Related papers: Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Tow…
Results reported in large-scale multilingual evaluations are often fragmented and confounded by factors such as target languages, differences in experimental setups, and model choices. We propose a framework that disentangles these…
Recent advancements in pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated that these models possess some degree of syntactic awareness. To leverage this knowledge, we propose a novel chart-based method for extracting parse trees from…
This study examines the extent to which Large Language Models (LLMs) capture geographic lexical variation in Spanish, a language that exhibits substantial regional variation. Treating LLMs as virtual informants, we probe their dialectal…
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present…
One of the biggest challenges of end-to-end language generation from meaning representations in dialogue systems is making the outputs more natural and varied. Here we take a large corpus of 50K crowd-sourced utterances in the restaurant…
We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified…
In translation, a concept represented by a single word in a source language can have multiple variations in a target language. The task of lexical selection requires using context to identify which variation is most appropriate for a source…
Statistical linguistics has advanced considerably in recent decades as data has become available. This has allowed researchers to study how statistical properties of languages change over time. In this work, we use data from Twitter to…
This paper presents a novel treebank-driven approach to comparing syntactic structures in speech and writing using dependency-parsed corpora. Adopting a fully inductive, bottom-up method, we define syntactic structures as delexicalized…
Contact languages like English exhibit rich regional variations in the form of dialects, which are often used by dialect speakers interacting with generative models. However, can multimodal generative models effectively produce content…
While state-of-the-art neural network models continue to achieve lower perplexity scores on language modeling benchmarks, it remains unknown whether optimizing for broad-coverage predictive performance leads to human-like syntactic…
The dissertation addresses the design of parsing grammars for automatic surface-syntactic analysis of unconstrained English text. It consists of a summary and three articles. {\it Morphological disambiguation} documents a grammar for…
The historical and geographical spread from older to more modern languages has long been studied by examining textual changes and in terms of changes in phonetic transcriptions. However, it is more difficult to analyze language change from…
Linguistic typology aims to capture structural and semantic variation across the world's languages. A large-scale typology could provide excellent guidance for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for languages that…
This paper introduces how human languages can be studied in light of recent development of network theories. There are two directions of exploration. One is to study networks existing in the language system. Various lexical networks can be…
This paper describes a web-based corpus of global language use with a focus on how this corpus can be used for data-driven language mapping. First, the corpus provides a representation of where national varieties of major languages are used…
We describe the approach to linguistic variation taken by the Motorola speech synthesizer. A pan-dialectal pronunciation dictionary is described, which serves as the training data for a neural network based letter-to-sound converter.…
Multilingual representations have mostly been evaluated based on their performance on specific tasks. In this article, we look beyond engineering goals and analyze the relations between languages in computational representations. We…
Sequence-to-sequence models excel at handling natural language variation, but have been shown to struggle with out-of-distribution compositional generalization. This has motivated new specialized architectures with stronger compositional…
We present a qualitative analysis of the (potentially erroneous) outputs of contextualized embedding-based methods for detecting diachronic semantic change. First, we introduce an ensemble method outperforming previously described…