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Ambiguous words or underspecified references require interlocutors to resolve them, often by relying on shared context and commonsense knowledge. Therefore, we systematically investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can leverage…
Cognitive science and neuroscience have long faced the challenge of disentangling representations of language from representations of conceptual meaning. As the same problem arises in today's language models (LMs), we investigate the…
Reasoning about implied relationships (e.g., paraphrastic, common sense, encyclopedic) between pairs of words is crucial for many cross-sentence inference problems. This paper proposes new methods for learning and using embeddings of word…
One of the most intriguing features of language is its constant change, with ongoing shifts in how meaning is expressed. Despite decades of research, the factors that determine how and why meanings evolve remain only partly understood.…
Unsupervised neural grammar induction aims to learn interpretable hierarchical structures from language data. However, existing models face an expressiveness bottleneck, often resulting in unnecessarily large yet underperforming grammars.…
Although behavioral studies have documented numerical reasoning errors in large language models (LLMs), the underlying representational mechanisms remain unclear. We hypothesize that numerical attributes occupy shared latent subspaces and…
It was recently observed that the representations of different models that process identical or semantically related inputs tend to align. We analyze this phenomenon using the Information Imbalance, an asymmetric rank-based measure that…
Supervised learning has become a cornerstone of modern machine learning, yet a comprehensive theory explaining its effectiveness remains elusive. Empirical phenomena, such as neural analogy-making and the linear representation hypothesis,…
Current reading comprehension models generalise well to in-distribution test sets, yet perform poorly on adversarially selected inputs. Most prior work on adversarial inputs studies oversensitivity: semantically invariant text perturbations…
The lexicon consists of a set of word meanings and their semantic relationships. A systematic representation of the English lexicon based in psycholinguistic considerations has been put together in the database Wordnet in a long-term…
The use of language is subject to variation over time as well as across social groups and knowledge domains, leading to differences even in the monolingual scenario. Such variation in word usage is often called lexical semantic change…
This study examines whether sentence-level memory load in comprehension is better explained by linear proximity between syntactically related words or by the structural density of the intervening material. Building on locality-based…
Homonyms are words with identical spelling but distinct meanings, which pose challenges for many generative models. When a homonym appears in a prompt, diffusion models may generate multiple senses of the word simultaneously, which is known…
Existing approaches to mapping-based cross-lingual word embeddings are based on the assumption that the source and target embedding spaces are structurally similar. The structures of embedding spaces largely depend on the co-occurrence…
We describe a method for automatic word sense disambiguation using a text corpus and a machine-readable dictionary (MRD). The method is based on word similarity and context similarity measures. Words are considered similar if they appear in…
Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain what a neural network has learned at a nuts-and-bolts level. What are the fundamental primitives of neural network representations? Previous mechanistic descriptions have used individual neurons…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong linguistic capabilities, but little is known about how they encode psycholinguistic knowledge across languages. We investigate whether and how LLMs exhibit human-like psycholinguistic responses…
Systems for language understanding have become remarkably strong at overcoming linguistic imperfections in tasks involving phrase matching or simple reasoning. Yet, their accuracy drops dramatically as the number of reasoning steps…
Humans organize knowledge into compact conceptual categories that balance compression with semantic richness. Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive linguistic abilities, but whether they navigate this same compression-meaning…
Neoteric works have shown that modern deep learning models can exhibit a sparse double descent phenomenon. Indeed, as the sparsity of the model increases, the test performance first worsens since the model is overfitting the training data;…