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We probe the layers in multilingual BERT (mBERT) for phylogenetic and geographic language signals across 100 languages and compute language distances based on the mBERT representations. We 1) employ the language distances to infer and…

Designing visually diverse and high-quality designs remains a manual, time-consuming process, limiting scalability and personalization in creative workflows. We present a system for generating editable design variations using a decoder-only…

The usual way to interpret language models (LMs) is to test their performance on different benchmarks and subsequently infer their internal processes. In this paper, we present an alternative approach, concentrating on the quality of LM…

More than 80% of the 1.6B English speakers do not use Standard American English (SAE), yet LLMs often fail to correctly identify non-SAE dialects and generate stereotyped responses for their speakers. We introduce DialectLLM, the first…

Phonotactic constraints can be employed to distinguish languages by representing a speech utterance as a multinomial distribution or phone events. In the present study, we propose a new learning mechanism based on subspace-based…

Cultural diversity encoded within languages of the world is at risk, as many languages have become endangered in the last decades in a context of growing globalization. To preserve this diversity, it is first necessary to understand what…

Vietnamese exhibits substantial dialectal phonetic variation across Northern, Central, and Southern regions, where identical lexical items may be realized with markedly different pronunciations. Such variation poses challenges for automatic…

A growing body of literature has focused on detailing the linguistic knowledge embedded in large, pretrained language models. Existing work has shown that non-linguistic biases in models can drive model behavior away from linguistic…

Delta modeling is a modular, yet flexible approach to capture spatial and temporal variability by explicitly representing the differences between system variants or versions. The conceptual idea of delta modeling is language-independent.…

We present a dataset of 19th century American literary orthovariant tokens with a novel layer of human-annotated dialect group tags designed to serve as the basis for computational experiments exploring literarily meaningful orthographic…

Graphemes of most languages encode pronunciation, though some are more explicit than others. Languages like Spanish have a straightforward mapping between its graphemes and phonemes, while this mapping is more convoluted for languages like…

Large Language Models are being used in conversational agents that simulate human conversations and generate social studies data. While concerns about the models' biases have been raised and discussed in the literature, much about the data…

We describe an approach to create a diverse set of predictions with spectral learning of latent-variable PCFGs (L-PCFGs). Our approach works by creating multiple spectral models where noise is added to the underlying features in the…

Correct answers do not necessarily reflect cultural understanding. We introduce CRaFT, an explanation-based multilingual evaluation framework designed to assess how large language models (LLMs) reason across cultural contexts. Rather than…

Cultural variation exists between nations (e.g., the United States vs. China), but also within regions (e.g., California vs. Texas, Los Angeles vs. San Francisco). Measuring this regional cultural variation can illuminate how and why people…

Recent work on the interpretability of deep neural language models has concluded that many properties of natural language syntax are encoded in their representational spaces. However, such studies often suffer from limited scope by focusing…

We propose a learning system in which language is grounded in visual percepts without specific pre-defined categories of terms. We present a unified generative method to acquire a shared semantic/visual embedding that enables the learning…

Decoder-only language models have the ability to dynamically switch between various computational tasks based on input prompts. Despite many successful applications of prompting, there is very limited understanding of the internal mechanism…

In this paper, we discuss Semantic Construction Grammar (SCG), a system developed over the past several years to facilitate translation between natural language and logical representations. Crucially, SCG is designed to support a variety of…

The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer…