Related papers: A molecular clock for writing systems reveals the …
Diacritics are orthographic marks that clarify pronunciation, distinguish similar words, or alter meaning. They play a central role in many writing systems, yet their impact on language technology has not been systematically quantified…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
Understanding humanity's earliest writing systems is crucial for reconstructing civilization's origins, yet many ancient scripts remain undeciphered. Oracle Bone Script (OBS) from China's Shang dynasty exemplifies this challenge: only…
We present a mechanistic analysis of literary style in GPT-2, identifying individual neurons that discriminate between exemplary prose and rigid AI-generated text. Using Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener as a corpus, we extract…
Record linkage is a bedrock of quantitative social science, as analyses often require linking data from multiple, noisy sources. Off-the-shelf string matching methods are widely used, as they are straightforward and cheap to implement and…
We investigate the performance of large language models on repetitive deterministic prediction tasks and study how the sequence accuracy rate scales with output length. Each such task involves repeating the same operation n times. Examples…
Multilingual speech foundation models such as Whisper are trained on web-scale data, where data for each language consists of a myriad of regional varieties. However, different regional varieties often employ different scripts to write the…
The availability of quantitative text analysis methods has provided new ways of analyzing literature in a manner that was not available in the pre-information era. Here we apply comprehensive machine learning analysis to the work of William…
Qualitative coding, or content analysis, extracts meaning from text to discern quantitative patterns across a corpus of texts. Recently, advances in the interpretive abilities of large language models (LLMs) offer potential for automating…
The field of machine learning has achieved striking progress in recent years, witnessing breakthrough results on language modelling, protein folding and nitpickingly fine-grained dog breed classification. Some even succeeded at playing…
Large language models (LLMs) are changing the way researchers interact with code and data in scientific computing. While their ability to generate general-purpose code is well established, their effectiveness in producing scientifically…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to ``professionalize'' workplace communication, often at the cost of linguistic identity. We introduce "Cultural Ghosting", the systematic erasure of linguistic markers unique to non-native…
In recent years, rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have increasingly stimulated research on ancient Chinese scripts. As the evolution of written characters constitutes a fundamental pathway for understanding…
Reproducing an empirical NLP study used to take weeks. Given the released data and a modern agentic-research harness, we redo every experiment of a recent ACL\,2026 study on personal-style post-editing of LLM drafts -- and add three new…
One single code change can significantly influence a wide range of software systems and their users. For example, 1) adding a new feature can spread defects in several modules, while 2) changing an API method can improve the performance of…
Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT are increasingly used in scientific writing, yet their broader implications for the organization of scientific knowledge remain unclear. We examine whether AI-assisted writing intensity, measured as the…
System prompt instructions that cooperate in English compete in Spanish, with the same semantic content, but opposite interaction topology. We present instruction-level ablation experiments across four languages and four models showing that…
Observations that rates of molecular evolution vary widely within and among lineages have cast doubts upon the existence of a single molecular clock. Differences in the timing of evolutionary events estimated from genetic and fossil…
The problem of detecting scientific fraud using machine learning was recently introduced, with initial, positive results from a model taking into account various general indicators. The results seem to suggest that writing style is…
Generative AI's rapid advancement sparks interest in its cognitive abilities, especially given its capacity for tasks like language understanding and code generation. This study explores how several recent GenAI models perform on the Clock…