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Robust, faithful and harm-free pronoun use for individuals is an important goal for language model development as their use increases, but prior work tends to study only one or two of these characteristics at a time. To measure progress…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
We ask where, and under what conditions, dyslexic reading costs arise in a large-scale naturalistic reading dataset. Using eye-tracking aligned to word-level features (word length, frequency, and predictability), we model how each feature…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
Neural morphological generation systems often achieve high aggregate accuracy on benchmark datasets, yet such performance can conceal systematic errors concentrated in rare morphological subclasses. We examine Japanese past-tense verb…
Regularization occurs when the output a learner produces is less variable than the linguistic data they observed. In an artificial language learning experiment, we show that there exist at least two independent sources of regularization…
Human recursive numeral systems (i.e., counting systems such as English base-10 numerals), like many other grammatical systems, are highly regular. Following prior work that relates cross-linguistic tendencies to biases in learning, we ask…
Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…
A topological argument is presented concering the structure of semantic space, based on the negative correlation between polysemy and word length. The resulting graph structure is applied to the modeling of free-recall experiments,…
In this paper I propose a new way of measuring linguistic productivity that objectively assesses the ability of an affix to be used to coin new complex words and, unlike other popular measures, is not directly dependent upon token…
The question What is Complexity? has occupied a great deal of time and paper over the last 20 or so years. There are a myriad different perspectives and definitions but still no consensus. In this paper I take a phenomenological approach,…
The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…
A methodology based upon recurrence quantification analysis is proposed for the study of orthographic structure of written texts. Five different orthographic data sets (20th century Italian poems, 20th century American poems, contemporary…
Term frequency normalization is a serious issue since lengths of documents are various. Generally, documents become long due to two different reasons - verbosity and multi-topicality. First, verbosity means that the same topic is repeatedly…
Listening habits are strongly influenced by two opposing aspects, the desire for variety and the demand for uniformity in music. In this work we quantify these two notions in terms of musical instrumentation and production technologies that…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant progress on various multilingual benchmarks and are increasingly used to generate and evaluate text in non-English languages. However, while they may produce fluent outputs, it remains…
We examine deterministic and nondeterministic state complexities of regular operations on prefix-free languages. We strengthen several results by providing witness languages over smaller alphabets, usually as small as possible. We next…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
Large language models (LLMs) can produce erroneous responses that sound fluent and convincing, raising the risk that users will rely on these responses as if they were correct. Mitigating such overreliance is a key challenge. Through a…
How language-agnostic are current state-of-the-art NLP tools? Are there some types of language that are easier to model with current methods? In prior work (Cotterell et al., 2018) we attempted to address this question for language…