Related papers: Modelling linguistic taxonomic dynamics
Recently, computational modelling became a very important research tool that enables us to study problems that for decades evaded scientific analysis. Evolutionary systems are certainly examples of such problems: they are composed of many…
Language modeling, a central task in natural language processing, involves estimating a probability distribution over strings. In most cases, the estimated distribution sums to 1 over all finite strings. However, in some pathological cases,…
Systems now exist which are able to compile unification grammars into language models that can be included in a speech recognizer, but it is so far unclear whether non-trivial linguistically principled grammars can be used for this purpose.…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
The Chapter starts with introductory information about quantitative linguistics notions, like rank--frequency dependence, Zipf's law, frequency spectra, etc. Similarities in distributions of words in texts with level occupation in quantum…
The distribution of human linguistic groups presents a number of interesting and non-trivial patterns. The distributions of the number of speakers per language and the area each group covers follow log-normal distributions, while population…
Language models serve as a cornerstone in natural language processing (NLP), utilizing mathematical methods to generalize language laws and knowledge for prediction and generation. Over extensive research spanning decades, language modeling…
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…
Several populational networks present complex topologies when implemented in evolutionary algorithms. A common feature of these topologies is the emergence of a power law. Power law behavior with different scaling factors can also be…
A fundamental challenge in the cognitive sciences is discovering the dynamics that govern behaviour. Take the example of spoken language, which is characterised by a highly variable and complex set of physical movements that map onto the…
Understanding how language model performance varies with scale is critical to benchmark and algorithm development. Scaling laws are one approach to building this understanding, but the requirement of training models across many different…
Statistical models of word-sense disambiguation are often based on a small number of contextual features or on a model that is assumed to characterize the interactions among a set of features. Model selection is presented as an alternative…
Linguistic laws, the common statistical patterns of human language, have been investigated by quantitative linguists for nearly a century. Recently, biologists from a range of disciplines have started to explore the prevalence of these laws…
The task of text segmentation may be undertaken at many levels in text analysis---paragraphs, sentences, words, or even letters. Here, we focus on a relatively fine scale of segmentation, hypothesizing it to be in accord with a stochastic…
Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state…
We present a taxonomy of the variability mechanisms offered by modeling languages. The definition of a formal language encompasses a syntax and a semantic domain as well as the mapping that relates them, thus language variabilities are…
Language models provide a key framework for studying linguistic theories based on prediction, but phonological analysis using large language models (LLMs) is difficult; there are few phonological benchmarks beyond English and the standard…
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…
The iterated learning model simulates the transmission of language from generation to generation in order to explore how the constraints imposed by language transmission facilitate the emergence of language structure. Despite each modelled…
Following Abrams and Strogatz 2003 and Patriarca and Leppanen 2004, five other physics groups independently started to simulate the competition of languages, as opposed to the evolution of a human language out of ape sounds, or the learning…