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We define a notion of randomness for individual and collections of formal languages based on automatic martingales acting on sequences of words from some underlying domain. An automatic martingale bets if the incoming word belongs to the…
Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining…
Let $x$ and $y$ be words. We consider the languages whose words $z$ are those for which the numbers of occurrences of $x$ and $y$, as subwords of $z$, are the same (resp., the number of $x$'s is less than the number of $y$'s, resp., is less…
Estimating the semantic similarity between text data is one of the challenging and open research problems in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The versatility of natural language makes it difficult to define rule-based methods…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
Word class flexibility refers to the phenomenon whereby a single word form is used across different grammatical categories. Extensive work in linguistic typology has sought to characterize word class flexibility across languages, but…
This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…
In order to analyze the dynamics of two languages in competition, one approach is to fit historical data on their numbers of speakers with a mathematical model in which the parameters are interpreted as the similarity between those…
Recent work in NLP shows that LSTM language models capture compositional structure in language data. For a closer look at how these representations are composed hierarchically, we present a novel measure of interdependence between word…
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…
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.…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Human social hierarchy has the unique characteristic of existing in two forms. Firstly, as an informal hierarchy where leaders and followers are implicitly defined by their personal characteristics, and secondly, as an institutional…
In this paper we propose a learning paradigm for the problem of understanding spoken language. The basis of the work is in a formalization of the understanding problem as a communication problem. This results in the definition of a…
Slang is a common type of informal language, but its flexible nature and paucity of data resources present challenges for existing natural language systems. We take an initial step toward machine generation of slang by developing a…
Generating a long, coherent text such as a paragraph requires a high-level control of different levels of relations between sentences (e.g., tense, coreference). We call such a logical connection between sentences as a (paragraph) flow. In…
One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…
Conversation is like an intricate partner dance and behavioral convergence, or the similarity in observable behaviors of partners over time, can lead to shared understanding, changed beliefs and increased rapport. This article describes a…
Socratic questioning is an educational method that allows students to discover answers to complex problems by asking them a series of thoughtful questions. Generation of didactically sound questions is challenging, requiring understanding…
Invitation to the statistical study of language: The topic of this presentation is the interdisciplinary nexus between linguistics and statistics. It targets linguists, for whom it may have a theoretical interest, or professionals that work…