Related papers: Cross-linguistic differences in gender congruency …

There exist both scalable tasks, like reading comprehension and fact-checking, where model performance improves with model size, and unscalable tasks, like arithmetic reasoning and symbolic reasoning, where model performance does not…

Machine translation systems with inadequate document understanding can make errors when translating dropped or neutral pronouns into languages with gendered pronouns (e.g., English). Predicting the underlying gender of these pronouns is…

Are the predictions of humans and language models affected by similar things? Research suggests that while comprehending language, humans make predictions about upcoming words, with more predictable words being processed more easily.…

Model interpretability methods are often used to explain NLP model decisions on tasks such as text classification, where the output space is relatively small. However, when applied to language generation, where the output space often…

Automatic image description systems are commonly trained and evaluated on large image description datasets. Recently, researchers have started to collect such datasets for languages other than English. An unexplored question is how…

Third-person singular pronouns have long been used to study stereotypical biases in language models and to test their abilities to reason about reference. More recently, the interplay between reasoning and bias has been investigated with…

Humans exhibit garden path effects: When reading sentences that are temporarily structurally ambiguous, they slow down when the structure is disambiguated in favor of the less preferred alternative. Surprisal theory (Hale, 2001; Levy,…

Recent studies have shown that word embeddings exhibit gender bias inherited from the training corpora. However, most studies to date have focused on quantifying and mitigating such bias only in English. These analyses cannot be directly…

Pronouns are important determinants of a text's meaning but difficult to translate. This is because pronoun choice can depend on entities described in previous sentences, and in some languages pronouns may be dropped when the referent is…

The correct use of Dutch pronouns 'die' and 'dat' is a stumbling block for both native and non-native speakers of Dutch due to the multiplicity of syntactic functions and the dependency on the antecedent's gender and number. Drawing on…

A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…

Studies of word production often make use of picture naming tasks, including the picture word interference task. In this task, participants name pictures with superimposed distractor words. They typically need more time to name pictures…

Subject-verb agreement in the presence of an attractor noun located between the main noun and the verb elicits complex behavior: judgments of grammaticality are modulated by the grammatical features of the attractor. For example, in the…

Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) process spoken input directly, retaining cues such as accent and perceived gender that were previously removed in cascaded pipelines. This introduces speaker identity dependent variation in…

We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…

The rapid deployment of generative language models (LMs) has raised concerns about social biases affecting the well-being of diverse consumers. The extant literature on generative LMs has primarily examined bias via explicit identity…

Small and mid-sized generative language models have gained increasing attention. Their size and availability make them amenable to being analyzed at a behavioral as well as a representational level, allowing investigations of how these…

Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in their…

The recent increase in data and model scale for language model pre-training has led to huge training costs. In scenarios where new data become available over time, updating a model instead of fully retraining it would therefore provide…

Research on bias in Text-to-Image (T2I) models has primarily focused on demographic representation and stereotypical attributes, overlooking a fundamental question: how does grammatical gender influence visual representation across…