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The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that…
Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and…
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…
Despite the recent increase in research on artificial intelligence for music, prominent correlations between key components of lyrics and rhythm such as keywords, stressed syllables, and strong beats are not frequently studied. This is…
This work presents an information-theoretic operationalisation of cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. It is not a new idea that there are small, cross-linguistic associations between the forms and meanings of words. For instance, it has…
Large-scale pretrained language models are the major driving force behind recent improvements in performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge, a widely employed test of common sense reasoning ability. We show, however, with a new diagnostic…
Word complexity is defined in a number of different ways. Psycholinguistic, morphological and lexical proxies are often used. Human ratings are also used. The problem here is that these proxies do not measure complexity directly, and human…
For general modeling methods applied to diverse languages, a natural question is: how well should we expect our models to work on languages with differing typological profiles? In this work, we develop an evaluation framework for fair…
Facts are subject to contingencies and can be true or false in different circumstances. One such contingency is time, wherein some facts mutate over a given period, e.g., the president of a country or the winner of a championship.…
Metamorphic testing has recently been used to check the safety of neural NLP models. Its main advantage is that it does not rely on a ground truth to generate test cases. However, existing studies are mostly concerned with robustness-like…
As NLP tools become ubiquitous in today's technological landscape, they are increasingly applied to languages with a variety of typological structures. However, NLP research does not focus primarily on typological differences in its…
Recent research has adopted a new experimental field centered around the concept of text perturbations which has revealed that shuffled word order has little to no impact on the downstream performance of Transformer-based language models…
Existing methods for complexity estimation are typically developed for entire documents. This limitation in scope makes them inapplicable for shorter pieces of text, such as health assessment tools. These typically consist of lists of…
Frequency counts are a measure of how much use a language makes of a linguistic unit, such as a phoneme or word. However, what is often important is not the units themselves, but the contrasts between them. A measure is therefore needed for…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
Novel metaphor comprehension involves complex semantic processes and linguistic creativity, making it an interesting task for studying language models (LMs). This study investigates whether surprisal, a probabilistic measure of…
Despite the success of language models using neural networks, it remains unclear to what extent neural models have the generalization ability to perform inferences. In this paper, we introduce a method for evaluating whether neural models…
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…
Among the several findings deriving from the application of complex network formalism to the investigation of natural phenomena, the fact that linguistic constructions follow power laws presents special interest for its potential…
In this paper, we assess the complexity results of formalisms that describe the feature theories used in computational linguistics. We show that from these complexity results no immediate conclusions can be drawn about the complexity of the…