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Third-person singular pronouns have long been used to study stereotypical biases in language models and to test their abilities to reason about reference. More recently, the interplay between reasoning and bias has been investigated with…
Neural language models trained with a predictive or masked objective have proven successful at capturing short and long distance syntactic dependencies. Here, we focus on verb argument structure in German, which has the interesting property…
Linguistic similarity is multi-faceted. For instance, two words may be similar with respect to semantics, syntax, or morphology inter alia. Continuous word-embeddings have been shown to capture most of these shades of similarity to some…
This paper focuses on two disparate aspects of German syntax from the perspective of parallel grammar development. As part of a cooperative project, we present an innovative approach to auxiliaries and multiple genitive NPs in German. The…
Like many verb-final languages, Germn displays considerable word-order freedom: there is no syntactic constraint on the ordering of the nominal arguments of a verb, as long as the verb remains in final position. This effect is referred to…
Dialects represent a significant component of human culture and are found across all regions of the world. In Germany, more than 40% of the population speaks a regional dialect (Adler and Hansen, 2022). However, despite cultural importance,…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various sentence-based linguistic phenomena, yet their ability to capture cross-sentence paradigmatic patterns, such as verb alternations, remains underexplored. In this…
Previous studies investigating the syntactic abilities of deep learning models have not targeted the relationship between the strength of the grammatical generalization and the amount of evidence to which the model is exposed during…
In derivational morphology, what mechanisms govern the variation in form-meaning relations between words? The answers to this type of questions are typically based on intuition and on observations drawn from limited data, even when a wide…
Learning the past tense of English verbs - a seemingly minor aspect of language acquisition - has generated heated debates since 1986, and has become a landmark task for testing the adequacy of cognitive modeling. Several artificial neural…
We introduce a dictionary containing forms of common words in various Swiss German dialects normalized into High German. As Swiss German is, for now, a predominantly spoken language, there is a significant variation in the written forms,…
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) trained on synthetic corpora can exhibit typological preferences that resemble cross-linguistic regularities in human languages, particularly for syntactic phenomena such as word order. In…
Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT and T5 have established a new state-of-the-art for ad-hoc search. However, it is not yet well-understood why these methods are so effective, what makes some variants more effective than…
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature,…
Word embeddings are a powerful approach for unsupervised analysis of language. Recently, Rudolph et al. (2016) developed exponential family embeddings, which cast word embeddings in a probabilistic framework. Here, we develop dynamic…
In this paper, our goal is to investigate to what degree multilingual pretrained language models capture cross-linguistically valid abstract linguistic representations. We take the approach of developing curated synthetic data on a large…
Static word embeddings encode word associations, extensively utilized in downstream NLP tasks. Although prior studies have discussed the nature of such word associations in terms of biases and lexical regularities captured, the variation in…
The German plural system has become a focal point for conflicting theories of language, both linguistic and cognitive. We present simulation results with three simple classifiers - an ordinary nearest neighbour algorithm, Nosofsky's…
We use large-scale corpora in six different gendered languages, along with tools from NLP and information theory, to test whether there is a relationship between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjectives used to describe…