Related papers: Syntactic Evolution in Language Usage
Despite impressive success, language models often generate outputs with flawed linguistic structure. We analyze the effect of directly infusing various kinds of syntactic and semantic information into large language models. To demonstrate…
Conversations allow the quick transfer of short bits of information and it is reasonable to expect that changes in communication medium affect how we converse. Using conversations in works of fiction and in an online social networking…
Language is far more than a communication tool. A wealth of information - including but not limited to the identities, psychological states, and social contexts of its users - can be gleaned through linguistic markers, and such insights are…
What does it mean to know language? Since the Chomskian revolution, one popular answer to this question has been: to possess a generative grammar that exclusively licenses certain syntactic structures. Decades later, not even an…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of natural language and constantly being added to a language. Owing to their non-compositionality and their ability to take on a figurative or literal meaning depending on the sentential context,…
We present a qualitative analysis of the (potentially erroneous) outputs of contextualized embedding-based methods for detecting diachronic semantic change. First, we introduce an ensemble method outperforming previously described…
The goal of this paper is threefold: i) to present some practical aspects of using full-text version of Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the largest diachronic multi-genre corpus of the English language, in the investigation of…
We present a syntactic dependency treebank for naturalistic child and child-directed speech in English (MacWhinney, 2000). Our annotations largely followed the guidelines of the Universal Dependencies project (UD (Zeman et al., 2022)), with…
Post-hoc explanation methods are an important tool for increasing model transparency for users. Unfortunately, the currently used methods for attributing token importance often yield diverging patterns. In this work, we study potential…
Linguistic accommodation is the process in which speakers adjust their accent, diction, vocabulary, and other aspects of language according to the communication style of one another. Previous research has shown how linguistic accommodation…
In a physical system, changing parameters such as temperature can induce a phase transition: an abrupt change from one state of matter to another. Analogous phenomena have recently been observed in large language models. Typically, the task…
We present a methodological framework to discover linguistic and discursive patterns associated to different social groups through contrastive synthetic text generation and statistical analysis. In contrast with previous approaches, we aim…
In multilingual societies, it is common to encounter different language varieties. Various approaches have been proposed to discuss different mechanisms of language shift. However, current models exploring language shift in languages in…
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…
Most previous studies on automatic recognition model for bipolar disorder (BD) were based on both social media and linguistic features. The present study investigates the possibility of adopting only language-based features, namely the…
It has been argued that humans rapidly adapt their lexical and syntactic expectations to match the statistics of the current linguistic context. We provide further support to this claim by showing that the addition of a simple adaptation…
Here a collection of 1169 abstracts, which corresponds to articles that the Journal of Marketing Research has published from 2005 to 2014, are analysed under a novel approach. We apply several statistical methods, such as Principal…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
We introduce quantitative metrics for child language acquisition to evaluate language models. Our focus is on the formal syntactic and functional discourse properties of determiners in English, which young children acquire early and…
As speakers turn their thoughts into sentences, they maintain a balance between the complexity of words and syntax. However, it is unclear whether this syntax-lexicon tradeoff is unique to the spoken language production that is under the…