Related papers: Syntactic Evolution in Language Usage
Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an essential component in conversational systems. Most SLU component treats each utterance independently, and then the following components aggregate the multi-turn information in the separate phases.…
As the etymology of the word shows, logic is intimately related to language, as exemplified by the work of philosophers from Antiquity and from the Middle-Age. At the beginning of the XX century, the crisis of the foundations of mathematics…
Despite their wide adoption, the biases and unintended behaviors of language models remain poorly understood. In this paper, we identify and characterize a phenomenon never discussed before, which we call semantic leakage, where models leak…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
The syntactic structures of sentences can be readily read-out from the activations of large language models (LLMs). However, the ``structural probes'' that have been developed to reveal this phenomenon are typically evaluated on an…
Representational spaces learned via language modeling are fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), however there has been limited understanding regarding how and when during training various types of linguistic information emerge…
Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
Syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman, 1990) is the hypothesis that children use the syntactic environments in which a verb occurs to learn its meaning. In this paper, we examine whether large language models exhibit a similar behavior. We do…
Natural languages display a trade-off among different strategies to convey syntactic structure, such as word order or inflection. This trade-off, however, has not appeared in recent simulations of iterated language learning with neural…
Vocal aging, a universal process of human aging, can largely affect one's language use, possibly including some subtle acoustic features of one's utterances like Voice Onset Time. To figure out the time effects, Queen Elizabeth's Christmas…
Slang is a common type of informal language, but its flexible nature and paucity of data resources present challenges for existing natural language systems. We take an initial step toward machine generation of slang by developing a…
Discovering and quantifying the drivers of language change is a major challenge. Hypotheses about causal factors proliferate, but are difficult to rigorously test. Here we ask a simple question: can 20th Century changes in English English…
We discuss how desirable it is that Large Language Models (LLMs) be able to adapt or align their language behavior with users who may be diverse in their language use. User diversity may come about among others due to i) age differences;…
Intimacy is a fundamental aspect of how we relate to others in social settings. Language encodes the social information of intimacy through both topics and other more subtle cues (such as linguistic hedging and swearing). Here, we introduce…
The purpose of this study is to find evidence for supporting the hypothesis that language is the mirror of our thinking, our prejudices and cultural stereotypes. In this analysis, a questionnaire was administered to 537 people. The answers…
Historical linguists have identified multiple forms of lexical semantic change. We present a three-dimensional framework for integrating these forms and a unified computational methodology for evaluating them concurrently. The dimensions…
Group interactions take place within a particular socio-temporal context, which should be taken into account when modelling interactions in online communities. We propose a method for jointly modelling community structure and language over…
While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) bring us closer to achieving artificial general intelligence, the question persists: Do LLMs truly understand language, or do they merely mimic comprehension through pattern…