Related papers: Finding Concept-specific Biases in Form--Meaning A…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
Morphological analysis involves predicting the syntactic traits of a word (e.g. {POS: Noun, Case: Acc, Gender: Fem}). Previous work in morphological tagging improves performance for low-resource languages (LRLs) through cross-lingual…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
Human word associations are a well-known method of gaining insight into the internal mental lexicon, but the responses spontaneously offered by human participants to word cues are not always predictable as they may be influenced by personal…
A longstanding debate in semiotics centers on the relationship between linguistic signs and their corresponding semantics: is there an arbitrary relationship between a word form and its meaning, or does some systematic phenomenon pervade?…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
A theoretical framework is proposed for the understanding of verbal perception -- the conversion of words into meaning, modeled as a compromise between lexical demands and contextual constraints -- and the theory is tested against…
In many applications of natural language processing it is necessary to determine the likelihood of a given word combination. For example, a speech recognizer may need to determine which of the two word combinations ``eat a peach'' and ``eat…
Since many real-world concepts are associated with colour, for example danger with red, linguistic information is often complimented with the use of appropriate colours in information visualization and product marketing. Yet, there is no…
Latent semantic similarity (LSS) is a measure of the similarity of information exchanges in a conversation. Challenging the assumption that higher LSS bears more positive psychological meaning, we propose that this association might depend…
As Large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into our lives, their inherent social biases remain a pressing concern. Detecting and evaluating these biases can be challenging because they are often implicit rather than…
The societal impact of pre-trained language models has prompted researchers to probe them for strong associations between protected attributes and value-loaded terms, from slur to prestigious job titles. Such work is said to probe models…
In cross-lingual language models, representations for many different languages live in the same space. Here, we investigate the linguistic and non-linguistic factors affecting sentence-level alignment in cross-lingual pretrained language…
In many applications of natural language processing (NLP) it is necessary to determine the likelihood of a given word combination. For example, a speech recognizer may need to determine which of the two word combinations ``eat a peach'' and…
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…
Biased language commonly occurs around topics which are of controversial nature, thus, stirring disagreement between the different involved parties of a discussion. This is due to the fact that for language and its use, specifically, the…
NLP research on aligning lexical representation spaces to one another has so far focused on aligning language spaces in their entirety. However, cognitive science has long focused on a local perspective, investigating whether translation…
Slanted news coverage, also called media bias, can heavily influence how news consumers interpret and react to the news. To automatically identify biased language, we present an exploratory approach that compares the context of related…
Heuristics and cognitive biases are an integral part of human decision-making. Automatically detecting a particular cognitive bias could enable intelligent tools to provide better decision-support. Detecting the presence of a cognitive bias…