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Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong mathematical problem-solving abilities but frequently fail on problems that deviate syntactically from their training distribution. We identify a systematic failure mode, syntactic blind…
Due to the lack of publicly available resources, conversation summarization has received far less attention than text summarization. As the purpose of conversations is to exchange information between at least two interlocutors, key…
This paper presents a novel treebank-driven approach to comparing syntactic structures in speech and writing using dependency-parsed corpora. Adopting a fully inductive, bottom-up method, we define syntactic structures as delexicalized…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
This paper addresses the problem of specifying and parsing the syntax of domain-specific languages (DSLs) in a modular, user-friendly way. That is, we want to enable the design of composable DSLs that combine the natural syntax of external…
The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a central focus of study in NLP. In this paper, we consider the case of syllogistic reasoning, an area of deductive reasoning studied extensively in logic and cognitive…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
The term Language Models (LMs) as a time-specific collection of models of interest is constantly reinvented, with its referents updated much like the $\textit{Ship of Theseus}$ replaces its parts but remains the same ship in essence. In…
We explore which linguistic factors -- at the sentence and token level -- play an important role in influencing language model predictions, and investigate whether these are reflective of results found in humans and human corpora (Gries and…
This paper discusses the problem of learning language from unprocessed text and speech signals, concentrating on the problem of learning a lexicon. In particular, it argues for a representation of language in which linguistic parameters…
Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain…
A controversial test for Large Language Models concerns the ability to discern possible from impossible language. While some evidence attests to the models' sensitivity to what crosses the limits of grammatically impossible language, this…
Subjective language understanding refers to a broad set of natural language processing tasks where the goal is to interpret or generate content that conveys personal feelings, opinions, or figurative meanings rather than objective facts.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with deductive judgment in syllogistic reasoning, systematically conflating semantic plausibility with formal validity a phenomenon known as content effect. This bias persists even when models…
We evaluate LLMs' language understanding capacities on simple inference tasks that most humans find trivial. Specifically, we target (i) grammatically-specified entailments, (ii) premises with evidential adverbs of uncertainty, and (iii)…
Disagreements are pervasive in human communication. In this paper we investigate what makes disagreement constructive. To this end, we construct WikiDisputes, a corpus of 7 425 Wikipedia Talk page conversations that contain content…
Detecting factual inconsistency for long document summarization remains challenging, given the complex structure of the source article and long summary length. In this work, we study factual inconsistency errors and connect them with a line…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet their performance often deteriorates sharply in long-horizon tasks, exhibiting systematic breakdown beyond certain scales. Conventional explanations primarily…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
Speakers sometimes omit certain arguments of a predicate in a sentence; such omission is especially frequent in pro-drop languages. This study addresses a question about ellipsis -- what can explain the native speakers' ellipsis decisions?…