Evolution of Language: An Agent-Based Simulation

Mark Dras
Macquarie University
Language Technology Group

Tuesday 30 October at 11am

Abstract

Languages change continuously, in terms of their phonology, morphology
and syntax: they can mutate in isolation, split off and diverge, or be
affected by other languages. This happens because languages are not
just cognitive phenomena but are conditioned by social interactions,
making them dynamical systems in the same way as biological and
physical phenomena. In all of these systems there are typical
patterns of change: change starts off slowly, accelerates, then slows
again, and this takes place over several generations. There are only
a few previous attempts to model language change, and these either
impose the form of the change onto the model or give empirically
inaccurate results.

We take a particular language phenomenon, vowel harmony in Turkic
languages, and model that using an agent-based simulation implemented
using a set of Swarm libraries in Objective C. In the simulation the
agents are endowed with low-level preferences and linguistic and
social behaviors. We show that empirically-observed patterns of
change are an emergent property of the model, in that they arise
naturally, but without prior specification, from the interactions of
the agents. 

As part of this, at a broader level, we've become interested in
questions raised by the notion of agent-based simulation: What can be
said about the methodology of developing agent-based models? How do
they compare with mathematical models? And what can these simulations
"prove" when used for science? This talk will suggest some answers
(or at least proto-answers) to these.

Short resume

Mark Dras got his PhD, in computer science, from Macquarie University
in 1999. He has just finished a two-year postdoc at the Institute for
Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and
is now back at Macquarie. His research interests centre around models
of language transformations, and include formal and mathematical
properties of synchronous grammars, machine translation, and language
evolution.

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