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Understanding the representations of different languages in multilingual language models is essential for comprehending their cross-lingual properties, predicting their performance on downstream tasks, and identifying any biases across…
How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major…
Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…
We suggest an information-theoretic approach for measuring stylistic coordination in dialogues. The proposed measure has a simple predictive interpretation and can account for various confounding factors through proper conditioning. We…
Despite substantial research efforts evaluating how well large language models~(LLMs) handle global cultural diversity, the mechanisms behind their cultural knowledge acquisition, particularly in multilingual settings, remain unclear. We…
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers are subject to a communicative pressure to distribute information evenly within utterances, minimising surprisal variance. While this hypothesis has been tested…
Recent work to enhance data partitioning strategies for more realistic model evaluation face challenges in providing a clear optimal choice. This study addresses these challenges, focusing on morphological segmentation and synthesizing…
Multilingual Large Language Models (mLLMs) leaderboards report per-language accuracy but rarely explain why disparities emerge, leaving systemic biases unattributed and offering practitioners no actionable levers. We first establish that…
Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to…
Linguistic typology studies the range of structures present in human language. The main goal of the field is to discover which sets of possible phenomena are universal, and which are merely frequent. For example, all languages have vowels,…
AI-text detectors achieve high accuracy on in-domain benchmarks, but often struggle to generalize across different generation conditions such as unseen prompts, model families, or domains. While prior work has reported these generalization…
This paper introduces how human languages can be studied in light of recent development of network theories. There are two directions of exploration. One is to study networks existing in the language system. Various lexical networks can be…
Do speakers of different languages talk differently about what they see? Behavioural and cognitive studies report cultural effects on perception; however, these are mostly limited in scope and hard to replicate. In this work, we conduct the…
The success of multilingual pre-trained models is underpinned by their ability to learn representations shared by multiple languages even in absence of any explicit supervision. However, it remains unclear how these models learn to…
Many languages' inflectional morphological systems are replete with irregulars, i.e., words that do not seem to follow standard inflectional rules. In this work, we quantitatively investigate the conditions under which irregulars can…
Linguistics holds unique characteristics of generality, stability, and nationality, which will affect the formulation of extraction strategies and should be incorporated into the relation extraction. Chinese open relation extraction is not…
Machine-translated data is widely used in multilingual NLP, particularly when native text is scarce. However, translated text differs systematically from native text. This phenomenon is known as translationese, and it reflects both traces…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
Language is not only a tool for communication but also a medium for human cognition and reasoning. If, as linguistic relativity suggests, the structure of language shapes cognitive patterns, then large language models (LLMs) trained on…