Related papers: Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Tow…
Modern work on the cross-linguistic computational modeling of morphological inflection has typically employed language-independent data splitting algorithms. In this paper, we supplement that approach with language-specific probes designed…
Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…
When comparing speech sounds across languages, scholars often make use of feature representations of individual sounds in order to determine fine-grained sound similarities. Although binary feature systems for large numbers of speech sounds…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) still exhibit large performance gaps between English and other languages, yet much current work assumes these gaps can be closed simply by making reasoning in every language resemble English reasoning. This…
This paper measures variation in embedding spaces which have been trained on different regional varieties of English while controlling for instability in the embeddings. While previous work has shown that it is possible to distinguish…
Recent advances in data-driven models for grounded language understanding have enabled robots to interpret increasingly complex instructions. Two fundamental limitations of these methods are that most require a full model of the environment…
Is it possible to develop a `physics of language' which can explain the spatial, temporal and social patterns we see, and which can predict future change like we forecast the weather? Such a theory is likely to involve ideas from…
In this article we propose a novel method to estimate the frequency distribution of linguistic variables while controlling for statistical non-independence due to shared ancestry. Unlike previous approaches, our technique uses all available…
Language technologies should be judged on their usefulness in real-world use cases. An often overlooked aspect in natural language processing (NLP) research and evaluation is language variation in the form of non-standard dialects or…
Languages continually evolve in response to societal events, resulting in new terms and shifts in meanings. These changes have significant implications for computer applications, including automatic translation and chatbots, making it…
The patterns in which the syntax of different languages converges and diverges are often used to inform work on cross-lingual transfer. Nevertheless, little empirical work has been done on quantifying the prevalence of different syntactic…
Lexical-syntactic flexibility, in the form of conversion (or zero-derivation) is a hallmark of English morphology. In conversion, a word with one part of speech is placed in a non-prototypical context, where it is coerced to behave as if it…
Human annotation for syntactic parsing is expensive, and large resources are available only for a fraction of languages. A question we ask is whether one can leverage abundant unlabeled texts to improve syntactic parsers, beyond just using…
Dislocations - linear defects within the crystal lattice of, e.g., metals - already have been directly observed and analyzed for nearly a century. While experimental characterization methods can nowadays reconstruct three-dimensional…
We present a systematic review of 337 articles evaluating the syntactic abilities of Transformer-based language models (TLMs), reporting on over 3,000 datapoints spanning a wide range of syntactic phenomena, languages, models, and methods.…
What makes some types of languages more probable than others? For instance, we know that almost all spoken languages contain the vowel phoneme /i/; why should that be? The field of linguistic typology seeks to answer these questions and,…
In this paper, we introduce a sociolinguistic perspective on language modeling. We claim that large language models are inherently models of varieties of language, and we consider how this insight can inform the development and deployment…
Speech-driven facial animation aims to synthesize lip-synchronized 3D talking faces following the given speech signal. Prior methods to this task mostly focus on pursuing realism with deterministic systems, yet characterizing the…
Recent research has shown that language and the socio-cognitive phenomena associated with it can be aptly modeled and visualized through networks of linguistic entities. However, most of the existing works on linguistic networks focus only…
This work describes experiments which probe the hidden representations of several BERT-style models for morphological content. The goal is to examine the extent to which discrete linguistic structure, in the form of morphological features…