Related papers: Investigating Cross-Linguistic Adjective Ordering …
In English and other languages, multiple adjectives in noun phrases follow intricate ordering patterns. These patterns have been widely studied in linguistics and provide a useful test case for assessing how language models (LMs) acquire…
Languages vary in their placement of multiple adjectives before, after, or surrounding the noun, but they typically exhibit strong intra-language tendencies on the relative order of those adjectives (e.g., the preference for `big blue box'…
Despite large language models' (LLMs) recent advancements, their bias and hallucination issues persist, and their ability to offer consistent preferential rankings remains underexplored. This study investigates the capacity of LLMs to…
Different languages might have different word orders. In this paper, we investigate cross-lingual transfer and posit that an order-agnostic model will perform better when transferring to distant foreign languages. To test our hypothesis, we…
Surveys have recently gained popularity as a tool to study large language models. By comparing survey responses of models to those of human reference populations, researchers aim to infer the demographics, political opinions, or values best…
The evaluative character of a word is called its semantic orientation. A positive semantic orientation implies desirability (e.g., "honest", "intrepid") and a negative semantic orientation implies undesirability (e.g., "disturbing",…
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…
Associative learning--forming links between co-occurring items--is fundamental to human cognition, reshaping internal representations in complex ways. Testing hypotheses on how representational changes occur in biological systems is…
Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female…
We use large-scale corpora in six different gendered languages, along with tools from NLP and information theory, to test whether there is a relationship between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjectives used to describe…
Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at…
Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…
Empirical grammar research has become increasingly data-driven, but the systematic analysis of annotated corpora still requires substantial methodological and technical effort. We explore how agentic large language models (LLMs) can…
This paper investigates biases of Large Language Models (LLMs) through the lens of grammatical gender. Drawing inspiration from seminal works in psycholinguistics, particularly the study of gender's influence on language perception, we…
This work aims at modeling how the meaning of gradable adjectives of size (`big', `small') can be learned from visually-grounded contexts. Inspired by cognitive and linguistic evidence showing that the use of these expressions relies on…
Small and mid-sized generative language models have gained increasing attention. Their size and availability make them amenable to being analyzed at a behavioral as well as a representational level, allowing investigations of how these…
Current state-of-the-art models for sentiment analysis make use of word order either explicitly by pre-training on a language modeling objective or implicitly by using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or convolutional networks (CNNs). This…
We show how to predict the basic word-order facts of a novel language given only a corpus of part-of-speech (POS) sequences. We predict how often direct objects follow their verbs, how often adjectives follow their nouns, and in general the…
Word order variances generally exist in different languages. In this paper, we hypothesize that cross-lingual models that fit into the word order of the source language might fail to handle target languages. To verify this hypothesis, we…
Probing techniques for large language models (LLMs) have primarily focused on English, overlooking the vast majority of the world's languages. In this paper, we extend these probing methods to a multilingual context, investigating the…