A Survey on Modeling Language Evolution in the New Millennium

Abstract

Language is a complex evolving system and it is not a trivial task to model the dynamics of processes occurring during its evolution. Therefore, modeling language evolution has attracted the interest of several researchers giving rise to a lot of models in the literature of the last millennium. This work reviews the literature devoted to computationally represent the evolution of human language through formal models and provides an analysis of the bibliographic production and scientific impact of the surveyed language evolution models to give some conclusions about current trends and future perspectives of this research field. The survey provides also an overview of the strategies for validating and comparing the different language evolution models and how these techniques have been applied by the surveyed models.