Related papers: Syntactic Variation Across the Grammar: Modelling …
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…
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…
This paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification…
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…
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…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
An individual's variation in writing style is often a function of both social and personal attributes. While structured social variation has been extensively studied, e.g., gender based variation, far less is known about how to characterize…
This research aims to investigate the dynamic nature of linguistic style throughout various stages of life, from post teenage to old age. By employing linguistic analysis tools and methodologies, the study will delve into the intricacies of…
Received wisdom in linguistic typology holds that if the structure of a language becomes more complex in one dimension, it will simplify in another, building on the assumption that all languages are equally complex (Joseph and Newmeyer,…
Large language models (LLMs) can reliably distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, but how grammatical knowledge is represented within the models remains an open question. We investigate whether different syntactic phenomena…
While state-of-the-art neural network models continue to achieve lower perplexity scores on language modeling benchmarks, it remains unknown whether optimizing for broad-coverage predictive performance leads to human-like syntactic…
This paper presents a novel treebank-driven approach to comparing syntactic structures in speech and writing using dependency-parsed corpora. Adopting a fully inductive, bottom-up method, we define syntactic structures as delexicalized…
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,…
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…
Social media features substantial stylistic variation, raising new challenges for syntactic analysis of online writing. However, this variation is often aligned with author attributes such as age, gender, and geography, as well as more…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
Semantics, morphology and syntax are strongly interdependent. However, the majority of computational methods for semantic change detection use distributional word representations which encode mostly semantics. We investigate an alternative…