相关论文: Slangvolution: A Causal Analysis of Semantic Chang…

Drawing causal conclusions from observational real-world data is a very much desired but challenging task. In this paper we present mixed-method analyses to investigate causal influences of publication trends and behavior on the adoption,…

Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…

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…

An earlier study (Nettle 1999b) concluded, based on computer simulations and some inferences from empirical data, that languages will change the more slowly the larger the population gets. We replicate this study using a more complete…

This paper presents the first unsupervised approach to lexical semantic change that makes use of contextualised word representations. We propose a novel method that exploits the BERT neural language model to obtain representations of word…

Although text-based large language models exhibit human-level writing ability and remarkable intelligence, speech language models (SLMs) still struggle to generate semantically coherent outputs. There are several potential reasons for this…

The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…

Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…

Language style transfer is the problem of migrating the content of a source sentence to a target style. In many of its applications, parallel training data are not available and source sentences to be transferred may have arbitrary and…

The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…

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…

We present a method of finding and analyzing shifts in grammatical relations found in diachronic corpora. Inspired by the econometric technique of measuring return and volatility instead of relative frequencies, we propose them as a way to…

In terminology work, natural language processing, and digital humanities, several studies address the analysis of variations in context and meaning of terms in order to detect semantic change and the evolution of terms. We distinguish three…

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…

Understanding the fundamental concepts and trends in a scientific field is crucial for keeping abreast of its continuous advancement. In this study, we propose a systematic framework for analyzing the evolution of research topics in a…

Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…

Background: Zipf's discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication.…

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…

The topic of "negative end" of change is, contrary to the fields of innovation and emergence, largely under-researched. Yet, it has lately started to gain an increasing attention from language scholars worldwide. The main focus of this…

Scientific English has undergone rapid and unprecedented changes in recent years, with words such as "delve," "intricate," and "crucial" showing significant spikes in frequency since around 2022. These changes are widely attributed to the…