Related papers: Semantics drives analogical change in Germanic str…
Although Germany has a diverse landscape of dialects, they are underrepresented in current automatic speech recognition (ASR) research. To enable studies of how robust models are towards dialectal variation, we present Betthupferl, an…
Conjuring up our thoughts, language reflects statistical patterns of word co-occurrences which in turn come to describe how we perceive the world. Whether counting how frequently nouns and verbs combine in Google search queries, or…
Multilingual generative language models (LMs) are increasingly fluent in a large variety of languages. Trained on the concatenation of corpora in multiple languages, they enable powerful transfer from high-resource languages to low-resource…
Some verbs have a particular kind of binary ambiguity: they can carry their normal, full meaning, or they can be merely acting as a prop for the nominal object. It has been suggested that there is a detectable pattern in the relationship…
In recent years, a flurry of morphological datasets had emerged, most notably UniMorph, a multi-lingual repository of inflection tables. However, the flat structure of the current morphological annotation schema makes the treatment of some…
Compared to English, German word order is freer and therefore poses additional challenges for natural language inference (NLI). We create WOGLI (Word Order in German Language Inference), the first adversarial NLI dataset for German word…
Over the past decade, various studies have addressed how speakers solve the so-called `The Paradigm Cell Filling Problem' (PCFP) \citep{ackerman2009parts} across different languages. The PCFP addresses a fundamental question in…
Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express an unbounded set of emerging ideas. One result of this tension is the formation of new compositions, such that existing linguistic units can be combined with emerging items into novel…
Large language models (LLMs) are able to generate grammatically well-formed text, but how do they encode their syntactic knowledge internally? While prior work has focused largely on binary grammatical contrasts, in this work, we study the…
Models such as Word2Vec and GloVe construct word embeddings based on the co-occurrence probability $P(i,j)$ of words $i$ and $j$ in text corpora. The resulting vectors $W_i$ not only group semantically similar words but also exhibit a…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
Associative learning--forming links between co-occurring items--is fundamental to human cognition, reshaping internal representations in complex ways. Testing hypotheses on how representational changes occur in biological systems is…
One of the central aspects of contextualised language models is that they should be able to distinguish the meaning of lexically ambiguous words by their contexts. In this paper we investigate the extent to which the contextualised…
The cognitive reality of irregular morphological patterns has been debated for decades: do speakers extend them to novel forms, or are they lexical artifacts? A neural network trained on distributional input offers a learnability test: if…
Pre-trained transformer language models (TLMs) have recently refashioned natural language processing (NLP): Most state-of-the-art NLP models now operate on top of TLMs to benefit from contextualization and knowledge induction. To explain…
This research offers a new interdisciplinary approach to the field of Linguistics by using Computational Linguistics, NLP, Bayesian Statistics and Sociolinguistics methods. This thesis investigates word order change in infinitival clauses…
Maltese is often described as having a hybrid morphological system resulting from extensive contact between Semitic and Romance language varieties. Such a designation reflects an etymological divide as much as it does a larger tradition in…
Languages typically provide more than one grammatical construction to express certain types of messages. A speaker's choice of construction is known to depend on multiple factors, including the choice of main verb -- a phenomenon known as…
Recent advances in prompt engineering enable large language models (LLMs) to solve multi-hop logical reasoning problems with impressive accuracy. However, there is little existing work investigating the robustness of LLMs with few-shot…
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…