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The statistical study of human memory requires large-scale experiments, involving many stimuli conditions and test subjects. While this approach has proven to be quite fruitful for meaningless material such as random lists of words,…
Language provides simple ways of communicating generalizable knowledge to each other (e.g., "Birds fly", "John hikes", "Fire makes smoke"). Though found in every language and emerging early in development, the language of generalization is…
Linguistic accommodation is the process in which speakers adjust their accent, diction, vocabulary, and other aspects of language according to the communication style of one another. Previous research has shown how linguistic accommodation…
In speech communication, how something is said (paralinguistic information) is as crucial as what is said (linguistic information). As a type of paralinguistic information, English speech uses sentence stress, the heaviest prominence within…
How predictable a word is can be quantified in two ways: using human responses to the cloze task or using probabilities from language models (LMs).When used as predictors of processing effort, LM probabilities outperform probabilities…
People in the real world often possess vague knowledge of future payoffs, for which quantification is not feasible or desirable. We argue that language, with differing ability to convey vague information, plays an important but less-known…
As public discourse continues to move and grow online, conversations about divisive topics on social media platforms have also increased. These divisive topics prompt both contentious and non-contentious conversations. Although what…
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition,…
Plan recognition does not work the same way in stories and in "real life" (people tend to jump to conclusions more in stories). We present a theory of this, for the particular case of how objects in stories (or in life) influence plan…
The availability heuristic is a strategy that people use to make quick decisions but often lead to systematic errors. We propose three ways that visualization could facilitate unbiased decision-making. First, visualizations can alter the…
Language is a popular resource to mine speakers' attitude bias, supposing that speakers' statements represent their bias on concepts. However, psychology studies show that people's explicit bias in statements can be different from their…
Though languages can evolve slowly, they can also react strongly to dramatic world events. By studying the connection between words and events, it is possible to identify which events change our vocabulary and in what way. In this work, we…
The scientific community discourages authors of research papers from citing papers that did not influence them. Such "rhetorical" citations are assumed to degrade the literature and incentives for good work. While a world where authors cite…
While composing a new document, anything from a news article to an email or essay, authors often utilize direct quotes from a variety of sources. Although an author may know what point they would like to make, selecting an appropriate quote…
Emphasis is a crucial component in human communication, which indicates the speaker's intention and implication beyond pure text in dialogue. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, their ability…
Language models are widely deployed to provide automatic text completion services in user products. However, recent research has revealed that language models (especially large ones) bear considerable risk of memorizing private training…
Why do some things succeed in the marketplace of ideas? While some argue that content drives success, others suggest that style, or the way ideas are presented, also plays an important role. To provide a stringent test of style's…
This paper studies the problem of measuring and predicting how memorable an image is to pattern recognition machines, as a path to explore machine intelligence. Firstly, we propose a self-supervised machine memory quantification pipeline,…
Children efficiently acquire language not just by listening, but by interacting with others in their social environment. Conversely, large language models are typically trained with next-word prediction on massive amounts of text. Motivated…
Idioms have long posed a challenge due to their unique linguistic properties, which set them apart from other common expressions. While recent studies have leveraged large language models (LLMs) to handle idioms across various tasks, e.g.,…