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Language models retain a significant amount of world knowledge from their pre-training stage. This allows knowledgeable models to be applied to knowledge-intensive tasks prevalent in information retrieval, such as ranking or question…
Social cognitive theory explains how people learn and acquire knowledge through observing others. Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), which suggests their potential significance as agents in…
Text-based secrets are still the most commonly used authentication mechanism in information systems. IT managers must strike a balance between security and memorability while developing password policies. Initially introduced as more secure…
Speech is a fundamental means of communication that can be seen to provide two channels for transmitting information: the lexical channel of which words are said, and the non-lexical channel of how they are spoken. Both channels shape…
Word-level saliency explanations ("heat maps over words") are often used to communicate feature-attribution in text-based models. Recent studies found that superficial factors such as word length can distort human interpretation of the…
To produce accurate predictions, language models (LMs) must balance between generalization and memorization. Yet, little is known about the mechanism by which transformer LMs employ their memorization capacity. When does a model decide to…
Conversational search offers an easier and faster alternative to conventional web search, while having downsides like lack of source verification. Research has examined performance disparities between these two systems in different…
Quotations are crucial for successful explanations and persuasions in interpersonal communications. However, finding what to quote in a conversation is challenging for both humans and machines. This work studies automatic quotation…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
This study is a preliminary exploration of the concept of informativeness -how much information a sentence gives about a word it contains- and its potential benefits to building quality word representations from scarce data. We propose…
We present an empirical evaluation of various outputs generated by nine of the most widely-available large language models (LLMs). Our analysis is done with off-the-shelf, readily-available tools. We find a correlation between percentage of…
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…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
Biased language commonly occurs around topics which are of controversial nature, thus, stirring disagreement between the different involved parties of a discussion. This is due to the fact that for language and its use, specifically, the…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
Cross-situational word learning, wherein a learner combines information about possible meanings of a word across multiple exposures, has previously been shown to be a very powerful strategy to acquire a large lexicon in a short time.…
Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to…
Consider a person trying to spread an important message on a social network. He/she can spend hours trying to craft the message. Does it actually matter? While there has been extensive prior work looking into predicting popularity of…
Contextual predictability shapes how we choose and encode words in production. The effects of a word's predictability given preceding or past context are generally well-understood in both production and comprehension, but studies of…
In modern society people are being exposed to numerous information, with some of them being frequently repeated or more disruptive than others. In this paper we use a model of opinion dynamics to study how this news impact the society. In…