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Despite alarm over the reliance of machine learning systems on so-called spurious patterns, the term lacks coherent meaning in standard statistical frameworks. However, the language of causality offers clarity: spurious associations are due…
We study the feasibility of identifying epistemic uncertainty (reflecting a lack of knowledge), as opposed to aleatoric uncertainty (reflecting entropy in the underlying distribution), in the outputs of large language models (LLMs) over…
We study estimating inherent human disagreement (annotation label distribution) in natural language inference task. Post-hoc smoothing of the predicted label distribution to match the expected label entropy is very effective. Such simple…
The task of deciding whether two documents are written by the same author is challenging for both machines and humans. This task is even more challenging when the two documents are written about different topics (e.g. baseball vs. politics)…
We conduct a quantitative analysis contrasting human-written English news text with comparable large language model (LLM) output from six different LLMs that cover three different families and four sizes in total. Our analysis spans several…
Construction grammar posits that constructions, or form-meaning pairings, are acquired through experience with language (the distributional learning hypothesis). But how much information about constructions does this distribution actually…
Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to…
System 2 reasoning is one of the defining characteristics of intelligence, which requires slow and logical thinking. Human conducts System 2 reasoning via the language of thoughts that organizes the reasoning process as a causal sequence of…
Natural language generation tools are powerful and effective for generating content. However, language models are known to display bias and fairness issues, making them impractical to deploy for many use cases. We here focus on how fairness…
Senders of messages prefer to communicate uncertainty verbally (e.g., something is likely to happen) rather than numerically (such as 75%), leaving receivers with imprecise information. While it is well established that receivers translate…
Does speaking style variation affect humans' ability to distinguish individuals from their voices? How do humans compare with automatic systems designed to discriminate between voices? In this paper, we attempt to answer these questions by…
Recent observations in the theory of verse and empirical metrics have suggested that constructing a verse line involves a pattern-matching search through a source text, and that the number of found elements (complete words totaling a…
Decision-making is often dependent on uncertain data, e.g. data associated with confidence scores or probabilities. We present a comparison of different information presentations for uncertain data and, for the first time, measure their…
It remains debated how well any LM understands natural language or generates reliable metalinguistic judgments. Moreover, relatively little work has demonstrated that LMs can represent and respect subtle relationships between form and…
Unsupervised methods for learning distributed representations of words are ubiquitous in today's NLP research, but far less is known about the best ways to learn distributed phrase or sentence representations from unlabelled data. This…
As AI integrates in various types of human writing, calls for transparency around AI assistance are growing. However, if transparency operates on uneven ground and certain identity groups bear a heavier cost for being honest, then the…
Recent studies suggest that very small language models (SLMs) can generate surprisingly coherent text when trained on simplified, child-directed corpora such as TinyStories. These findings have been interpreted as evidence that readability…
The increasing reliance on digital information necessitates advancements in conversational search systems, particularly in terms of information transparency. While prior research in conversational information-seeking has concentrated on…
In real-world scenarios, it is desirable for embodied agents to have the ability to leverage human language to gain explicit or implicit knowledge for learning tasks. Despite recent progress, most previous approaches adopt simple low-level…
Human processing of idioms relies on understanding the contextual sentences in which idioms occur, as well as language-intrinsic features such as frequency and speaker-intrinsic factors like familiarity. While LLMs have shown high…