Related papers: Beyond Distributional Hypothesis: Let Language Mod…

The non-humanlike behaviour of contemporary pre-trained language models (PLMs) is a leading cause undermining their trustworthiness. A striking phenomenon of such faulty behaviours is the generation of inconsistent predictions, which…

Natural language processing (NLP) tasks tend to suffer from a paucity of suitably annotated training data, hence the recent success of transfer learning across a wide variety of them. The typical recipe involves: (i) training a deep,…

Large language models (LLMs) are the result of a massive experiment in bottom-up, data-driven reverse engineering of language at scale. Despite their utility in a number of downstream NLP tasks, ample research has shown that LLMs are…

Negation is a common and important semantic feature in natural language, yet Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle when negation is involved in natural language understanding tasks. Commonsense knowledge, on the other hand, despite being a…

The relationship between communicated language and intended meaning is often probabilistic and sensitive to context. Numerous strategies attempt to estimate such a mapping, often leveraging recursive Bayesian models of communication. In…

Although large language models (LLMs) have apparently acquired a certain level of grammatical knowledge and the ability to make generalizations, they fail to interpret negation, a crucial step in Natural Language Processing. We try to…

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…

Simile interpretation (SI) and simile generation (SG) are challenging tasks for NLP because models require adequate world knowledge to produce predictions. Previous works have employed many hand-crafted resources to bring knowledge-related…

Simile interpretation is a crucial task in natural language processing. Nowadays, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many tasks. However, it remains under-explored whether PLMs can interpret…

Language modeling studies the probability distributions over strings of texts. It is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). It has been widely used in text generation, speech recognition, machine…

Language models (LMs) have been argued to overlap substantially with human beings in grammaticality judgment tasks. But when humans systematically make errors in language processing, should we expect LMs to behave like cognitive models of…

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have produced substantial improvements in discourse-aware neural machine translation (NMT), for example, improved coherence in spoken language translation. However, the underlying reasons for their strong…

Machine learning practitioners often face significant challenges in formally integrating their prior knowledge and beliefs into predictive models, limiting the potential for nuanced and context-aware analyses. Moreover, the expertise needed…

A recent study (Kuribayashi et al., 2025) has shown that human sentence processing behavior, typically measured on syntactically unchallenging constructions, can be effectively modeled using surprisal from early layers of large language…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, recent literature reveals that LLMs generate nonfactual responses intermittently, which impedes the LLMs' reliability for further…

As language models (LMs) deliver increasing performance on a range of NLP tasks, probing classifiers have become an indispensable technique in the effort to better understand their inner workings. A typical setup involves (1) defining an…

Analogical reasoning -- the capacity to identify and map structural relationships between different domains -- is fundamental to human cognition and learning. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can sometimes match…

Probing and enhancing large language models' reasoning capacity remains a crucial open question. Here we re-purpose the reverse dictionary task as a case study to probe LLMs' capacity for conceptual inference. We use in-context learning to…

Language understanding is a multi-faceted cognitive capability, which the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has striven to model computationally for decades. Traditionally, facets of linguistic intelligence have been…

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…