Related papers: Modelling linguistic taxonomic dynamics
Large language models with a huge number of parameters, when trained on near internet-sized number of tokens, have been empirically shown to obey neural scaling laws: specifically, their performance behaves predictably as a power law in…
The diffusion of ideas and language in society has conventionally been described by S-shaped models, such as the logistic curve. However, the role of sub-exponential growth -- a slower-than-exponential pattern known in epidemiology -- has…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
Present human languages display slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution for size [1-3], whereas present cities follow power law (Pareto-Zipf law)[4]. Our model considers the competition between languages and that between cities…
In this research note, I derive explicit dynamical systems for language within an acquisition-driven framework (Niyogi \& Berwick, 1997; Niyogi, 2006) assuming that children/learners follow the Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2016) to determine…
The phenomenon of human language is widely studied from various points of view. It is interesting not only for social scientists, antropologists or philosophers, but also for those, interesting in the network dynamics. In several recent…
Motivated by the dramatic disappearance of endangered languages observed in recent years, a great deal of attention has been given to the modeling of language competition in order to understand the factors that promote the disappearance of…
The language competition model of Viviane de Oliveira et al is modified by associating with each language a string of 32 bits. Whenever a language changes in this Viviane model, also one randomly selected bit is flipped. If then only…
Opinion formation has been gaining increasing research interests recently, and various models have been proposed. These models, however, have their limitations, among which noticeably include (i) it is generally assumed that adjacent nodes…
Small Language Models (SLMs) have become increasingly important due to their efficiency and performance to perform various language tasks with minimal computational resources, making them ideal for various settings including on-device,…
The current distribution of language size in terms of speaker population is generally described using a lognormal distribution. Analyzing the original real data we show how the double-Pareto lognormal distribution can give an alternative…
What can large language models learn? By definition, language models (LM) are distributions over strings. Therefore, an intuitive way of addressing the above question is to formalize it as a matter of learnability of classes of…
This article investigates scaling laws within language families using data from over six thousand languages and analyzing emergent patterns observed in Zipf-like classification graphs. Both macroscopic (based on number of languages by…
When scaled to hundreds of billions of parameters, pretrained language models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) achieve remarkable few-shot performance. However, enormous amounts of compute are required for training and applying such big…
Distributed linguistic representations are powerful tools for modelling the uncertainty and complexity of preference information in linguistic decision making. To provide a comprehensive perspective on the development of distributed…
Since the Transformer architecture emerged, language model development has grown, driven by their promising potential. Releasing these models into production requires properly understanding their behavior, particularly in sensitive domains…
We investigate the origin of Zipf's law for words in written texts by means of a stochastic dynamical model for text generation. The model incorporates both features related to the general structure of languages and memory effects inherent…
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…
The performance of a language model has been shown to be effectively modeled as a power-law in its parameter count. Here we study the scaling behaviors of Routing Networks: architectures that conditionally use only a subset of their…
In this article, we investigate the properties of phoneme N-grams across half of the world's languages. We investigate if the sizes of three different N-gram distributions of the world's language families obey a power law. Further, the…