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In this paper we present statistical analysis of English texts from Wikipedia. We try to address the issue of language complexity empirically by comparing the simple English Wikipedia (Simple) to comparable samples of the main English…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely documented to be sensitive to minor prompt perturbations and prone to sycophantic alignment, their robustness in consequential, rule-bound decision-making remains under-explored. We uncover a…
An individual's variation in writing style is often a function of both social and personal attributes. While structured social variation has been extensively studied, e.g., gender based variation, far less is known about how to characterize…
A pervasive belief with regard to the differences between human language and animal vocal sequences (song) is that they belong to different classes of computational complexity, with animal song belonging to regular languages, whereas human…
Many tasks in statistical and causal inference can be construed as problems of \emph{entailment} in a suitable formal language. We ask whether those problems are more difficult, from a computational perspective, for \emph{causal}…
Prompt sensitivity, referring to the phenomenon where paraphrasing (i.e., repeating something written or spoken using different words) leads to significant changes in large language model (LLM) performance, has been widely accepted as a…
The characterization of plasticity, robustness, and evolvability, an important issue in biology, is studied in terms of phenotypic fluctuations. By numerically evolving gene regulatory networks, the proportionality between the phenotypic…
Research in linguistics has shown that humans can read words with internally scrambled letters, a phenomenon recently dubbed typoglycemia. Some specific NLP models have recently been proposed that similarly demonstrate robustness to such…
Large language models have been shown to behave inconsistently in response to meaning-preserving paraphrastic inputs. At the same time, researchers evaluate the knowledge and reasoning abilities of these models with test evaluations that do…
We study the self-organization of the consonant inventories through a complex network approach. We observe that the distribution of occurrence as well as cooccurrence of the consonants across languages follow a power-law behavior. The…
Cross-linguistically, native words and loanwords follow different phonological rules. In English, for example, words of Germanic and Latinate origin exhibit different stress patterns, and a certain syntactic structure, double-object…
By virtue of linguistic compositionality, few syntactic rules and a finite lexicon can generate an unbounded number of sentences. That is, language, though seemingly high-dimensional, can be explained using relatively few degrees of…
The wording of natural language prompts has been shown to influence the performance of large language models (LLMs), yet the role of politeness and tone remains underexplored. In this study, we investigate how varying levels of prompt…
Studies of discrete languages emerging when neural agents communicate to solve a joint task often look for evidence of compositional structure. This stems for the expectation that such a structure would allow languages to be acquired faster…
Large language models (LLMs) now write code in settings where misreading a single word can break safety or cost money, yet we still expect them to overlook stray typos. To probe where useful robustness ends and harmful insensitivity begins,…
Neural models for the various flavours of morphological inflection tasks have proven to be extremely accurate given ample labeled data -- data that may be slow and costly to obtain. In this work we aim to overcome this annotation bottleneck…
Various measures of dispersion have been proposed to paint a fuller picture of a word's distribution in a corpus, but only little has been done to validate them externally. We evaluate a wide range of dispersion measures as predictors of…
In natural language using short sentences is considered efficient for communication. However, a text composed exclusively of such sentences looks technical and reads boring. A text composed of long ones, on the other hand, demands…
Across languages, numeral systems vary widely in how they construct and combine numbers. While humans consistently learn to navigate this diversity, large language models (LLMs) struggle with linguistic-mathematical puzzles involving…
Language modelling is regularly analysed at word, subword or character units, but syllables are seldom used. Syllables provide shorter sequences than characters, they can be extracted with rules, and their segmentation typically requires…