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Persistent language-model agents increasingly combine tool use, tiered memory, reflective prompting, and runtime adaptation. In such systems, behavior is shaped not only by current prompts but by mutable internal conditions that influence…
This paper investigates the role of tutor feedback in language learning using computational models. We compare two dominant paradigms in language learning: interactive learning and cross-situational learning - which differ primarily in the…
Generative Language Models (GLMs) have the potential to significantly shape our linguistic landscape due to their expansive use in various digital applications. However, this widespread adoption might inadvertently trigger a…
Large pretrained language models are critical components of modern NLP pipelines. Yet, they suffer from spurious correlations, poor out-of-domain generalization, and biases. Inspired by recent progress in causal machine learning, in…
This paper pursues the insight that language models naturally enable an intelligent variation operator similar in spirit to evolutionary crossover. In particular, language models of sufficient scale demonstrate in-context learning, i.e.…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of natural language and constantly being added to a language. Owing to their non-compositionality and their ability to take on a figurative or literal meaning depending on the sentential context,…
"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and…
Many of the thousands of attested languages share common configurations of features, creating a spectrum from typologically very rare (e.g., object-verb-subject word order) or impossible languages to very common combinations of features…
Aligning language models (LMs) with user intent is becoming increasingly relevant to enhance user experience. This calls for designing methods that can allow users to control the properties of the language that LMs generate, for example,…
Teacher education requires deliberate practice with learners who exhibit identifiable strengths, weaknesses, and partial mastery. Large language models could support such practice by simulating students with known skill components, enabling…
Large language models (LLMs) are capable of producing high quality information at unprecedented rates. As these models continue to entrench themselves in society, the content they produce will become increasingly pervasive in databases that…
Modern multilingual models are trained on concatenated text from multiple languages in hopes of conferring benefits to each (positive transfer), with the most pronounced benefits accruing to low-resource languages. However, recent work has…
We introduce Interactionalism as a new set of guiding principles and heuristics for the design and architecture of learning now available due to Generative AI (GenAI) platforms. Specifically, we articulate interactional intelligence as a…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
Machine Learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful form of data modelling with widespread applicability beyond its roots in the design of autonomous agents. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the interaction between people…
Controlling the behavior of language models (LMs) without re-training is a major open problem in natural language generation. While recent works have demonstrated successes on controlling simple sentence attributes (e.g., sentiment), there…
We study the problem of emergent communication, in which language arises because speakers and listeners must communicate information in order to solve tasks. In temporally extended reinforcement learning domains, it has proved hard to learn…
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and…
The ability to process idiomatic or literal multiword expressions is a crucial aspect of understanding and generating any language. The task of generating contextually relevant continuations for narratives containing idiomatic (or literal)…
The growing prevalence of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping online text-based communication; a transformation that is extensively studied as AI-mediated communication. However, much of the existing research remains bound by…