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Elucidating the language-brain relationship requires bridging the methodological gap between the abstract theoretical frameworks of linguistics and the empirical neural data of neuroscience. Serving as an interdisciplinary cornerstone,…
The use of causal language in observational studies has raised concerns about overstatement in scientific communication. While some argue that such language should be reserved for randomized controlled trials, others contend that rigorous…
This paper presents a new model for word sense disambiguation formulated in terms of evolutionary game theory, where each word to be disambiguated is represented as a node on a graph whose edges represent word relations and senses are…
We investigate a new setting for foreign language learning, where learners infer the meaning of unfamiliar words in a multimodal context of a sentence describing a paired image. We conduct studies with human participants using different…
Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of…
Word or word-fragment based Language Models (LM) are typically preferred over character-based ones in many downstream applications. This may not be surprising as words seem more linguistically relevant units than characters. Words provide…
Discourse relations bind smaller linguistic elements into coherent texts. However, automatically identifying discourse relations is difficult, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked sentences. A more subtle challenge…
As language technologies gain prominence in real-world settings, it is important to understand how changes to language affect reader perceptions. This can be formalized as the causal effect of varying a linguistic attribute (e.g.,…
We describe an automated method for identifying classes of morphologically related words in an on-line dictionary, and for linking individual senses in the derived form to one or more senses in the base form by means of morphological…
With widening deployments of natural language processing (NLP) in daily life, inherited social biases from NLP models have become more severe and problematic. Previous studies have shown that word embeddings trained on human-generated…
This paper investigates contextual word representation models from the lens of similarity analysis. Given a collection of trained models, we measure the similarity of their internal representations and attention. Critically, these models…
When looking at the structure of natural language, "phrases" and "words" are central notions. We consider the problem of identifying such "meaningful subparts" of language of any length and underlying composition principles in a completely…
Lexical resemblances among a group of languages indicate that the languages could be genetically related, i.e., they could have descended from a common ancestral language. However, such resemblances can arise by chance and, hence, need not…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
Language is contextual as meanings of words are dependent on their contexts. Contextuality is, concomitantly, a well-defined concept in quantum mechanics where it is considered a major resource for quantum computations. We investigate…
Given a specific discourse, which discourse properties trigger the use of metaphorical language, rather than using literal alternatives? For example, what drives people to say "grasp the meaning" rather than "understand the meaning" within…
Informational bias is bias conveyed through sentences or clauses that provide tangential, speculative or background information that can sway readers' opinions towards entities. By nature, informational bias is context-dependent, but…
Language models are trained on large-scale corpora that embed implicit biases documented in psychology. Valence associations (pleasantness/unpleasantness) of social groups determine the biased attitudes towards groups and concepts in social…
A standard form of analysis for linguistic typology is the universal implication. These implications state facts about the range of extant languages, such as ``if objects come after verbs, then adjectives come after nouns.'' Such…
While the embedding of words has revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing, the embedding of concepts has received much less attention so far. A dense and meaningful representation of concepts, however, could prove useful for…