spatial computer simulation model was recently introduced to study the evolution of the linguistic diversity. The model considers processes of selective geographic colonization, linguistic anomalous diffusion and mutation. In the…