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Large language models have achieved impressive progress in multilingual translation, yet they continue to face challenges with certain language pairs-particularly those with limited training data or significant linguistic divergence from…
This paper uses computational experiments to explore the role of exposure in the emergence of construction grammars. While usage-based grammars are hypothesized to depend on a learner's exposure to actual language use, the mechanisms of…
We examine the effects of instantiating Lewis signaling games within a population of speaker and listener agents with the aim of producing a set of general and robust representations of unstructured pixel data. Preliminary experiments…
We propose an alternate approach to quantifying how well language models learn natural language: we ask how well they match the statistical tendencies of natural language. To answer this question, we analyze whether text generated from…
The linguistic abilities of Large Language Models are a matter of ongoing debate. This study contributes to this discussion by investigating model performance in a morphological generalization task that involves novel words. Using a…
Surveys have recently gained popularity as a tool to study large language models. By comparing survey responses of models to those of human reference populations, researchers aim to infer the demographics, political opinions, or values best…
This paper investigates the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in answering questions over datasets. We examine their performance in two scenarios: (a) directly answering questions given a dataset file as input, and (b)…
This work develops a computational model (by Automata Networks) of phonological similarity effects involved in the formation of word-meaning associations on artificial populations of speakers. Classical studies show that in recalling…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
It is shown that a real novel shares many characteristic features with a null model in which the words are randomly distributed throughout the text. Such a common feature is a certain translational invariance of the text. Another is that…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…
Languages typically provide more than one grammatical construction to express certain types of messages. A speaker's choice of construction is known to depend on multiple factors, including the choice of main verb -- a phenomenon known as…
Many studies have shown that human languages tend to optimize for lower complexity and increased communication efficiency. Syntactic dependency distance, which measures the linear distance between dependent words, is often considered a key…
This paper presents the results of the application of a bit-string model of languages (Schulze and Stauffer 2005) to problems of taxonomic patterns. The questions addressed include the following: (1) Which parameters are minimally ne eded…
Can large language models (LLMs) simulate social surveys? To answer this question, we conducted millions of simulations in which LLMs were asked to answer subjective questions. A comparison of different LLM responses with the European…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for persuasion, such as in political communication and marketing, where they affect how people think, choose, and act. Yet, empirical findings on the effectiveness of LLMs in persuasion…
The current trend of scaling language models involves increasing both parameter count and training dataset size. Extrapolating this trend suggests that training dataset size may soon be limited by the amount of text data available on the…
Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate survey responses, but synthetic data can be misaligned with the human population, leading to unreliable inference. We develop a general framework that converts LLM-simulated…