Related papers: The syntax-lexicon tradeoff in writing
Syntax connects words to each other in very specific ways. Two words are syntactically connected if they depend directly on each other. Syntactic connections usually happen within a sentence. Gathering all those connection across several…
Syntax is a latent hierarchical structure which underpins the robust and compositional nature of human language. In this work, we explore the hypothesis that syntactic dependencies can be represented in language model attention…
Language sciences rely less and less on formal syntax as their base. The reason is probably its lack of psychological reality, knowingly avoided. Philosophers of science call for a paradigm shift in which explanations are by mechanisms, as…
Understanding the vulnerability of linguistic features extracted from noisy text is important for both developing better health text classification models and for interpreting vulnerabilities of natural language models. In this paper, we…
Natural languages display a trade-off among different strategies to convey syntactic structure, such as word order or inflection. This trade-off, however, has not appeared in recent simulations of iterated language learning with neural…
The syntactic structures of sentences can be readily read-out from the activations of large language models (LLMs). However, the ``structural probes'' that have been developed to reveal this phenomenon are typically evaluated on an…
Syntactic theory has traditionally adopted a constructivist approach, in which a set of atomic elements are manipulated by combinatory operations to yield derived, complex elements. Syntactic structure is thus seen as the result or discrete…
With a growing interest in modeling inherent subjectivity in natural language, we present a linguistically-motivated process to understand and analyze the writing style of individuals from three perspectives: lexical, syntactic, and…
We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer's recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence.…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
Sentence simplification aims to make sentences easier to read and understand. Recent approaches have shown promising results with sequence-to-sequence models which have been developed assuming homogeneous target audiences. In this paper we…
Maintaining information in context is essential in successful real-time language comprehension, but maintenance is cognitively costly and can slow processing. We hypothesize that rational language users selectively maintain information that…
Post-hoc explanation methods are an important tool for increasing model transparency for users. Unfortunately, the currently used methods for attributing token importance often yield diverging patterns. In this work, we study potential…
Natural languages are complexly structured entities. They exhibit characterising regularities that can be exploited to link them one another. In this work, I compare two morphological aspects of languages: Written Patterns and Sentence…
Sentences that present a complex syntax act as a major stumbling block for downstream Natural Language Processing applications whose predictive quality deteriorates with sentence length and complexity. The task of Text Simplification (TS)…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
In the last half-decade, the field of natural language processing (NLP) has undergone two major transitions: the switch to neural networks as the primary modeling paradigm and the homogenization of the training regime (pre-train, then…
Dependency syntax represents the structure of a sentence as a tree composed of dependencies, i.e., directed relations between lexical units. While in its more general form any such tree is allowed, in practice many are not plausible or are…
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
Legal interpretation is a linguistic venture. In judicial opinions, for example, courts are often asked to interpret the text of statutes and legislation. As time has shown, this is not always as easy as it sounds. Matters can hinge on…