Creolizing the Web
This work addresses the challenge of unreliable claims in language evolution studies, though it appears incremental in applying existing interdisciplinary methods to this domain.
The authors tackled the problem of detecting evolutionary patterns in language by developing a minimalistic model based on communication between individuals, which they applied to a real-world dataset to identify communities and echo chambers that obstruct reliable communication.
The evolution of language has been a hotly debated subject with contradicting hypotheses and unreliable claims. Drawing from signalling games, dynamic population mechanics, machine learning and algebraic topology, we present a method for detecting evolutionary patterns in a sociological model of language evolution. We develop a minimalistic model that provides a rigorous base for any generalized evolutionary model for language based on communication between individuals. We also discuss theoretical guarantees of this model, ranging from stability of language representations to fast convergence of language by temporal communication and language drift in an interactive setting. Further we present empirical results and their interpretations on a real world dataset from \rdt to identify communities and echo chambers for opinions, thus placing obstructions to reliable communication among communities.