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This is a guest post by Justin Quillinan (of Chimp Challenge fame).

Cast your reminisce pods back a few days and recall Sean’s iterated learning experiment using the automated transcription of YouTube videos. The process went as follows:

1. Record yourself saying something.
2. Upload the video to YouTube
3. Let it be automatically transcribed (usually takes about 10 minutes for a short video)
4. Record yourself saying the text from the automatic transcription
5. Go to 2

Sean took a short extract from Kafka’s Metamorphosis and found that, as in human iterated learning experiments, both the error rate and compression ratio decreases with successive iterations. He also found that the process resulted in a text with longer and more unique words.

I was curious to see whether we could remove human participants entirely and run computer generated speech through this automated transcription. Here’s the process:

1. Generate an audio file from some text using a speech synthesis program;
2. Generate a transcription of the audio file;
3. Repeat from 1. with the new transcription.

Continue reading “Iterated learning using Youtube videos and speech synthesis”

I recently discovered that videos uploaded to YouTube are automatically transcribed (if they’re in English).  As you might guess, the transcriptions are not perfect, so there will be a discrepancy between what the speaker actually said and what is transcribed.  This is essentially all you need to run an iterated learning experiment (e.g. Kirby, Cornish & Smith, 2008).  Iterated learning is a process of repeatedly transmitting a signal through a bottleneck.  For instance, language is transmitted from adults to children, who learn its rules.  These children then go on to transmit this language to their own children.

Simon Kirby and colleagues have discovered that this process leads to languages becoming both more learnable and more expressive over time.  This happens by the emergence of compositionality: parts of a word become systematically linked to parts of its meaning.  See some posts by Hannah and Wintz on these experiments.

But can we see the same process with non-human learners?  Here’s how iterated learning with YouTube works:

1. Record yourself saying something.
2. Upload the video to YouTube
3. Let it be automatically transcribed (usually takes about 10 minutes for a short video)
4. Record yourself saying the text from the automatic transcription
5. Go to 2

Here’s a diagram of the procedure:

Continue reading “Iterated learning using YouTube videos”

It’s job frenzy out there. You can see here seven postdoctoral positions in the Dutch research consortium “Language in Interaction” including one on language evolution below:

WP 5: Language evolution and diversity

The goal of this WP is to contribute to a better understanding of the biological underpinnings of linguistic universality as well as diversity, both at the population level (between languages and between species) and at the individual level (within a language). We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher in this area. The preferred area of specialization is evolutionary modelling of language with respect to diversity in communication. Other possible areas of expertise may include language diversity, individual differences in language abilities, animal communication, and genetic influences on speech and language.

Contact information WP 5: Prof. Pieter Muysken, p.muysken@let.ru.nl

The deadline for applications is May 15, 2013 for a September start date. More details on the document here:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/1HErCprWm1KZauFiKNEaswRmblG2HJZlydRSbDODEKfVkZ48BQzen3ems-h43/edit

The university of St. Andrews is on a hiring frenzy:

Applications are invited to join an interdisciplinary research programme directed by Professors Kevin Laland (School of Biology) and Andrew Whiten (School of Psychology and Neuroscience) at the University of St Andrews’ Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution. “Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Culture Complexity, Creativity and Trust” is funded through a major grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Successful candidates will join a team of over 20 researchers working on the project, studying aspects of social learning, innovation and cultural evolution in monkeys, apes and human participants, employing a diversity of techniques including systematic observation, experiments and statistical modelling.

Two Lectureships: Lecturer in Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology (School of Biology);

Lecturer in Comparative, Evolutionary or Developmental Psychology (School of Psychology). Salary £37,382 – £45,941 per annum. Ref No: ML1133. Closing Date 7 April 2013.

Eight Postdoctoral Research Assistantships: £30,424 – £36,298 per annum. Ref No: SB1299.Closing Date 5 April 2013.

Up to ten PhD Scholarships. For further particulars and how to apply see http://lalandlab.st-andrews.ac.uk/opportunities.html.

Positions are for 33 months (salaried posts) or three years (PhD), commencing 1st September 2013 or as soon as possible thereafter. For the Lectureships & Postdoctoral Research Assistants only, we encourage applicants to apply online at www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/welcome.aspx, where further particulars of all posts can be viewed. However if you are unable to do this, please call +44 (0)1334462571 for an application pack.

Please quote the appropriate reference number on all correspondence.

The University is committed to equality of opportunity.

The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland (No SC013532).

The press release announcing the grant states:

The new project will use comparative studies of social learning among monkeys, apes and human children together with sophisticated statistical modeling and a diverse range of other methods to address a suite of such ‘Big Questions’ about the evolution of culture, a field in which St Andrews is a world leader. “When we talk of ‘culture’ in this project, we include everything that is learned from others, from our language to our technology and moral codes. Our cultural nature is arguably the most important characteristic that separates us from even our closest primate relatives”, says Professor Whiten. “Nevertheless, we can learn much about the evolutionary roots of our cultural capacities by studying the social traditions of monkeys and apes, and that will be an important part of this project”.

“Our unique human ability to make cultures evolve cumulatively, building on what others achieved before us, depends on two essential elements highlighted in the project title”, adds Professor Laland: “creativity, which produces new innovations, and trust, which guides which innovations are adopted and spread. We will be investigating how humans and other animals decide whom to trust as sources of cultural information and what other forms of cultural filtering are important”.

