Related papers: Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its …

Prior work shows that men and women speak with different levels of confidence, though it's often assumed that these differences are innate or are learned in early childhood. Using academic publishing as a setting, we find that language…

Prominent questions about the role of sensory vs. linguistic input in the way we acquire and use language have been extensively studied in the psycholinguistic literature. However, the relative effect of various factors in a person's…

We consider two graph models of semantic change. The first is a time-series model that relates embedding vectors from one time period to embedding vectors of previous time periods. In the second, we construct one graph for each word: nodes…

We investigate a new setting for foreign language learning, where learners infer the meaning of unfamiliar words in a multimodal context of a sentence describing a paired image. We conduct studies with human participants using different…

We advance an information-theoretic model of human language processing in the brain, in which incoming linguistic input is processed at two levels, in terms of a heuristic interpretation and in terms of error correction. We propose that…

Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…

Individuals signal aspects of their identity and beliefs through linguistic choices. Studying these choices in aggregate allows us to examine large-scale attitude shifts within a population. Here, we develop computational methods to study…

Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change of human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or \textbf{semantic changes} of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning…

Surprisal theory posits that the processing difficulty of a word is determined by its predictability in context, offering a potential link between human sentence processing and next-word predictions from language models. While language…

In Shannon's seminal paper, entropy of printed English, treated as a stationary stochastic process, was estimated to be roughly 1 bit per character. However, considered as a means of communication, language differs considerably from its…

Code-switching, the alternation of languages within a conversation or utterance, is a common communicative phenomenon that occurs in multilingual communities across the world. This survey reviews computational approaches for code-switched…

Translating from languages without productive grammatical gender like English into gender-marked languages is a well-known difficulty for machines. This difficulty is also due to the fact that the training data on which models are built…

While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a…

The study of the brain's representations of uncertainty is a central topic in neuroscience. Unlike most quantities of which the neural representation is studied, uncertainty is a property of an observer's beliefs about the world, which…

Computer vision often treats human perception as homogeneous: an implicit assumption that visual stimuli are perceived similarly by everyone. This assumption is reflected in the way researchers collect datasets and train vision models. By…

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…

Listeners adapt language comprehension based on their mental representations of speakers, but how these representations are updated remains unclear. We investigated whether listeners probabilistically adapt comprehension based on the…

Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…

Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding--namely, that the way something is expressed reflects…

Do machines and humans process language in similar ways? Recent research has hinted at the affirmative, showing that human neural activity can be effectively predicted using the internal representations of language models (LMs). Although…