Formalizing linguists' intuitions of language change as a dynamical system, we quantify the time course of language change including sudden vs. gradual changes in languages. We apply the computer model to the historical ...

This paper considers the problem of language change. Linguists must explain not only how languages are learned but also how and why they have evolved along certain trajectories and not others. While the language ...

We present an unsupervised learning algorithm that acquires a natural-language lexicon from raw speech. The algorithm is based on the optimal encoding of symbol sequences in an MDL framework, and uses a hierarchical ...