Related papers: Human language reveals a universal positivity bias
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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…
Affective reactions have deep biological foundations, however in humans the development of emotion concepts is also shaped by language and higher-order cognition. A recent breakthrough in AI has been the creation of multimodal language…
We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…
Understanding how the brain represents the multifaceted properties of words in context is essential for explaining the neural architecture of human language. Here, we combine large-scale psycholinguistic modeling with naturalistic fMRI to…
Human word associations are a well-known method of gaining insight into the internal mental lexicon, but the responses spontaneously offered by human participants to word cues are not always predictable as they may be influenced by personal…
Progress in natural language generation research has been shaped by the ever-growing size of language models. While large language models pre-trained on web data can generate human-sounding text, they also reproduce social biases and…
Although information theoretic characterizations of human communication have become increasingly popular in linguistics, to date they have largely involved grafting probabilistic constructs onto older ideas about grammar. Similarities…
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,…
Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Language has the power to reinforce stereotypes and project social biases onto others. At the core of the challenge is that it is rarely what is stated explicitly, but…
Studies in bias and fairness in natural language processing have primarily examined social biases within a single language and/or across few attributes (e.g. gender, race). However, biases can manifest differently across various languages…
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise…
Biases induced to text by generative models have become an increasingly large topic in recent years. In this paper we explore how machine translation might introduce a bias in sentiments as classified by sentiment analysis models. For this,…
Language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to the social interactions it facilitates. Despite the incredible effectiveness of language processing models to tackle…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of human languages, often used to express complex ideas in compressed or conventional ways (e.g. eager beaver as a keen and enthusiastic person). However, their interpretations may not be…
Subjective well-being is a key metric in economic, medical, and policy decision-making. As artificial intelligence provides scalable tools for modelling human outcomes, it is crucial to evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) can…
Word embeddings are powerful representations that form the foundation of many natural language processing architectures, both in English and in other languages. To gain further insight into word embeddings, we explore their stability (e.g.,…
Conducting experiments with diverse participants in their native languages can uncover insights into culture, cognition, and language that may not be revealed otherwise. However, conducting these experiments online makes it difficult to…
We present a text-based framework for investigating moral sentiment change of the public via longitudinal corpora. Our framework is based on the premise that language use can inform people's moral perception toward right or wrong, and we…
Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution \emph{rank diversity}. We calculate this diversity…