Related papers: Syntactic Variation Across the Grammar: Modelling …

The intricate hierarchical structure of syntax is fundamental to the intricate and systematic nature of human language. This study investigates the premise that language models, specifically their attention distributions, can encapsulate…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) are ubiquitous in modern day natural language processing. However, previous work has shown degraded LLM performance for under-represented English dialects. We analyze the effects of typifying "standard" American…

Although there are more than 6,500 languages in the world, the pronunciations of many phonemes sound similar across the languages. When people learn a foreign language, their pronunciation often reflects their native language's…

We present a systematic review of 337 articles evaluating the syntactic abilities of Transformer-based language models (TLMs), reporting on over 3,000 datapoints spanning a wide range of syntactic phenomena, languages, models, and methods.…

Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish…

In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…

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…

Existing large language models (LLMs) that mainly focus on Standard American English (SAE) often lead to significantly worse performance when being applied to other English dialects. While existing mitigations tackle discrepancies for…

Effectively normalizing textual data poses a considerable challenge, especially for low-resource languages lacking standardized writing systems. In this study, we fine-tuned a multilingual model with data from several Occitan dialects and…

This study investigates the consequences of training language models on synthetic data generated by their predecessors, an increasingly prevalent practice given the prominence of powerful generative models. Diverging from the usual emphasis…

The dissertation addresses the design of parsing grammars for automatic surface-syntactic analysis of unconstrained English text. It consists of a summary and three articles. {\it Morphological disambiguation} documents a grammar for…

This paper presents a study on mutual speech variation influences in a human-computer setting. The study highlights behavioral patterns in data collected as part of a shadowing experiment, and is performed using a novel end-to-end platform…

Grammar refers to the system of rules that governs the structural organization and the semantic relations among linguistic units such as sentences, phrases, and words within a given language. In natural language processing, there remains a…

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…

Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature,…

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…

This work proposes Adaptive Facilitated Mutation, a self-adaptive mutation method for Structured Grammatical Evolution (SGE), biologically inspired by the theory of facilitated variation. In SGE, the genotype of individuals contains a list…

Humans continuously adapt their style and language to a variety of domains. However, a reliable definition of `domain' has eluded researchers thus far. Additionally, the notion of discrete domains stands in contrast to the multiplicity of…

It has been claimed that within a language, morphologically irregular words are more likely to be phonotactically simple and morphologically regular words are more likely to be phonotactically complex. This inverse correlation has been…