Related papers: On the relation between structural diversity and g…
Crosslingual transfer is crucial to contemporary language models' multilingual capabilities, but how it occurs is not well understood. We ask what happens to a monolingual language model when it begins to be trained on a second language.…
Linguistic feature datasets such as URIEL+ are valuable for modelling cross-lingual relationships, but their high dimensionality and sparsity, especially for low-resource languages, limit the effectiveness of distance metrics. We propose a…
In order to demonstrate why it is important to correctly account for the (serial dependent) structure of temporal data, we document an apparently spectacular relationship between population size and lexical diversity: for five out of seven…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
Scaling existing applications and solutions to multiple human languages has traditionally proven to be difficult, mainly due to the language-dependent nature of preprocessing and feature engineering techniques employed in traditional…
Cultural transmission models are coming to the fore in explaining increases in the Paleolithic toolkit richness and diversity. During the later Paleolithic, technologies increase not only in terms of diversity but also in their complexity…
We show that short-range phoneme dependencies encode large-scale patterns of linguistic relatedness, with direct implications for quantitative typology and evolutionary linguistics. Specifically, using an information-theoretic framework, we…
Computational and human perception are often considered separate approaches for studying sound changes over time; few works have touched on the intersection of both. To fill this research gap, we provide a pioneering review contrasting…
The modelling, analysis, and visualisation of dynamic geospatial phenomena has been identified as a key developmental challenge for next-generation Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In this context, the envisaged paradigmatic extensions…
In recent years linguistic typology, which classifies the world's languages according to their functional and structural properties, has been widely used to support multilingual NLP. While the growing importance of typological information…
Typological databases in linguistics are usually categorical-valued. As a result, it is difficult to have a clear visualization of the data. In this paper, we describe a workflow to analyze the topological shapes of South American languages…
We present a novel technique for learning semantic representations, which extends the distributional hypothesis to multilingual data and joint-space embeddings. Our models leverage parallel data and learn to strongly align the embeddings of…
Historically, researchers and consumers have noticed a decrease in quality when applying NLP tools to minority variants of languages (i.e. Puerto Rican Spanish or Swiss German), but studies exploring this have been limited to a select few…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…
We propose a new computational approach for tracking and detecting statistically significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words. Such linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where the rapid exchange of…
Any natural language can be considered as a tool for producing large databases (consisting of texts, written, or discursive). This tool for its description in turn requires other large databases (dictionaries, grammars etc.). Nowadays, the…
Diversity in human capital is widely seen as critical to creating holistic and high quality research, especially in areas that engage with diverse cultures, environments, and challenges. Quantifying diverse academic collaborations and its…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
Languages evolve over time in a process in which reproduction, mutation and extinction are all possible, similar to what happens to living organisms. Using this similarity it is possible, in principle, to build family trees which show the…
Machine learning techniques have conquered many different tasks in speech and natural language processing, such as speech recognition, information extraction, text and speech generation, and human machine interaction using natural language…