Related papers: Stability of Syntactic Dialect Classification Over…
This paper evaluates global-scale dialect identification for 14 national varieties of English as a means for studying syntactic variation. The paper makes three main contributions: (i) introducing data-driven language mapping as a method…
This paper measures variation in embedding spaces which have been trained on different regional varieties of English while controlling for instability in the embeddings. While previous work has shown that it is possible to distinguish…
While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures…
The goal of this paper is to provide a complete representation of regional linguistic variation on a global scale. To this end, the paper focuses on removing three constraints that have previously limited work within…
Performance of text classification models tends to drop over time due to changes in data, which limits the lifetime of a pretrained model. Therefore an ability to predict a model's ability to persist over time can help design models that…
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…
Several computational models have been developed to detect and analyze dialect variation in recent years. Most of these models assume a predefined set of geographical regions over which they detect and analyze dialectal variation. However,…
Dialect variation is of considerable interest in linguistics and other social sciences. However, traditionally it has been studied using proxies (transcriptions) rather than acoustic recordings directly. We introduce novel statistical…
This paper develops a construction-based dialectometry capable of identifying previously unknown constructions and measuring the degree to which a given construction is subject to regional variation. The central idea is to learn a grammar…
Targeted syntactic evaluations of language models ask whether models show stable preferences for syntactically acceptable content over minimal-pair unacceptable inputs. Most targeted syntactic evaluation datasets ask models to make these…
Contact languages like English exhibit rich regional variations in the form of dialects, which are often used by dialect speakers interacting with generative models. However, can multimodal generative models effectively produce content…
Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…
Evolving data streams induce joint nonstationarity in continual semantic segmentation, where semantic classes, input distributions, and supervision availability change simultaneously over time. This setting reflects practical structured…
The problem of synthetic speech detection has enjoyed considerable attention, with recent methods achieving low error rates across several established benchmarks. However, to what extent can low error rates on academic benchmarks translate…
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…
The evolution of natural languages poses a riddle to any theoretical perspective based on efficiency considerations. If languages are already optimally effective means of organization and communication of thought, why do they change? And if…
Is it possible to develop a `physics of language' which can explain the spatial, temporal and social patterns we see, and which can predict future change like we forecast the weather? Such a theory is likely to involve ideas from…
We present a qualitative analysis of the (potentially erroneous) outputs of contextualized embedding-based methods for detecting diachronic semantic change. First, we introduce an ensemble method outperforming previously described…
Writing style is a combination of consistent decisions at different levels of language production including lexical, syntactic, and structural associated to a specific author (or author groups). While lexical-based models have been widely…
Many studies have shown that human languages tend to optimize for lower complexity and increased communication efficiency. Syntactic dependency distance, which measures the linear distance between dependent words, is often considered a key…