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We present a methodological framework to discover linguistic and discursive patterns associated to different social groups through contrastive synthetic text generation and statistical analysis. In contrast with previous approaches, we aim…
Children can use the statistical regularities of their environment to learn word meanings, a mechanism known as cross-situational learning. We take a computational approach to investigate how the information present during each observation…
This paper studies the effect of linguistic constraints on the large scale organization of language. It describes the properties of linguistic networks built using texts of written language with the words randomized. These properties are…
How predictable a word is can be quantified in two ways: using human responses to the cloze task or using probabilities from language models (LMs).When used as predictors of processing effort, LM probabilities outperform probabilities…
_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…
Bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly undermines their reliability and fairness. We focus on a common form of bias: when two reference concepts in the model's concept space, such as sentiment polarities (e.g., "positive" and…
Traditionally, the formation of vocabularies has been studied by agent-based models (specially, the Naming Game) in which random pairs of agents negotiate word-meaning associations at each discrete time step. This paper proposes a first…
We describe a novel language-independent approach to the task of determining the polarity, positive or negative, of the author's opinion on a specific topic in natural language text. In particular, weights are assigned to attributes,…
Grammaticality and likelihood are distinct notions in human language. Pretrained language models (LMs), which are probabilistic models of language fitted to maximize corpus likelihood, generate grammatically well-formed text and…
This work examines the impact of cross-linguistic transfer on grammatical errors in English as Second Language (ESL) texts. Using a computational framework that formalizes the theory of Contrastive Analysis (CA), we demonstrate that…
In Natural Language Processing (NLP), one traditionally considers a single task (e.g. part-of-speech tagging) for a single language (e.g. English) at a time. However, recent work has shown that it can be beneficial to take advantage of…
Word choice is dependent on the cultural context of writers and their subjects. Different words are used to describe similar actions, objects, and features based on factors such as class, race, gender, geography and political affinity.…
Language Models (LMs) have emerged as powerful sources of evidence for linguists seeking to develop theories of syntax. In this paper, we argue that causal interpretability methods, applied to LMs, can greatly enhance the value of such…
Large Language Models have garnered significant attention for their capabilities in multilingual natural language processing, while studies on risks associated with cross biases are limited to immediate context preferences. Cross-language…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Language has the power to reinforce stereotypes and project social biases onto others. At the core of the challenge is that it is rarely what is stated explicitly, but…
Despite their remarkable ability to capture linguistic nuances across diverse languages, questions persist regarding the degree of alignment between languages in multilingual embeddings. Drawing inspiration from research on high-dimensional…
Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…