Related papers: Liberating language research from dogmas of the 20…

In the recent issue of PNAS, Futrell et al. claims that their study of 37 languages gives the first large scale cross-language evidence for Dependency Length Minimization, which is an overstatement that ignores similar previous researches.…

We address recent criticisms (Liu et al., 2015; Ferrer-i-Cancho and G\'omez-Rodr\'iguez, 2015) of our work on empirical evidence of dependency length minimization across languages (Futrell et al., 2015). First, we acknowledge error in…

In our era of widespread false information, human fact-checkers often face the challenge of duplicating efforts when verifying claims that may have already been addressed in other countries or languages. As false information transcends…

Liu et al. (2017) provide a comprehensive account of research on dependency distance in human languages. While the article is a very rich and useful report on this complex subject, here I will expand on a few specific issues where research…

Futrell and Mahowald (2025) frame the success of neural language models (LMs) as supporting gradient, usage-based linguistic theories. I argue that LMs can also instantiate theories based on formal structures - the types of theories seen in…

The performance of multilingual pretrained models is highly dependent on the availability of monolingual or parallel text present in a target language. Thus, the majority of the world's languages cannot benefit from recent progress in NLP…

The impact of text length on the estimation of lexical diversity has captured the attention of the scientific community for more than a century. Numerous indices have been proposed, and many studies have been conducted to evaluate them, but…

We perform a critical examination of the scientific methodology behind contemporary large language model (LLM) research. For this we assess over 2,000 research works released between 2020 and 2024 based on criteria typical of what is…

This is a reply to Muff, S. et al. (2022) Rewriting results sections in the language of evidence, Trends in Ecology & Evolution 37, 203-210.

Large language models (LLMs) are a class of language models that have demonstrated outstanding performance across a range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks and have become a highly sought-after research area, because of their…

Comment on "Dependency distance: a new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural language" by Haitao Liu et al

It is often stated that human languages, as other biological systems, are shaped by cost-cutting pressures but, to what extent? Attempts to quantify the degree of optimality of languages by means of an optimality score have been scarce and…

Scientific discovery increasingly depends on efficient experimental optimization to navigate vast design spaces under time and resource constraints. Traditional approaches often require extensive domain expertise and feature engineering.…

Futrell and Mahowald present a useful framework bridging technology-oriented deep learning systems and explanation-oriented linguistic theories. Unfortunately, the target article's focus on generative text-based LLMs fundamentally limits…

Multilingual reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), with performance disproportionately favoring high-resource languages. Drawing inspiration from cognitive neuroscience, which suggests that human…

Neural dependency parsing has achieved remarkable performance for many domains and languages. The bottleneck of massive labeled data limits the effectiveness of these approaches for low resource languages. In this work, we focus on…

Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…

In this book we promote logical computational linguistics as opposed to statistical computational linguistics. In particular, we provide a logical semantic interface. This book assembles more than twenty years of research work on type…

Prior studies in multilingual language modeling (e.g., Cotterell et al., 2018; Mielke et al., 2019) disagree on whether or not inflectional morphology makes languages harder to model. We attempt to resolve the disagreement and extend those…

The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…