Related papers: Comparing morphological complexity of Spanish, Oto…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
Multilingual language models (LMs) sometimes under-perform their monolingual counterparts, possibly due to capacity limitations. We quantify this ``multilingual penalty'' for lexical disambiguation--a task requiring precise semantic…
In many fields, such as language acquisition, neuropsychology of language, the study of aging, and historical linguistics, corpora are used for estimating the diversity of grammatical structures that are produced during a period by an…
The description complexity of a model is the length of the shortest formula that defines the model. We study the description complexity of unary structures in first-order logic FO, also drawing links to semantic complexity in the form of…
Human speech perception involves transforming a countinous acoustic signal into discrete linguistically meaningful units, such as phonemes, while simultaneously causing a listener to activate words that are similar to the spoken utterance…
By virtue of linguistic compositionality, few syntactic rules and a finite lexicon can generate an unbounded number of sentences. That is, language, though seemingly high-dimensional, can be explained using relatively few degrees of…
Maltese is a morphologically rich language with a hybrid morphological system which features both concatenative and non-concatenative processes. This paper analyses the impact of this hybridity on the performance of machine learning…
Even in highly-developed countries, as many as 15-30\% of the population can only understand texts written using a basic vocabulary. Their understanding of everyday texts is limited, which prevents them from taking an active role in society…
Grammaticality and likelihood are distinct notions in human language. Pretrained language models (LMs), which are probabilistic models of language fitted to maximize corpus likelihood, generate grammatically well-formed text and…
How do typological properties such as word order and morphological case marking affect the ability of neural sequence models to acquire the syntax of a language? Cross-linguistic comparisons of RNNs' syntactic performance (e.g., on…
Ontologies are useful for automatic machine processing of domain knowledge as they represent it in a structured format. Yet, constructing ontologies requires substantial manual effort. To automate part of this process, large language models…
Subword tokenization has become the de-facto standard for tokenization, although comparative evaluations of subword vocabulary quality across languages are scarce. Existing evaluation studies focus on the effect of a tokenization algorithm…
Large language models must satisfy hard orthographic constraints during controlled text generation, yet systematic cross-family evaluation remains limited. We evaluate 39 configurations spanning three model families (Qwen3, Claude Haiku…
The spatial character of territorial systems plays a crucial role in the emergence of their complexities. This contribution aims at illustrating to what extent different types of complexities can be exhibited in models of such systems. We…
We investigate inflection structure of a synthetic language using Latin as an example. We construct a bipartite graph in which one group of vertices correspond to dictionary headwords and the other group to inflected forms encountered in a…
We propose a novel approach to translating from a morphologically complex language. Unlike previous research, which has targeted word inflections and concatenations, we focus on the pairwise relationship between morphologically related…
Recent advances in Language Models (LMs) have failed to mask their shortcomings particularly in the domain of reasoning. This limitation impacts several tasks, most notably those involving ontology engineering. As part of a PhD research, we…
We present a study of morphological irregularity. Following recent work, we define an information-theoretic measure of irregularity based on the predictability of forms in a language. Using a neural transduction model, we estimate this…
Esperanto is a widespread constructed language, known for its regular grammar and productive word formation. Besides having substantial resources available thanks to its online community, it remains relatively underexplored in the context…
Intrinsic evaluation metrics for conditional language models, such as perplexity or bits-per-character, are widely used in both mono- and multilingual settings. These metrics are rather straightforward to use and compare in monolingual…