So it sounds very relevant for Language Evolution bods!

Zach Weinersmith of SMBC comics and various science folk are putting on a Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses.  The festival will include presentations of “well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect evolutionary theory”.  They’re looking for people to give 5 minute presentations.  It takes place at MIT on the 20th April, submissions are due 10th March.

Finally, a place for all our hard work on spurious correlations in culturally evolved systems.

More details here

Yesterday I posted an analysis of some work by Prof. Keith Chen on the link between future tense marking and economic decisions.  Prof. Chen made some suggestions about changes to the analysis, some of which I’ve carried out here.  The new results below indicate that the link between future tense and the propensity to save is more robust than the previous post suggested, which is quite embarrassing, but I submit the findings here anyway.

One of Prof. Chen’s points was that I was using simple linear regression, while his analysis used conditional logit modelling.  This is much more computationally intense, and it’s not feasible for me to run 145 logit models for the given size of dataset (R was telling me it needed 13GB of memory to run an analysis of one linguistic variable! Help, anyone?).

Another suggestion was to look at which linguistic variables explain the residual variation in a model with non-linguistic variables.  That is, controlling for non-linguistic variables such as age, sex and number of children, how much extra variance does a particular linguistic variable account for?

I analysed this by comparing two models for each linguistic variable (using ANOVAS, although the results are equivalent with regressions).  Each model had the propensity to save as the dependent variable and independent variables including age, sex, employment status, marriage status, level of education, religion, number of children and survey year.  The second model also included the linguistic variable.  I then compared the improvement in the model fit using the F-score of the difference in residuals.  (There are some problems here, because different linguistic features will be represented in different sub-sets of the data, but we’ll ignore this for now.)

Continue reading “Whorfian economics reconsidered: Residuals and Causal Graphs”

Update: I have carried out some more analyses that paint a different picture to the one presented below.  Oops!

A recently accepted paper by Keith Chen has been getting a lot of press coverage. Chen has discovered a close link between the properties of the language people speak and their economic decisions. People who speak languages which mark the future tense differently to the present tense tend to make fewer provisions for the future. This includes economic decisions  such as being less likely to save money, but also secondary indicators such as greater prevalence of smoking and obesity.

The hypothesis is that marking the future tense differently makes the future seem further away, and therefore you are less likely to plan for the future.

Chen has talked about this hypothesis at a TED conference and has been covered in the media, most recently in a BBC economics column (which, to be fair, was fairly critical). The hypothesis has been criticised by several linguists, notably on language log (and a great model post by Mark Liberman), where Chen gave a response. The data has been criticised (e.g. English is marked as ‘strong future tense marking’, but has a range of ways of using present tense for future time reference), as well as the thinking behind the hypothesis itself (e.g. why wouldn’t marking a difference in the language actually make the future MORE salient?). Some have also pointed out weaknesses in the statistical claim, for instance, Östen Dahl has pointed out that speaking a language with front rounded vowels is also a good predictor of economic decisions.

Here at Replicated Typo, we have discussed many cases of spurious correlations – statistical links between cultural traits that are unlikely to be causal.  James Winters and I recently published a paper on the dangers of making claims based on large-scale, cross-cultural statistics. Basically, it’s very easy to find statistical links between any two variables because cultrual traits are inherited in bundles (they are not independent).

In this post, I address an issue that I haven’t seen systematically answered yet: Chen predicts that there is a correlation between future tense marking and economic decisions, and finds a strong link. However, he should also predict that future tense marking is a stronger predictor than other linguistic variables.  In other words, can we find a different aspect of language that is even better at predicting economic behaviour?  Here I test the link between the propensity to save money and many different linguistic factors.

Continue reading “Whorfian economics reconsidered: Why future tense?”

There’s the European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association (EHBEA), the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), and the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE) too. I’m reminded of the People’s Front of Judea.

Anyway… the 3rd annual meeting of the ESHE will be held in Vienna, Austria, on 20-21 September, 2013. The meeting will be hosted by the local organizer Professor Gerhard Weber, from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna.

On Thursday 19 September, the eve of the opening of the meeting, a special keynote presentation will be given by Professor Tecumseh Fitch, from the University of Vienna, on the evolution of speech, language and music. The meeting will be held on Friday 20 and Saturday 21 September in the spectacular Großer Festsaal and Kleiner Festsaal at the University of Vienna. Each day will be composed of plenary podium sessions in the morning, specialized workshops in the afternoon and poster sessions in the early evening.

Submissions of topics in the broader field of evolutionary studies, outside of human paleontology and paleolithic archaeology, are especially encouraged this year. The submission should include a 1-2 page presentation of the subject, a list of participants with titles and short abstracts (200 words). Applications should be sent no later than 15 April and will be quickly reviewed so that selected participants can submit their full abstract in due time for the 31 May abstract deadline. Questions relating to the organization of these specialized sessions can be sent to abstracts@eshe.eu.

Meeting Registration for the 2013 ESHE Meeting in Vienna is available on our website http://www.eshe.eu/meetings.html.

There is 3000€ available for 2 or 3 student poster prizes. To be included in the running for a poster prize you must first submit your abstract via the online system, and check the box which states “Enter this poster in the Student Poster Competition”. A pdf of your poster must be sent to abstracts@eshe.eu by 31 August in order to be evaluated.