19 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Themistoklis Botsas, Lachlan Mason, Omar Matar, Indranil Pan
In our previous work in Botsas et al. (2020), we introduced the rule-based Bayesian Regression, a methodology that leverages two concepts: (i) Bayesian inference, for the general framework and uncertainty quantification and (ii) rule-based systems for the incorporation of expert knowledge and intuition. The resulting…
Jessica Mégane, Nuno Lourenço, Penousal Machado
—The grammars used in grammar-based Genetic Programming (GP) methods have a significant impact on the quality of the solutions generated since they define the search space by restricting the solutions to its syntax. In this work, we propose Probabilistic Structured Grammatical Evolution (PSGE), a new approach that…
Khabat Soltanian, Ali Ebnenasir, Mohsen Afsharchi
This paper presents a novel method, called Modular Grammatical Evolution (MGE), towards validating the hypothesis that restricting the solution space of NeuroEvolution to modular and simple neural networks enables the efficient generation of smaller and more structured neural networks while providing acceptable (and in…
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…
Olena Shcherbakova, Damián E. Blasi, Volker Gast, Hedvig Skirgård + 2 more
'Russell D. Gray' 'Simon J. Greenhill'] Languages vary in how they signal “who does what to whom”. Three main strategies to indicate the participant roles of “who” and “whom” are case, verbal indexing, and rigid word order. Languages that disambiguate these roles with case tend to have either verb-final or flexible…
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…
Erich Round, Rikker Dockum, Robin J. Ryder, Kathleen Currie Hall + 2 more
Functional load (FL) quantifies the contributions by phonological contrasts to distinctions made across the lexicon. Previous research has linked particularly low values of FL to sound change. Here, we broaden the scope of enquiry into FL to its evolution at higher values also. We apply phylogenetic methods to examine…
Annemarie Verkerk, Olena Shcherbakova, Hannah J. Haynie, Hedvig Skirgård + 4 more
Human languages show astonishing variety, yet their diversity is constrained by recurring patterns. Linguists have long argued over the extent and causes of these grammatical ‘universals’. Using Grambank-a comprehensive database of grammatical features across the world’s languages-we tested 191 proposed universals with…
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'…
Nour Efrat-Kowalsky, Peter Ranacher, Nico Neureiter, Paul Widmer + 1 more
It is an unresolved question to what extent the current frequency distributions of linguistic features inform us about what is representative of the language faculty and does not instead result from historical contingencies. We probe this question by leveraging unique data from the oldest attested languages, those…
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…
Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Koji Hoshi, Ljiljana Progovac
The gradual emergence of syntax has been claimed to be engaged in a feedback loop with Human Self-Domestication (HSD), both processes resulting from, and contributing to, enhanced connectivity in selected cortico-striatal networks, which is the mechanism for attenuating reactive aggression, the hallmark of HSD, but…
Adrian A. Shimpi, Kristen M. Naegle
Evolution has developed a set of principles that determine feasible domain combinations, analogous to grammar within natural languages. Defining domains as words and proteins as sentences, made up of words, we apply a linguistic approach to define the complete n-gram network of the human proteome. Combining this with…
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…
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…
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…
Junru Wu, William S.-Y. Wang, Niels O. Schiller
“Co-evolution” was originally a term from ecology and referred to closely associated species influencing each other and leading to reciprocal changes (Thompson and Rafferty, [4]). Borrowing this term into language evolution, the contributors of the current Research Topic have not only included mutual influences of…