Related papers: Does Dependency Locality Predict Non-canonical Wor…
Sequence-processing neural networks led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks. As a consequence, there has been increasing interest in understanding to what extent they process language as humans do. We aim here to uncover which biases…
Pro-drop is commonly seen in many languages, but its discourse motivations have not been well characterized. Inspired by the topic chain theory in Chinese, this study shows how character-verb usage continuity distinguishes dropped pronouns…
This paper proposes a corpus-based language model for topic identification. We analyze the association of noun-noun and noun-verb pairs in LOB Corpus. The word association norms are based on three factors: 1) word importance, 2) pair…
Word alignment is an important natural language processing task that indicates the correspondence between natural languages. Recently, unsupervised learning of log-linear models for word alignment has received considerable attention as it…
The impressive performance of neural networks on natural language processing tasks attributes to their ability to model complicated word and phrase compositions. To explain how the model handles semantic compositions, we study hierarchical…
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…
Even though online social movements can quickly become viral on social media, languages can be a barrier to timely monitoring and analyzing the underlying online social behaviors (OSB). This is especially true for under-resourced languages…
Static word embeddings encode word associations, extensively utilized in downstream NLP tasks. Although prior studies have discussed the nature of such word associations in terms of biases and lexical regularities captured, the variation in…
The taggedPBC (Ring 2025a) contains more than 1,800 sentences of pos-tagged parallel text data from over 1,500 languages, representing 133 language families and 111 isolates. While this dwarfs previously available resources, and the POS…
Traditionally linguists have organized languages of the world as language families modelled as trees. In this work we take a contrarian approach and question the tree-based model that is rather restrictive. For example, the affinity that…
We argue that semantic meanings of a sentence or clause can not be interpreted independently from the rest of a paragraph, or independently from all discourse relations and the overall paragraph-level discourse structure. With the goal of…
The problem of accurately predicting relative reading difficulty across a set of sentences arises in a number of important natural language applications, such as finding and curating effective usage examples for intelligent language…
Syntactic structures used to play a vital role in natural language processing (NLP), but since the deep learning revolution, NLP has been gradually dominated by neural models that do not consider syntactic structures in their design. One…
Sentence formation is a highly structured, history-dependent, and sample-space reducing (SSR) process. While the first word in a sentence can be chosen from the entire vocabulary, typically, the freedom of choosing subsequent words gets…
Neural dependency parsing has achieved remarkable performance for low resource morphologically rich languages. It has also been well-studied that morphologically rich languages exhibit relatively free word order. This prompts a fundamental…
Neural language models trained with a predictive or masked objective have proven successful at capturing short and long distance syntactic dependencies. Here, we focus on verb argument structure in German, which has the interesting property…
It is well known that the length of a syntactic dependency determines its online memory cost. Thus, the problem of the placement of a head and its dependents (complements or modifiers) that minimizes online memory is equivalent to the…
Previous works show that deep NLP models are not always conceptually sound: they do not always learn the correct linguistic concepts. Specifically, they can be insensitive to word order. In order to systematically evaluate models for their…
This study examines whether sentence-level memory load in comprehension is better explained by linear proximity between syntactically related words or by the structural density of the intervening material. Building on locality-based…
The corpus, from which a predictive language model is trained, can be considered the experience of a semantic system. We recorded everyday reading of two participants for two months on a tablet, generating individual corpus samples of…