Related papers: Quantifying the cross-linguistic effects of syncre…
A range of studies have concluded that neural word prediction models can distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences with high accuracy. However, these studies are based primarily on monolingual evidence from English. To…
Large language models (LLMs) can reliably distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, but how grammatical knowledge is represented within the models remains an open question. We investigate whether different syntactic phenomena…
How do typological properties such as word order and morphological case marking affect the ability of neural sequence models to acquire the syntax of a language? Cross-linguistic comparisons of RNNs' syntactic performance (e.g., on…
Structural probing work has found evidence for latent syntactic information in pre-trained language models. However, much of this analysis has focused on monolingual models, and analyses of multilingual models have employed correlational…
Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behaviors -- such as excessive agreement with or flattery of the user -- but it is unclear whether these behaviors arise from a single mechanism or multiple distinct processes. We…
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has advanced natural language processing, yet concerns about cognitive biases are growing. In this paper, we investigate the anchoring effect, a cognitive bias where the mind relies…
Transformers underlie almost all state-of-the-art language models in computational linguistics, yet their cognitive adequacy as models of human sentence processing remains disputed. In this work, we use a surprisal-based linking mechanism…
We advance a novel explanation of similarity-based interference effects in subject-verb and reflexive pronoun agreement processing, grounded in surprisal values computed from a pretrained large-scale Transformer model, GPT-2. Specifically,…
Determining the correct form of a verb in context requires an understanding of the syntactic structure of the sentence. Recurrent neural networks have been shown to perform this task with an error rate comparable to humans, despite the fact…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit position bias systematically underweighting information based on its location in the context but how this bias varies across languages and models remains unclear. We conduct a multilingual study across…
Acquiescence bias, i.e. the tendency of humans to agree with statements in surveys, independent of their actual beliefs, is well researched and documented. Since Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be very influenceable by…
This paper leverages past sentence processing studies to investigate whether monolingual and multilingual LLMs show human-like preferences when presented with examples of relative clause attachment ambiguities in Italian and English.…
Subject-verb agreement in the presence of an attractor noun located between the main noun and the verb elicits complex behavior: judgments of grammaticality are modulated by the grammatical features of the attractor. For example, in the…
To date, most investigations on surprisal and entropy effects in reading have been conducted on the group level, disregarding individual differences. In this work, we revisit the predictive power of surprisal and entropy measures estimated…
Many studies have shown that human languages tend to optimize for lower complexity and increased communication efficiency. Syntactic dependency distance, which measures the linear distance between dependent words, is often considered a key…
We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified…
Recent research has adopted a new experimental field centered around the concept of text perturbations which has revealed that shuffled word order has little to no impact on the downstream performance of Transformer-based language models…
Pre-trained transformer language models (TLMs) have recently refashioned natural language processing (NLP): Most state-of-the-art NLP models now operate on top of TLMs to benefit from contextualization and knowledge induction. To explain…
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have received enormous attention over the past year and are now used by hundreds of millions of people every day. The rapid adoption of this technology naturally raises questions about the…
Learning representations that accurately model semantics is an important goal of natural language processing research. Many semantic phenomena depend on syntactic structure. Recent work examines the extent to which state-of-the-art models…