Related papers: Learning to Write Rationally: How Information Is D…

Cognitive and social traits of individuals are reflected in language use. Moreover, individuals who are prone to spread fake news online often share common traits. Building on these ideas, we introduce a model that creates representations…

While most reading comprehension benchmarks for LLMs focus on factual information that can be answered by localizing specific textual evidence, many real-world tasks require understanding distributional information, such as population-level…

The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…

Large language models(LLMs) like Gemini are becoming common tools for supporting student writing. But most of their feedback is based only on the final essay missing important context about how that text was written. In this paper, we…

Large language models (LLMs) are used by over a billion people globally, most often to assist with writing. In this work, we demonstrate that LLMs not only alter the voice and tone of human writing, but also consistently alter the intended…

Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to…

The meteoric rise in text generation capability has been accompanied by parallel growth in interest in machine-generated text detection: the capability to identify whether a given text was generated using a model or written by a person.…

Most research on natural language processing treats bias as an absolute concept: Based on a (probably complex) algorithmic analysis, a sentence, an article, or a text is classified as biased or not. Given the fact that for humans the…

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis states that humans tend to distribute information roughly evenly across an utterance or discourse. Early evidence in support of the UID hypothesis came from Genzel & Charniak (2002), which…

Learning and decision-making in domains with naturally high noise-to-signal ratio, such as Finance or Healthcare, is often challenging, while the stakes are very high. In this paper, we study the problem of learning and acting under a…

Media plays an important role in shaping public opinion. Biased media can influence people in undesirable directions and hence should be unmasked as such. We observe that featurebased and neural text classification approaches which rely…

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of writing grammatical text that follows instructions, answers questions, and solves problems. As they have advanced, it has become difficult to distinguish their output from human-written text.…

Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…

Language modeling has shifted in recent years from a distribution over strings to prediction models with textual inputs and outputs for general-purpose tasks. This position paper highlights the often overlooked implications of this shift…

This work addresses the problem of sharing partial information within social learning strategies. In traditional social learning, agents solve a distributed multiple hypothesis testing problem by performing two operations at each instant:…

Providing plausible responses to why questions is a challenging but critical goal for language based human-machine interaction. Explanations are challenging in that they require many different forms of abstract knowledge and reasoning.…

Language models (LMs) may appear insensitive to word order changes in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this paper, we propose that linguistic redundancy can explain this phenomenon, whereby word order and other linguistic cues…

Eliciting information to reduce uncertainty about a latent entity is a critical task in many application domains, e.g., assessing individual student learning outcomes, diagnosing underlying diseases, or learning user preferences. Though…

Variation in language is ubiquitous, particularly in newer forms of writing such as social media. Fortunately, variation is not random, it is often linked to social properties of the author. In this paper, we show how to exploit social…

Language models (LMs) are increasingly being studied as models of human language learners. Due to the nascency of the field, it is not well-established whether LMs exhibit similar learning dynamics to humans, and there are few direct…