Related papers: Language Models as Artificial Learners: Investigat…

With the success of neural language models (LMs), their language acquisition has gained much attention. This work sheds light on the second language (L2) acquisition of LMs, while previous work has typically explored their first language…

Crosslingual transfer is crucial to contemporary language models' multilingual capabilities, but how it occurs is not well understood. We ask what happens to a monolingual language model when it begins to be trained on a second language.…

This study evaluates Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners interfered with by their native first language (L1). In dialogue-based interviews, we prompt…

The emergent cross-lingual transfer seen in multilingual pretrained models has sparked significant interest in studying their behavior. However, because these analyses have focused on fully trained multilingual models, little is known about…

Large language models (LMs) have rapidly become a mainstay in Natural Language Processing. These models are known to acquire rich linguistic knowledge from training on large amounts of text. In this paper, we investigate if pre-training on…

Do multilingual language models share abstract grammatical representations across languages, and if so, when do these develop? Following Sinclair et al. (2022), we use structural priming to test for abstract grammatical representations with…

Large language models hold significant promise in multilingual applications. However, inherent biases stemming from predominantly English-centric pre-training have led to the widespread practice of pre-translation, i.e., translating…

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,…

Language models (LMs) are pre-trained on raw text datasets to generate text sequences token-by-token. While this approach facilitates the learning of world knowledge and reasoning, it does not explicitly optimize for linguistic competence.…

Natural language inference (NLI) is among the most challenging tasks in natural language understanding. Recent work on unsupervised pretraining that leverages unsupervised signals such as language-model and sentence prediction objectives…

In this study, we reveal an in-context learning (ICL) capability of multilingual large language models (LLMs): by translating the input to several languages, we provide Parallel Input in Multiple Languages (PiM) to LLMs, which significantly…

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…

Language modeling studies the probability distributions over strings of texts. It is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). It has been widely used in text generation, speech recognition, machine…

The impact of different multilingual data mixtures in pretraining large language models (LLMs) has been a topic of ongoing debate, often raising concerns about potential trade-offs between language coverage and model performance (i.e., the…

Large language models demonstrate reasonable multilingual abilities, despite predominantly English-centric pretraining. However, the spontaneous multilingual alignment in these models is shown to be weak, leading to unsatisfactory…

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…

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) can process many languages, yet how they internally represent this diversity remains unclear. Do they form shared multilingual representations with language-specific decoding, and if so, why does…

Humans appear to have a critical period (CP) for language acquisition: Second language (L2) acquisition becomes harder after early childhood, and ceasing exposure to a first language (L1) after this period (but not before) typically does…

Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable ability in cross-lingual tasks. Understanding how LLMs acquire this ability is crucial for their interpretability. To quantify the cross-lingual ability of LLMs accurately, we propose a…