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Among the several findings deriving from the application of complex network formalism to the investigation of natural phenomena, the fact that linguistic constructions follow power laws presents special interest for its potential…
Do speakers of different languages talk differently about what they see? Behavioural and cognitive studies report cultural effects on perception; however, these are mostly limited in scope and hard to replicate. In this work, we conduct the…
Lexical resources are crucial for cross-linguistic analysis and can provide new insights into computational models for natural language learning. Here, we present an advanced database for comparative studies of words with multiple meanings,…
Vocabulary learning by children can be characterized by many biases. When encountering a new word, children as well as adults, are biased towards assuming that it means something totally different from the words that they already know. To…
A foundational assumption in linguistics holds that the relationship between a word's sound and its meaning is arbitrary. Accumulating evidence from sound symbolism challenges this view, yet no study has systematically mapped the…
Low-frequency words place a major challenge for automatic speech recognition (ASR). The probabilities of these words, which are often important name entities, are generally under-estimated by the language model (LM) due to their limited…
While cross-linguistic model transfer is effective in many settings, there is still limited understanding of the conditions under which it works. In this paper, we focus on assessing the role of lexical semantics in cross-lingual transfer,…
We describe an algorithm for automatic classification of idiomatic and literal expressions. Our starting point is that words in a given text segment, such as a paragraph, that are highranking representatives of a common topic of discussion…
Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when…
An interesting line of research in natural language processing (NLP) aims to incorporate linguistic typology to bridge linguistic diversity and assist the research of low-resource languages. While most works construct linguistic similarity…
We present an algorithm that takes an unannotated corpus as its input, and returns a ranked list of probable morphologically related pairs as its output. The algorithm tries to discover morphologically related pairs by looking for pairs…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making tasks like r\'esum\'e screening and content moderation, giving them the power to amplify or suppress certain perspectives. While previous research has identified…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
Semantically non-compositional phrases constitute an intriguing research topic in Natural Language Processing. Semantic non-compositionality --the situation when the meaning of a phrase cannot be derived from the meaning of its components,…
Are pairs of words that tend to occur together also likely to stand in a linguistic dependency? This empirical question is motivated by a long history of literature in cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and NLP. In this work we…
Pretrained multilingual models exhibit the same social bias as models processing English texts. This systematic review analyzes emerging research that extends bias evaluation and mitigation approaches into multilingual and non-English…
Cross-lingual representations of words enable us to reason about word meaning in multilingual contexts and are a key facilitator of cross-lingual transfer when developing natural language processing models for low-resource languages. In…
Research has shown that while large language models (LLMs) can generate their responses based on cultural context, they are not perfect and tend to generalize across cultures. However, when evaluating the cultural bias of a language…
The meaning of polysemous words often varies in a highly productive yet predictable way. Generalizing the regularity between conventional senses to derive novel word meaning is crucial for automated processing of non-literal language uses…
Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain…