Adamic et al. (2016)

Online opinion dynamics

Transmission chains for cultural evolution theories

Reviews by

Mesoudi and Whiten (2008)

Whiten et al. (2016)

Leskovec et al. (2009)

Boyd & Richerson (1985, 2005)

Sperber (1996)

Hierarchicalisation

(Mesoudi and Whiten, 2004)

Social & survival information

(Stubbersfield et al., 2015)

Negativity

(Bebbington et al., 2017)

Moussaïd et al. (2015)

Lauf et al. (2013)

Lerique & Roth (2018)

Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. (2012)

Quotes in 2011 news on Strauss-Kahn

Claidière et al. (2014)

Cornish et al. (2013)

Word list recall (Zaromb et al. 2006)

Simple sentence recall (Potter & Lombardi 1990)

No ecological content

Control over experimental setting

Fast iterations

Scale similar to in vivo

Browser-based

At Dover, the finale of the bailiffs convention,their duty said a speaker are delicate, dangerous and detailed

Needleman and Wunsch (1970)

AGAACT-
 | ||
-G-AC-G

AGAACT

GACG

Finding her son, Alvin, 69, hanged, Mrs Hunt, of Brighton, was so depressed she could not cut him down
Finding her son Arthur 69 hanged Mrs Brown from Brighton was so upset she could not cut him down

Apply to utterances using NLP

$\hookrightarrow E_1$

$\hookrightarrow E_2$

Extend to build recursive deep alignments

Frequency

Frequency

Frequency

|chunk|

|chunk|

Deletion

Insertion

Replacement

Position in $u$

$|u|_w$

Number of operations vs. utterance length

Susceptibility vs. position in utterance

Deletions tend to gate other operations

Insertions relate to preceding deletions

Stubbersfield et al. (2015)

Bebbington et al. (2017)

Links the low-level with contrasted outcomes

In vivo & oral applications (social networks)

Parsimonious explanations of higher level evolution

Semantic parses, long-lived chains with recurring changes

Lots to do

Quantitative analysis of changes

Inner structure of transformations

WEIRD participants

Written text

No controlled context

Caveats

Very Soon™ on arXiv.org

osf.io/k7d38

Can you think of anything else, Barbara, they might have told me about that party?

I've spoken to the other children who were there that day.

S

B

Abuser

The Devil's Advocate (1997)

?

Strong pragmatics (Scott-Phillips, 2017)

Access to context

Theory of the constitution of meaning

Challenges

Pilots

MemeTracker, WikiSource,

12 Angry Men, Tales,

News stories

Exp. A

Memorable/non-memorable quote pairs

(Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al., 2012)

Exp. A'

Nouvelles en trois lignes

(Fénéon, 1906)

“Hanging on to the door, a traveller a tad overweight caused his carriage to topple, in Bromley, and fractured his skull.”

“Three bears driven down from the heights of the Pyrenees by snow have been decimating the sheep of the valley.”

“A dozen hawkers who had been announcing news of a nonexistent anarchist bombing at King's Cross have been arrested.”

$\theta_{open}$

$\theta_{extend}$

$\theta_{mismatch}$

$\theta_{exchange}$ by hand

All transformations

Hand-coded training set size?

Train the $\theta_*$ on hand-coded alignments

Simulate the training process: imagine we know the optimal $\theta$

1. Sample $\theta^0 \in [-1, 0]^3$ to generate artificial alignments for all transformations

2. From those, sample $n$ training alignments

3. Brute-force $\hat{\theta}_1, ..., \hat{\theta}_m$ estimators of $\theta_0$

4. Evaluate the number of errors per transformation on the test set

Test set

$\Longrightarrow$ 100-200 hand-coded alignments yield $\leq$ 1 error/transformation

Immediately after I become president I will confront this economic challenge head-on by taking all necessary steps

immediately after I become a president I will confront this economic challenge

Immediately after I become president, I will tackle this economic challenge head-on by taking all the necessary steps

This crisis did not develop overnight and it will not be solved overnight

the crisis did not developed overnight, and it will be not solved overnight

original

This, crisis, did, not, develop, overnight, and, it, will, not, be, solved, overnight

this, crisis, did, not, develop, overnight, and, it, will, not, be, solved, overnight

this, crisis, did, not, develop, overnight, and, it, will, not, be, solved, overnight

crisi, develop, overnight, solv, overnight

tokenize

lowercase & length > 2

stopwords

stem

The crisis didn't happen today won't be solved by midnight.

crisi, happen, today, solv, midnight

d = 0,6

Susceptibility

Feature variation