相关论文: Frequency patterns of semantic change: Corpus-base…

The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements…

The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…

Newberry et al. (Detecting evolutionary forces in language change, Nature 551, 2017) tackle an important but difficult problem in linguistics, the testing of selective theories of language change against a null model of drift. Having…

Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…

Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…

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…

It is well accepted that adoption of innovations are described by S-curves (slow start, accelerating period, and slow end). In this paper, we analyze how much information on the dynamics of innovation spreading can be obtained from a…

How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major…

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…

Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…

Phase transitions have been proposed as the origin of emergent abilities in large language models (LLMs), where new capabilities appear abruptly once models surpass critical thresholds of scale. Prior work, such as that of Wei et al.,…

The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…

Of basic interest is the quantification of the long term growth of a language's lexicon as it develops to more completely cover both a culture's communication requirements and knowledge space. Here, we explore the usage dynamics of words in…

The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic…

Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution \emph{rank diversity}. We calculate this diversity…

Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…

All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…

The evolution of natural languages poses a riddle to any theoretical perspective based on efficiency considerations. If languages are already optimally effective means of organization and communication of thought, why do they change? And if…

Over the past two centuries, the frequency of word usage in major Western languages has exhibited small amplitude regular cycles, superimposed on larger background trends. We show that these cycles of word usage organize into semantically…

What processes can explain how very large populations are able to converge on the use of a particular word or grammatical construction without global coordination? Answering this question helps to understand why new language constructs…