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Following on recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and subsequent chat models, a new wave of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has emerged. Such models can incorporate images as input in addition to text, and perform tasks such…
Unlike most neural language models, humans learn language in a rich, multi-sensory and, often, multi-lingual environment. Current language models typically fail to fully capture the complexities of multilingual language use. We train an…
One of the central aspects of contextualised language models is that they should be able to distinguish the meaning of lexically ambiguous words by their contexts. In this paper we investigate the extent to which the contextualised…
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…
Multilingual alignment of sentence representations has mostly required bitexts to bridge the gap between languages. We investigate whether visual information can bridge this gap instead. Image caption datasets are very easy to create…
Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…
The need for grounding in language understanding is an active research topic. Previous work has suggested that color perception and color language appear as a suitable test bed to empirically study the problem, given its cognitive…
Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross-linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim…
Recently pre-trained multimodal models, such as CLIP, have shown exceptional capabilities towards connecting images and natural language. The textual representations in English can be desirably transferred to multilingualism and support…
Automatically generating descriptive captions for images is a well-researched area in computer vision. However, existing evaluation approaches focus on measuring the similarity between two sentences disregarding fine-grained semantics of…
Internet memes represent a popular form of multimodal online communication and often use figurative elements to convey layered meaning through the combination of text and images. However, it remains largely unclear how multimodal large…
Image captioning models are becoming increasingly successful at describing the content of images in restricted domains. However, if these models are to function in the wild - for example, as assistants for people with impaired vision - a…
Recent advances in language modeling have witnessed the rise of highly desirable emergent capabilities, such as reasoning and in-context learning. However, vision models have yet to exhibit comparable progress in these areas. In this paper,…
Idioms are figurative expressions whose meanings often cannot be inferred from their individual words, making them difficult to process computationally and posing challenges for human experimental studies. This survey reviews datasets…
Do large language models (LLMs) truly acquire embodied cognition and cultural conventions from text? We introduce demonstratives, fundamental spatial expressions like "this/that" in English and "zh\`e/n\`a" in Chinese, as a novel probe for…
Language places subtle constraints on how we make inductive inferences. Developmental evidence by Gelman et al. (2002) has shown children (4 years and older) to differentiate among generic statements ("Bears are daxable"), universally…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used across diverse cultural contexts, making accurate cultural understanding essential. Prior evaluations have mostly focused on output-level performance, obscuring the factors that drive…
What is the interplay between semantic representations learned by language models (LM) from surface form alone to those learned from more grounded evidence? We study this question for a scenario where part of the input comes from a…
Referring expressions are natural language descriptions that identify a particular object within a scene and are widely used in our daily conversations. In this work, we focus on segmenting the object in an image specified by a referring…
Small and mid-sized generative language models have gained increasing attention. Their size and availability make them amenable to being analyzed at a behavioral as well as a representational level, allowing investigations of how these…