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People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
Natural language exhibits statistical dependencies at a wide range of scales. For instance, the mutual information between words in natural language decays like a power law with the temporal lag between them. However, many statistical…
Recent studies in the field of Machine Translation (MT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have shown that existing models amplify biases observed in the training data. The amplification of biases in language technology has mainly been…
In this work, we provide a large-scale empirical study of the scaling properties of multilingual neural machine translation models. We examine how increases in the model size affect the model performance and investigate the role of the…
Leveraging an established exercise in negotiation education, we build a novel dataset for studying how the use of language shapes bilateral bargaining. Our dataset extends existing work in two ways: 1) we recruit participants via behavioral…
Despite their wide adoption, the underlying training and memorization dynamics of very large language models is not well understood. We empirically study exact memorization in causal and masked language modeling, across model sizes and…
Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using simple designs in which neural responses to expected and unexpected words are compared in a categorical fashion. However, these designs have been contested as being `prediction…
When scaled to hundreds of billions of parameters, pretrained language models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) achieve remarkable few-shot performance. However, enormous amounts of compute are required for training and applying such big…
More predictable words are easier to process - they are read faster and elicit smaller neural signals associated with processing difficulty, most notably, the N400 component of the event-related brain potential. Thus, it has been argued…
While recent studies have looked into the abilities of large language models in various benchmark tasks, including question generation, reading comprehension, multilingual and etc, there have been few studies looking into the…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…
The explanations of large language models have recently been shown to be sensitive to the randomness used for their training, creating a need to characterize this sensitivity. In this paper, we propose a characterization that questions the…
We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two…
Current language models are considered to have sub-human capabilities at natural language tasks like question-answering or writing code. However, language models are not trained to perform well at these tasks, they are trained to accurately…
Recent work has shown that larger language models have better predictive power for eye movement and reading time data. While even the best models under-allocate probability mass to human responses, larger models assign higher-quality…
Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying…
Human language, as a typical complex system, its organization and evolution is an attractive topic for both physical and cultural researchers. In this paper, we present the first exhaustive analysis of the text organization of human speech.…
Learning structural information from observational data is central to producing new knowledge outside the training corpus. This holds for mechanistic understanding in scientific discovery as well as flexible test-time compositional…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…