Related papers: Understanding confounding effects in linguistic co…
Certain spans of utterances in a discourse, referred to here as segments, are widely assumed to form coherent units. Further, the segmental structure of discourse has been claimed to constrain and be constrained by many phenomena. However,…
We consider the problem of using observational data to estimate the causal effects of linguistic properties. For example, does writing a complaint politely lead to a faster response time? How much will a positive product review increase…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
Coherent discourse is distinguished from a mere collection of utterances by the satisfaction of a diverse set of constraints, for example choice of expression, logical relation between denoted events, and implicit compatibility with…
How does irrelevant information (i.e., distractors) affect test-time scaling in vision-language models (VLMs)? Prior studies on language models have reported an inverse scaling effect, where textual distractors lead to longer but less…
Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of…
Coherence is a crucial aspect of evaluating text readability and can be assessed through two primary factors when evaluating an essay in a scoring scenario. The first factor is logical coherence, characterized by the appropriate use of…
The language of information theory is favored in both causal reasoning and machine learning frameworks. But, is there a better language than this? In this study, we demonstrate the pitfalls of infotheoretic estimation using first order…
This paper shows how agents' choice in communicative action can be designed to mitigate the effect of their resource limits in the context of particular features of a collaborative planning task. I first motivate a number of hypotheses…
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…
With the pandemic, many experimental psychologists and linguists have started to collect data over the internet (hereafter on-line data). The feasibility of such experiments and the sample sizes required to achieve sufficient statistical…
Persona-assigned Large Language Models (LLMs) can adopt diverse roles, enabling personalized and context-aware reasoning. However, even minor demographic perturbations in personas, such as simple pronoun changes, can alter reasoning…
The substantial growth of online learning, in particular, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), supports research into the development of better models for effective learning. Learner 'confusion' is among one of the identified aspects…
Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain…
Large language models leverage both parametric knowledge acquired during pretraining and in-context knowledge provided at inference time. Crucially, when these sources conflict, models arbitrate based on their internal confidence,…
Second-order statistical methods show very good results for automatic speaker identification in controlled recording conditions. These approaches are generally used on the entire speech material available. In this paper, we study the…
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 comparing the linguistic capabilities of language models (LMs) with humans using LM probabilities, factors such as the length of the sequence and the unigram frequency of lexical items have a significant effect on LM probabilities in…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
This paper presents a study on mutual speech variation influences in a human-computer setting. The study highlights behavioral patterns in data collected as part of a shadowing experiment, and is performed using a novel end-to-end platform…