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This thesis is about the problem of compositionality in distributional semantics. Distributional semantics presupposes that the meanings of words are a function of their occurrences in textual contexts. It models words as distributions over…
Deception detection is a task with many applications both in direct physical and in computer-mediated communication. Our focus is on automatic deception detection in text across cultures. We view culture through the prism of the…
This paper measures the stability of cross-linguistic register variation. A register is a variety of a language that is associated with extra-linguistic context. The relationship between a register and its context is functional: the…
We characterize the meaning of words with language-independent numerical fingerprints, through a mathematical analysis of recurring patterns in texts. Approximating texts by Markov processes on a long-range time scale, we are able to…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited considerable cross-lingual generalization abilities, whereby they implicitly transfer knowledge across languages. However, the transfer is not equally successful for all languages, especially for…
Most of the world's languages and dialects are low-resource, and lack support in mainstream machine translation (MT) models. However, many of them have a closely-related high-resource language (HRL) neighbor, and differ in linguistically…
Preserving a speaker's voice identity while generating speech in a different language remains a fundamental challenge in spoken language technology, particularly in specialized domains such as scientific communication. In this paper, we…
Language sciences rely less and less on formal syntax as their base. The reason is probably its lack of psychological reality, knowingly avoided. Philosophers of science call for a paradigm shift in which explanations are by mechanisms, as…
Although linguistic typology has a long history, computational approaches have only recently gained popularity. The use of distributed representations in computational linguistics has also become increasingly popular. A recent development…
Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…
In this paper, we propose three methods for generating synthetic samples to train and evaluate multimodal large language models capable of processing both text and speech inputs. Addressing the scarcity of samples containing both…
The goal of this work is to generate natural speech in multiple languages while maintaining the same speaker identity, a task known as cross-lingual speech synthesis. A key challenge of cross-lingual speech synthesis is the language-speaker…
The exploitation of syntactic graphs (SyGs) as a word's context has been shown to be beneficial for distributional semantic models (DSMs), both at the level of individual word representations and in deriving phrasal representations via…
The Random Language Model (De Giuli 2019) is an ensemble of stochastic context-free grammars, quantifying the syntax of human and computer languages. The model suggests a simple picture of first language learning as a type of annealing in…
Data-driven subword segmentation has become the default strategy for open-vocabulary machine translation and other NLP tasks, but may not be sufficiently generic for optimal learning of non-concatenative morphology. We design a test suite…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
This work proposes Adaptive Facilitated Mutation, a self-adaptive mutation method for Structured Grammatical Evolution (SGE), biologically inspired by the theory of facilitated variation. In SGE, the genotype of individuals contains a list…
As it has been unveiled that pre-trained language models (PLMs) are to some extent capable of recognizing syntactic concepts in natural language, much effort has been made to develop a method for extracting complete (binary) parses from…
Using Phylogenetic Algebraic Geometry, we analyze computationally the phylogenetic tree of subfamilies of the Indo-European language family, using data of syntactic structures. The two main sources of syntactic data are the SSWL database…