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Building on research arguing for the possibility of conceptual and categorical knowledge acquisition through statistics contained in language, we evaluate predictive language models (LMs) -- informed solely by textual input -- on a…

Learning structural information from observational data is central to producing new knowledge outside the training corpus. This holds for mechanistic understanding in scientific discovery as well as flexible test-time compositional…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to process information using a proficient internal language consistently, referred to as latent language, which may differ from the input or output languages. However, how the discrepancy between the…

For communication to happen successfully, a common language is required between agents to understand information communicated by one another. Inducing the emergence of a common language has been a difficult challenge to multi-agent learning…

We highlight an important frontier in algorithmic fairness: disparity in the quality of natural language processing algorithms when applied to language from authors of different social groups. For example, current systems sometimes analyze…

The quality of rationales is essential in the reasoning capabilities of language models. Rationales not only enhance reasoning performance in complex natural language tasks but also justify model decisions. However, obtaining impeccable…

We initiate the study of the effects of non-transparency in decision rules on individuals' ability to improve in strategic learning settings. Inspired by real-life settings, such as loan approvals and college admissions, we remove the…

We propose an alternate approach to quantifying how well language models learn natural language: we ask how well they match the statistical tendencies of natural language. To answer this question, we analyze whether text generated from…

Creativity assessment in science and engineering is increasingly based on both human and AI judgment, but the cognitive processes and biases behind these evaluations remain poorly understood. We conducted two experiments examining how…

Humans' distinctive role in the world can largely be attributed to our capacity for iterated learning, a process by which knowledge is expanded and refined over generations. A range of theories seek to explain why humans are so adept at…

Language models usually use left-to-right (L2R) autoregressive factorization. However, L2R factorization may not always be the best inductive bias. Therefore, we investigate whether alternative factorizations of the text distribution could…

Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when…

As people rely on social media as their primary sources of news, the spread of misinformation has become a significant concern. In this large-scale study of news in social media we analyze eleven million posts and investigate propagation…

Using NLP to analyze authentic learner language helps to build automated assessment and feedback tools. It also offers new and extensive insights into the development of second language production. However, there is a lack of research…

When a student fails an exam, do we tend to blame their effort or the test's difficulty? Attribution, defined as how reasons are assigned to event outcomes, shapes perceptions, reinforces stereotypes, and influences decisions. Attribution…

A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language…

Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…

Natural language data follows a power-law distribution, with most knowledge and skills appearing at very low frequency. While a common intuition suggests that reweighting or curating data towards a uniform distribution may help models…

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…

Biased news contributes to societal polarization and is often reinforced by hostile reader comments, constituting a vital yet often overlooked aspect of news dissemination. Our study reveals that offensive comments support biased content,…