19 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Benjamin David Winter, William John Teahan
—Activation functions play a critical role in the performance and behaviour of neural networks, significantly impacting their ability to learn and generalise. Traditional activation functions, such as ReLU, sigmoid, and tanh, have been widely used with considerable success. However, these functions may not always…
Jessica Mégane, Nuno Lourenço, Penousal Machado
This work proposes an extension to Structured Grammatical Evolution (SGE) called Co-evolutionary Probabilistic Structured Grammatical Evolution (Co-PSGE). In Co-PSGE each individual in the population is composed by a grammar and a genotype, which is a list of dynamic lists, each corresponding to a non-terminal of the…
J. M. Luck, Anita Mehta
Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the 'descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages, and the 'contact' mechanism, where evolution in a given language occurs via…
Alfredo Ardila
Since the very beginning of the aphasia history it has been well established that there are two major aphasic syndromes (Wernicke's-type and Broca's-type aphasia); each one of them is related to the disturbance at a specific linguistic level (lexical/semantic and grammatical) and associated with a particular brain…
Michael Hahn, Yang Xu
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subjectverb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across languages. However, the existing approaches are not able to explain coherently the…
Hedvig Skirgård, Hannah J. Haynie, Damián E. Blasi, Harald Hammarström + 101 more
'Harald Hammarström' 'Jeremy Collins' 'Jay J. Latarche' 'Jakob Lesage' 'Tobias Weber' 'Alena Witzlack-Makarevich' 'Sam Passmore' 'Angela Chira' 'Luke Maurits' 'Russell Dinnage' 'Michael Dunn' 'Ger Reesink' 'Ruth Singer' 'Claire Bowern' 'Patience Epps' 'Jane Hill' 'Outi Vesakoski' 'Martine Robbeets' 'Noor Karolin Abbas'…
Shin-ichi Tanaka
In the history of phonological theory, the paradigm of computational systems has shifted in tandem with a better understanding of substantive issues such as typology, acquisition, social variation, and historical change in sound structure. The paradigm shift in the past 50 years can simply be characterized as the one…
Idan Rejwan, Avi Caciularu
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order from a functional perspective. In particular, we examine whether fixed word order…
Hiromi Matsumae, Patrick E. Savage, Peter Ranacher, Damián E. Blasi + 8 more
Culture evolves in ways that are analogous to, but distinct from, genetic evolution. Previous studies have demonstrated correlations between genetic and cultural diversity at small scales within language families, but few studies have empirically investigated parallels between genetic and cultural evolution across…
Giulia Palazzolo
Is syntax an evolutionary novelty in the human lineage? This question, along with the question of how human syntax evolved, is highly debated in the field of language evolution. In this paper, I reconstruct two prominent frameworks for studying the evolution of human syntax, which I call “unbounded hierarchy” (Bolhuis…
Kenny Smith
Recent work suggests that linguistic structure develops through cultural evolution, as a consequence of the repeated cycle of learning and use by which languages persist. This work has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of the cognitive basis for language; in particular, human language and…
Carlo Y. Meloni, Jessica K. Ivani, Taras Zakharko, Guanghao You + 2 more
The acquisition of writing has a lasting effect on how languages are processed in the brain, raising the possibility that it also affects how they are used and evolve over time. A popular hypothesis is that writing specifically leads to increased use and evolution of complex hierarchical structures in language. While…
Daniela Barbara Keller, Jörg Schultz, Angel Sánchez
Morphemes are the smallest meaningful parts of words and therefore represent a natural unit to study the evolution of words. To analyze the influence of language change on morphemes, we performed a large scale analysis of German and English vocabulary covering the last 200 years. Using a network approach from…
Johann-Mattis List, Jananan Sylvestre Pathmanathan, Philippe Lopez, Eric Bapteste
'Eric Bapteste'] Background For a long time biologists and linguists have been noticing surprising similarities between the evolution of life forms and languages. Most of the proposed analogies have been rejected. Some, however, have persisted, and some even turned out to be fruitful, inspiring the transfer of methods…
Carlo Y. Meloni, Chundra A. Cathcart, Erik J. Ringen, Jessica K. Ivani + 1 more
We examine the syntax-semantics interface in clause linkage using a cross-linguistic sample of nearly 700 constructions from Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Tupí-Guaraní. To evaluate predictions from the Interclausal Relations Hierarchy, we model the phylogenetic dynamics of how semantic relations influence the degree…
Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Grammaticalization refers to the diachronic "development from lexical to grammatical forms, and from grammatical to even more grammatical forms" (Heine & Kuteva, 2007, p. 32). It is assumed to go along with desemanticization, a process of losing descriptive meaning (Heine, 2003; Bybee, 2015; Lehmann, 2015; Heine &…
Brent Allman, Luiz Vieira, Daniel J. Diaz, Claus O. Wilke
Predicting the evolutionary patterns of emerging and endemic viruses is key for mitigating their spread in host populations. In particular, it is critical to rapidly identify mutations with the potential for immune escape or increased disease burden (variants of concern). Knowing which circulating mutations are such…
Jennifer Culbertson, Simon Kirby
The extent to which the linguistic system-its architecture, the representations it operates on, the constraints it is subject to-is specific to language has broad implications for cognitive science and its relation to evolutionary biology. Importantly, a given property of the linguistic system can be “specific” to the…
Claire Bowern
I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying semantic change that rely on temporally stratified word embeddings. I draw…