Related papers: Semantics drives analogical change in Germanic str…
Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies show that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop differentiated…
While it is well established that self-propelled particles with alignment interactions can exhibit orientational order, the impact of self-replication and annihilation, which are key characteristics in cellular systems, on spatiotemporal…
Detecting ambiguity is important for language understanding, including uncertainty estimation, humour detection, and processing garden path sentences. We assess language models' sensitivity to ambiguity by introducing an adversarial…
We present a method of finding and analyzing shifts in grammatical relations found in diachronic corpora. Inspired by the econometric technique of measuring return and volatility instead of relative frequencies, we propose them as a way to…
Empirical evidence shows that the rate of irregular usage of English verbs exhibits discontinuity as a function of their frequency: the most frequent verbs tend to be totally irregular. We aim to qualitatively understand the origin of this…
In this reproducibility study, we revisit the LLAMBO framework of Daxberger et al. (2024), a prompting-based Bayesian optimization (BO) method that uses large language models as discriminative surrogates and acquisition optimizers via…
While multilingual large language models (LLMs) perform well on high-level tasks like translation and question answering, their ability to handle grammatical gender and morphological agreement remains underexplored. In morphologically rich…
This paper investigates biases of Large Language Models (LLMs) through the lens of grammatical gender. Drawing inspiration from seminal works in psycholinguistics, particularly the study of gender's influence on language perception, we…
Most generative document models act on bag-of-words input in an attempt to focus on the semantic content and thereby partially forego syntactic information. We argue that it is preferable to keep the original word order intact and…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
Due to its semantic succinctness and novelty of expression, poetry is a great test bed for semantic change analysis. However, so far there is a scarcity of large diachronic corpora. Here, we provide a large corpus of German poetry which…
Word alignments identify translational correspondences between words in a parallel sentence pair and is used, for instance, to learn bilingual dictionaries, to train statistical machine translation systems , or to perform quality…
In recent years, various methods have been proposed to evaluate gender bias in large language models (LLMs). A key challenge lies in the transferability of bias measurement methods initially developed for the English language when applied…
We investigate the extent to which verb alternation classes, as described by Levin (1993), are encoded in the embeddings of Large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) such as BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, and DeBERTa using selectively constructed…
What makes some types of languages more probable than others? For instance, we know that almost all spoken languages contain the vowel phoneme /i/; why should that be? The field of linguistic typology seeks to answer these questions and,…
How do typological properties such as word order and morphological case marking affect the ability of neural sequence models to acquire the syntax of a language? Cross-linguistic comparisons of RNNs' syntactic performance (e.g., on…
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…
The extent to which individual language characteristics influence tokenization and language modeling is an open question. Differences in morphological systems have been suggested as both unimportant and crucial to consider (Cotterell et…
Word order evolution has been hypothesized to be constrained by a word order permutation ring: transitions involving orders that are closer in the permutation ring are more likely. The hypothesis can be seen as a particular case of…
The human ability to flexibly reason using analogies with domain-general content depends on mechanisms for identifying relations between concepts, and for mapping concepts and their relations across analogs. Building on a recent model of…