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Register a new userThe emerging field of language dynamics
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S. Wichmann
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A simple review by a linguist, citing many articles by physicists: Quantitative methods, agent-based computer simulations, language dynamics, language typology, historical linguistics
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We study the entropy of Chinese and English texts, based on characters in case of Chinese texts and based on words for both languages. Significant differences are found between the languages and between different personal styles of debating partners. The entropy analysis points in the direction of lower entropy, that is of higher complexity. Such a text analysis would be applied for individuals of different styles, a single individual at different age, as well as different groups of the population.
We study the problem of multilingual masked language modeling, i.e. the training of a single model on concatenated text from multiple languages, and present a detailed study of several factors that influence why these models are so effective for cross-lingual transfer. We show, contrary to what was previously hypothesized, that transfer is possible even when there is no shared vocabulary across the monolingual corpora and also when the text comes from very different domains. The only requirement is that there are some shared parameters in the top layers of the multi-lingual encoder. To better understand this result, we also show that representations from independently trained models in different languages can be aligned post-hoc quite effectively, strongly suggesting that, much like for non-contextual word embeddings, there are universal latent symmetries in the learned embedding spaces. For multilingual masked language modeling, these symmetries seem to be automatically discovered and aligned during the joint training process.
Deep neural networks have been employed for various spoken language recognition tasks, including tasks that are multilingual by definition such as spoken language identification. In this paper, we present a neural model for Slavic language identification in speech signals and analyze its emergent representations to investigate whether they reflect objective measures of language relatedness and/or non-linguists perception of language similarity. While our analysis shows that the language representation space indeed captures language relatedness to a great extent, we find perceptual confusability between languages in our study to be the best predictor of the language representation similarity.
Methods connecting dynamical systems and graph theory have attracted increasing interest in the past few years, with applications ranging from a detailed comparison of different kinds of dynamics to the characterisation of empirical data. Here we investigate the effects of the (multi)fractal properties of a time signal, common in sequences arising from chaotic or strange attractors, on the topology of a suitably projected network. Relying on the box counting formalism, we map boxes into the nodes of a network and establish analytic expressions connecting the natural measure of a box with its degree in the graph representation. We single out the conditions yielding to the emergence of a scale-free topology, and validate our findings with extensive numerical simulations.
Empirical evidence shows that the rate of irregular usage of English verbs exhibits discontinuity as a function of their frequency: the most frequent verbs tend to be totally irregular. We aim to qualitatively understand the origin of this feature by studying simple agent--based models of language dynamics, where each agent adopts an inflectional state for a verb and may change it upon interaction with other agents. At the same time, agents are replaced at some rate by new agents adopting the regular form. In models with only two inflectional states (regular and irregular), we observe that either all verbs regularize irrespective of their frequency, or a continuous transition occurs between a low frequency state where the lemma becomes fully regular, and a high frequency one where both forms coexist. Introducing a third (mixed) state, wherein agents may use either form, we find that a third, qualitatively different behavior may emerge, namely, a discontinuous transition in frequency. We introduce and solve analytically a very general class of three--state models that allows us to fully understand these behaviors in a unified framework. Realistic sets of interaction rules, including the well-known Naming Game (NG) model, result in a discontinuous transition, in agreement with recent empirical findings. We also point out that the distinction between speaker and hearer in the interaction has no effect on the collective behavior. The results for the general three--state model, although discussed in terms of language dynamics, are widely applicable.
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