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Approaches to improving multilingual language understanding often struggle with significant performance gaps between high-resource and low-resource languages. While there are efforts to align the languages in a single latent space to…
Iconicity, the resemblance between linguistic form and meaning, is pervasive in signed languages, offering a natural testbed for visual grounding. For vision-language models (VLMs), the challenge is to recover such essential mappings from…
Speech tokenizers are essential for connecting speech to large language models (LLMs) in multimodal systems. These tokenizers are expected to preserve both semantic and acoustic information for downstream understanding and generation.…
Analyses of self-supervised speech models have begun to reveal where and how they represent different types of information. However, almost all analyses have focused on English. Here, we examine how wav2vec2 models trained on four different…
Research in natural language processing commonly assumes that approaches that work well for English and and other widely-used languages are "language agnostic". In high-resource languages, especially those that are analytic, a common…
In this article, we investigate the properties of phoneme N-grams across half of the world's languages. We investigate if the sizes of three different N-gram distributions of the world's language families obey a power law. Further, the…
The number of senses of a given word, or polysemy, is a very subjective notion, which varies widely across annotators and resources. We propose a novel method to estimate polysemy, based on simple geometry in the contextual embedding space.…
Recently, much work has concerned itself with the enigma of what exactly pretrained language models~(PLMs) learn about different aspects of language, and how they learn it. One stream of this type of research investigates the knowledge that…
Cognates are variants of the same lexical form across different languages; for example 'fonema' in Spanish and 'phoneme' in English are cognates, both of which mean 'a unit of sound'. The task of automatic detection of cognates among any…
This paper argues that the relationship between lexical identity and prosody -- one well-studied parameter of linguistic variation -- can be characterized using information theory. We predict that languages that use prosody to make lexical…
The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…
Language models perform differently across languages. It has been previously suggested that morphological typology may explain some of this variability (Cotterell et al., 2018). We replicate previous analyses and find additional new…
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…
Recent studies have demonstrated how to assess the stereotypical bias in pre-trained English language models. In this work, we extend this branch of research in multiple different dimensions by systematically investigating (a) mono- and…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
Idioms are figurative expressions whose meanings often cannot be inferred from their individual words, making them difficult to process computationally and posing challenges for human experimental studies. This survey reviews datasets…
The success of multilingual pre-trained models is underpinned by their ability to learn representations shared by multiple languages even in absence of any explicit supervision. However, it remains unclear how these models learn to…
Large language models generate judgments that resemble those of humans. Yet the extent to which these models align with human judgments in interpreting figurative and socially grounded language remains uncertain. To investigate this, human…
NLP research on aligning lexical representation spaces to one another has so far focused on aligning language spaces in their entirety. However, cognitive science has long focused on a local perspective, investigating whether translation…
Human speech perception involves transforming a countinous acoustic signal into discrete linguistically meaningful units, such as phonemes, while simultaneously causing a listener to activate words that are similar to the spoken utterance…