Related papers: Word length predicts word order: "Min-max"-ing dri…
Prior work on generating explanations in a planning and decision-making context has focused on providing the rationale behind an AI agent's decision making. While these methods provide the right explanations from the explainer's…
Language models (LMs) may appear insensitive to word order changes in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this paper, we propose that linguistic redundancy can explain this phenomenon, whereby word order and other linguistic cues…
In this paper we propose some new measures of language development using network analyses, which is inspired by the recent surge of interests in network studies of many real-world systems. Children's and care-takers' speech data from a…
We present a model of speech perception which takes into account effects of correlations between sounds. Words in this model correspond to the attractors of a suitably chosen descent dynamics. The resulting lexicon is rich in short words,…
We consider a language together with the subword relation, the cover relation, and regular predicates. For such structures, we consider the extension of first-order logic by threshold- and modulo-counting quantifiers. Depending on the…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Across languages, multiple consecutive adjectives modifying a noun (e.g. "the big red dog") follow certain unmarked ordering rules. While explanatory accounts have been put forward, much of the work done in this area has relied primarily on…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
The task of quantifying human behavior by observing interaction cues is an important and useful one across a range of domains in psychological research and practice. Machine learning-based approaches typically perform this task by first…
We propose a model of the speech perception of individual words in the presence of mishearings. This phenomenological approach is based on concepts used in linguistics, and provides a formalism that is universal across languages. We put…
It is often stated that human languages, as other biological systems, are shaped by cost-cutting pressures but, to what extent? Attempts to quantify the degree of optimality of languages by means of an optimality score have been scarce and…
The evolution of natural languages poses a riddle to any theoretical perspective based on efficiency considerations. If languages are already optimally effective means of organization and communication of thought, why do they change? And if…
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…
We introduce a dataset for studying the evolution of words, constructed from WordNet and the Google Books Ngram Corpus. The dataset tracks the evolution of 4,000 synonym sets (synsets), containing 9,000 English words, from 1800 AD to 2000…
When we read, we make predictions about upcoming words; these predictions influence our reading behavior. The success of large language models (LLMs), which, like humans, make predictions about upcoming words, has motivated their use as…
In cross-lingual language models, representations for many different languages live in the same space. Here, we investigate the linguistic and non-linguistic factors affecting sentence-level alignment in cross-lingual pretrained language…
Word order variances generally exist in different languages. In this paper, we hypothesize that cross-lingual models that fit into the word order of the source language might fail to handle target languages. To verify this hypothesis, we…
There is inherent information captured in the order in which we write words in a list. The orderings of binomials --- lists of two words separated by `and' or `or' --- has been studied for more than a century. These binomials are common…
Despite the impressive growth of the abilities of multilingual language models, such as XLM-R and mT5, it has been shown that they still face difficulties when tackling typologically-distant languages, particularly in the low-resource…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…