Related papers: Dual Mechanism Priming Effects in Hindi Word Order
We test the hypothesis that discourse predictability influences Hindi syntactic choice. While prior work has shown that a number of factors (e.g., information status, dependency length, and syntactic surprisal) influence Hindi word order…
We explore which linguistic factors -- at the sentence and token level -- play an important role in influencing language model predictions, and investigate whether these are reflective of results found in humans and human corpora (Gries and…
Previous work has shown that isolated non-canonical sentences with Object-before-Subject (OSV) order are initially harder to process than their canonical counterparts with Subject-before-Object (SOV) order. Although this difficulty…
We investigate the extent to which modern, neural language models are susceptible to structural priming, the phenomenon whereby the structure of a sentence makes the same structure more probable in a follow-up sentence. We explore how…
Since language models are used to model a wide variety of languages, it is natural to ask whether the neural architectures used for the task have inductive biases towards modeling particular types of languages. Investigation of these biases…
Models trained to estimate word probabilities in context have become ubiquitous in natural language processing. How do these models use lexical cues in context to inform their word probabilities? To answer this question, we present a case…
The principle of DEPENDENCY LENGTH MINIMIZATION, which seeks to keep syntactically related words close in a sentence, is thought to universally shape the structure of human languages for effective communication. However, the extent to which…
Neural language models are a critical component of state-of-the-art systems for machine translation, summarization, audio transcription, and other tasks. These language models are almost universally autoregressive in nature, generating…
Despite the centrality of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) to bilingualism research, human studies often yield conflicting results due to inherent experimental variance. We address these inconsistencies by using language models (LMs) as…
This study evaluates the performance of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Transformer models in replicating cross-language structural priming, a key indicator of abstract grammatical representations in human language processing. Focusing…
Pretraining Neural Language Models (NLMs) over a large corpus involves chunking the text into training examples, which are contiguous text segments of sizes processable by the neural architecture. We highlight a bias introduced by this…
In this paper, we present our work on the creation of lexical resources for the Machine Translation between English and Hindi. We describes the development of phrase pair mappings for our experiments and the comparative performance…
Crosslingual transfer is crucial to contemporary language models' multilingual capabilities, but how it occurs is not well understood. We ask what happens to a monolingual language model when it begins to be trained on a second language.…
We conducted three experiments to investigate how large language models (LLMs) evaluate posterior probabilities. Our results reveal the coexistence of two modes in posterior judgment among state-of-the-art models: a normative mode, which…
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…
The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We…
Word ordering is a constrained language generation task taking unordered words as input. Existing work uses linear models and neural networks for the task, yet pre-trained language models have not been studied in word ordering, let alone…
English to Indian language machine translation poses the challenge of structural and morphological divergence. This paper describes English to Indian language statistical machine translation using pre-ordering and suffix separation. The…
How do typological properties such as word order and morphological case marking affect the ability of neural sequence models to acquire the syntax of a language? Cross-linguistic comparisons of RNNs' syntactic performance (e.g., on…
We use both Bayesian and neural models to dissect a data set of Chinese learners' pre- and post-interventional responses to two tests measuring their understanding of English prepositions. The results mostly replicate previous findings from…