Read also: Writing a Master's Thesis in Language Technology
Languages change rapidly over time and language users adapt to different situations and setting. Studying how language and communicative processes evolves is a highly multi-disciplinary task involving machine and language learning as well as biological and cultural evolution. The aim of this project will be to use methods such as evolutionary algorithms or reinforcement learning to investigate the main dynamics in language evolution.
When trying to understand the origins of languages, we can compensate for the lack of empirical evidence by utilising evolutionary computational methods to create simulations of how language may have evolved over time, e.g., by creating "language games" to simulate communication between agents in a social setting. In general, simulations on language evolution tend to have relatively small and fixed population sizes, something this study could aim to change.