Stan CareyThere are many theories about the origins of language. I like Jane Wagner's: "I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain."
#language #evolution #evolang #humour #JaneWagner #GivingOut
Stefan HartmannSAVE THE DATE: The next International Conference on he Evolution of Language #Evolang will take place 7-10 April 2026 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria! The organizers have prepared a video to whet your appetite: http://tinyurl.com/evolang2026
Andres KarjusAbout to take off to fly to Evolang 2024 in Madison! We're doing a workshop on Saturday on big language data & LLMs - stream link posted soon too, starts at 9AM CDT.
https://www.changeiskey.org/event/2024-evolang-workshop/
#Evolang #EvolangXV #Evolang2024
https://www.changeiskey.org/event/2024-evolang-workshop/
#Evolang #EvolangXV #Evolang2024
Large-scale computational approaches to evolution and change prospects and pitfalls | Change Is Key!
A first workshop on Large-scale computational approaches to evolution and change will be held at Evolang XV, Madison US. We aim to bring together language evolution, cutting-edge NLP, and LLM-driven approaches, to critically discuss novel opportunities of large-scale empirical approaches to language evolution and change.
Gareth RobertsWell now I have even more of an excuse to attend #EvoLang next year
A note for anyone planning to submit an abstract to #Evolang XV by tomorrow: Submission is via OpenReview. It turns out that, if you don't already have an account there and need to create one, it can take *up to 12 hours* to activate a new account.
Been following the Bentz et al line of #language #complexity research since the 2018 #evolang workshop, great to see this paper out now: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0054/html?lang=en
But also cool, more thinking in #ensembles!
Us in https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10271: "instead [of a single metric of visual complexity] use an array of estimates that captures complimentary aspects of complexity"
Bentz et al: "capture the complexity of a language by a vector of measurements, rather than a single value"
Complexity trade-offs and equi-complexity in natural languages: a meta-analysis
In linguistics, there is little consensus on how to define, measure, and compare complexity across languages. We propose to take the diversity of viewpoints as a given, and to capture the complexity of a language by a vector of measurements, rather than a single value. We then assess the statistical support for two controversial hypotheses: the trade-off hypothesis and the equi-complexity hypothesis. We furnish meta-analyses of 28 complexity metrics applied to texts written in overall 80 typologically diverse languages. The trade-off hypothesis is partially supported, in the sense that around one third of the significant correlations between measures are negative. The equi-complexity hypothesis, on the other hand, is largely confirmed. While we find evidence for complexity differences in the domains of morphology and syntax, the overall complexity vectors of languages turn out virtually indistinguishable.