Papers for the Language Change course, SS2019

What to do?

Send me by email an ordered list with your top 3 preferences from this list. First come first served. Do not choose a paper that you have chosen for another course. Those already assigned have the name of the presenter in square brackets, so don't include those on your list of preferences.

You can choose a regular conference paper (8-9 pages of content), two short papers, or share a journal paper with colleagues (approx. 10 pages per student, so the number of people depends on the article)

If you would like to present a different paper, you can send me an email about that and if I think it is interesting (i.e. relevant and unexpected, or any other interestingness measure I choose to apply) for the course, you can present it.

How will this work?

• Read the paper (if you have troubles with it, talk to me!)
• Send a list of at least 3 questions to your colleagues one week in advance of the presentation: class mailing list -- LCseminar@cl....
• Your colleagues will send you and me their answers to the questions, at least 24h before the presentation (you don't have to send in answers for the papers presented the same day as yours)
• In class you will lead the discussion of the paper -- tell us first the main idea of the paper, then details about how it was done, and connect to the ideas we already talked about (either in the lectures, or in previously discussed papers), and talk about the questions you sent out and the answers received (were there misinterpretations? clarify particularly where your colleagues gave the wrong answers, that is where things were not clear or maybe just more difficult to understand)
• everybody should participate in the paper discussion, and ask for clarifications where necessary

List of papers

1. The Mathematical Models of Glottochronology Chretien, 1962
2. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and probabilistic inference: Evidence from the domain of color Cibelli et al., 2016
Etymologies and language families
3. [Michael] MDL-based Models for Alignment of Etymological Data Wettig et al., 2011
4. Probabilistic Models for Alignment of Etymological Data Wettig et al., 2011
5. Perfect phylogenetic networks: A new methodology for reconstructing the evolutionary history of natural languages Nakhleh et al., 2005
6. From alignment of etymological data to phylogenetic inference via population genetics Nouri et al., 2016
7. [Fabian] Proto-Indo-European Lexicon: The Generative Etymological Dictionary of Indo-European Languages Pyysalo, 2017
8. [Fabian] Indo-European languages tree by Levenshtein distance Serva and Petroni, 2007
9. An Indoeuropean Classification: A Lexicostatistical Experiment (pages 1-32) Dyen et al., 1992
10. The proportionality trap Or: what is wrong with lexicostatistical subgrouping? Holm, 2003
11. [Arthur] Using context and phonetic features in models of etymological sound change Wettig et al., 2012
12. [Rebecca] Identifying cognates by phonetic and semantic similarity Kondrak, 2001
13. [Julia] Automatic Discrimination between Cognates and Borrowings Ciobanu and Dinu, 2015
14. [Julia] Simulating Language Evolution: a Tool for Historical Linguistics Ciobanu and Dinu, 2018
15. [Maja G.] Language Family Relationship Preserved in Non-native English Nagata, 2014
The lexicon
16. [Georg] Natural selection in the modern english lexicon Grieve, 2018
17. The origins of word order universals: evidence from corpus statistics and silent gesture Kirby et al., 2018
18. [Irina] Constructions, construal and cooperation in the evolution of language Pleyer and Lindner, 2014
19. [Souvenir] Alien symbols for alien language: Iterated learning in a unique, novel signal space Cuskley, 2018
20. [Souvenir] Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language Kirby et al., 2008
21. [Jason] Identifying linguistic selection and innovation while controlling for cultural drift Karjus et al., 2018
    AND
    [Jason] Evolutionary forces in language change Ahern et al., 2016
22. [Frank] Cultural Shift or Linguistic Drift? Comparing Two Computational Measures of Semantic Change Hamilton et al., 2016
Language change in topics
23. Topics over time: A non-Markov continuous-time model of topical trends Wang and Mccallum, 2006
24. [Jonas] Studying the history of ideas using topic models Hall et al., 2008
25. [Rebekka] Deep Temporal-Recurrent-Replicated-Softmax for Topical Trends over Time Gupta et al., 2018
26. [Konstantin] Making "fetch" happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on the success of lexical innovations Stewart and Eisenstein, 2018
Phonology
27. [Tai] Phonological factors in social media writing Eisenstein, 2013
28. A probabilistic approach to diachronic phonology Bouchard et al., 2007
Word senses and semantic change
29. Situating Word Senses in their Historical Context with Linked Data Khan et al., 2017
30. [Leonard] On the Linearity of Semantic Change: Investigating Meaning Variation via Dynamic Graph Models Eger and Mehler, 2016
31. [Leonard] Analogies in Complex Verb Meaning Shifts: the Effect of Affect in Semantic Similarity Models Kopper and Schulte im Walde, 2018
32. [Philipp] Algorithms in the historical emergence of word senses Ramiro et al., 2018
33. [Zibu Lin and ...]Semantic typology and efficient communication Kemp et al., 2018
34. [Eric] Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium Xu et al., 2017
35. [Laura] Historical semantic chaining and efficient communication: The case of container names Xu et al., 2016
36. The natural selection of words: Finding the features of fitness Turney and Mohammad, 2018
37. An automatic approach to identify word sense changes in text media across timescale Mitra et al., 2015
    OR
    [Miriam] That’s sick dude!: Automatic identification of word sense change across different timescales Mitra et al., 2014
38. [Leo] Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Change Hamilton et al., 2016
Dialects
39. One foot in the grave? Dialect death, dialect contact, and dialect birth in England Britain, 2009
40. When Is a Change Not a Change? A Case Study on the Dialect Origins of New Zealand English Britain, 2008
41. [Tornike] Word Embeddings Quantify 100 Years of Ethnic and Gender Stereotypes Garg et al., 2017
42. [Frank] Don't Get Fooled by Word Embeddings -- Better Watch their Neighborhood Hellrich and Hahn, 2017
43. Code switching
44. [Georg] The Study of the Perception of Code-switching to English in German Advertising Zhiganova, 2016
45. [Verena] Language Modeling for Code-Mixing: The Role of Linguistic Theory based Synthetic Data Pratapa et al., 2018
46. [Michael Z.] Issues in Code-Switching: Competing Theories and Models Boztepe, 2002
47. [Ozan] Intra-sentential and Inter-sentential Code-switching in Turkish-English Bilinguals in New York City, U.S Koban, 2013