Related papers: Predicting cross-linguistic adjective order with i…
Across languages, multiple consecutive adjectives modifying a noun (e.g. "the big red dog") follow certain unmarked ordering rules. While explanatory accounts have been put forward, much of the work done in this area has relied primarily on…
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 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…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
A frequent object of study in linguistic typology is the order of elements {demonstrative, adjective, numeral, noun} in the noun phrase. The goal is to predict the relative frequencies of these orders across languages. Here we use Poisson…
Word order is an important concept in natural language, and in this work, we study how word order affects the induction of world knowledge from raw text using language models. We use word analogies to probe for such knowledge. Specifically,…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
Based on comparable English-Chinese news corpora annotated by Large Language Model (LLM), this paper attempts to explore the differences in constituent order of English-Chinese news from the perspective of functional chunks with adverbial…
As neural language models approach human performance on NLP benchmark tasks, their advances are widely seen as evidence of an increasingly complex understanding of syntax. This view rests upon a hypothesis that has not yet been empirically…
The frequency of the preferred order for a noun phrase formed by demonstrative, numeral, adjective and noun has received significant attention over the last two decades. We investigate the actual distribution of the 24 possible orders.…
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…
The phenomenon of sound symbolism, the non-arbitrary mapping between word sounds and meanings, has long been demonstrated through anecdotal experiments like Bouba Kiki, but rarely tested at scale. We present the first computational…
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…
Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synthetic word-order variants of natural languages. We observe…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
Prior work establishes that controlled contrastiveness between self-generated responses from large language models, set via reward scores, improves downstream preference tuning in English. We extend this method to multiple languages and…
This research offers a new interdisciplinary approach to the field of Linguistics by using Computational Linguistics, NLP, Bayesian Statistics and Sociolinguistics methods. This thesis investigates word order change in infinitival clauses…
Human lexicons contain many different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., "purple" or "magenta" for the same shade of color. On the one hand, studies on language use have explored how speakers adapt their…
Preference optimization techniques have become a standard final stage for training state-of-art large language models (LLMs). However, despite widespread adoption, the vast majority of work to-date has focused on first-class citizen…
We analyse preference inference, through consistency, for general preference languages based on lexicographic models. We identify a property, which we call strong compositionality, that applies for many natural kinds of preference…