Related papers: Learning to Write Rationally: How Information Is D…
Although information theoretic characterizations of human communication have become increasingly popular in linguistics, to date they have largely involved grafting probabilistic constructs onto older ideas about grammar. Similarities…
Although the multilingual capability of LLMs offers new opportunities to overcome the language barrier, do these capabilities translate into real-life scenarios where linguistic divide and knowledge conflicts between multilingual sources…
It has been shown in a recent publication that words in human-produced English language tend to have an information content close to the conditional entropy. In this paper, we show that the same is true for events in human-produced…
In this study, the output of large language models (LLM) is considered an information source generating an unlimited sequence of symbols drawn from a finite alphabet. Given the probabilistic nature of modern LLMs, we assume a probabilistic…
Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variability across words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-based…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
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…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
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…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Despite widespread success in language understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) exhibit unclear and often inconsistent behavior when faced with tasks that require probabilistic reasoning. In this work, we present the first…
Shannon entropy is often a quantity of interest to linguists studying the communicative capacity of human language. However, entropy must typically be estimated from observed data because researchers do not have access to the underlying…
Research in multi-agent cooperation has shown that artificial agents are able to learn to play a simple referential game while developing a shared lexicon. This lexicon is not easy to analyze, as it does not show many properties of a…
Native language identification (NLI) is the task of training (via supervised machine learning) a classifier that guesses the native language of the author of a text. This task has been extensively researched in the last decade, and the…
This paper addresses the task of readability assessment for the texts aimed at second language (L2) learners. One of the major challenges in this task is the lack of significantly sized level-annotated data. For the present work, we…
Through proliferation on smartphones and smart speakers, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) have made speech a common interaction modality. Yet, due to linguistic coverage and varying levels of functionality, many speakers engage with…
Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of…
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…
Writing is a foundational literacy skill that underpins effective communication, fosters critical thinking, facilitates learning across disciplines, and enables individuals to organize and articulate complex ideas. Consequently, writing…
The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…