Related papers: Understanding confounding effects in linguistic co…
There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a…
Hidden structural patterns in written texts have been subject of considerable research in the last decades. In particular, mapping a text into a time series of sentence lengths is a natural way to investigate text structure. Typically,…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
Many social science questions ask how linguistic properties causally affect an audience's attitudes and behaviors. Because text properties are often interlinked (e.g., angry reviews use profane language), we must control for possible latent…
In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody--the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry…
Conversation is like an intricate partner dance and behavioral convergence, or the similarity in observable behaviors of partners over time, can lead to shared understanding, changed beliefs and increased rapport. This article describes a…
For a language model (LM) to faithfully model human language, it must compress vast, potentially infinite information into relatively few dimensions. We propose analyzing compression in (pre-trained) LMs from two points of view: geometric…
Texts exhibit considerable stylistic variation. This paper reports an experiment where a corpus of documents (N= 75 000) is analyzed using various simple stylistic metrics. A subset (n = 1000) of the corpus has been previously assessed to…
Existing conversational search systems can synthesize information into responses, but they lack principled ways to adapt response formats to users' cognitive states. This paper investigates whether aligning format and distance, which…
The syntactic structures of sentences can be readily read-out from the activations of large language models (LLMs). However, the ``structural probes'' that have been developed to reveal this phenomenon are typically evaluated on an…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
Prosody -- the suprasegmental component of speech, including pitch, loudness, and tempo -- carries critical aspects of meaning. However, the relationship between the information conveyed by prosody vs. by the words themselves remains poorly…
What makes an interaction with the LLM more preferable for the user? While it is intuitive to assume that information accuracy in the LLM's responses would be one of the influential variables, recent studies have found that inaccurate LLM's…
This study examines whether sentence-level memory load in comprehension is better explained by linear proximity between syntactically related words or by the structural density of the intervening material. Building on locality-based…
Confounding seriously impairs our ability to learn about causal relations from observational data. Confounding can be defined as a statistical association between two variables due to inputs from a common source (the confounder). For…
Expectations about the correlation of cue phrases, the duration of unfilled pauses and the structuring of spoken discourse are framed in light of Grosz and Sidner's theory of discourse and are tested for a directions-giving dialogue. The…
Numerous analyses of reading time (RT) data have been implemented -- all in an effort to better understand the cognitive processes driving reading comprehension. However, data measured on words at the end of a sentence -- or even at the end…
Large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities to learn in-context, where exemplar input-output pairings are appended to the prompt for demonstration. However, existing work has demonstrated the ability of models to learn…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
This study re-evaluates the assumption that long-range correlations in sentence length are a fundamental feature of natural language and a marker of literary style. While previous research has suggested that punctuation marks--particularly…