Related papers: Measuring the Functional Load of Phonological Cont…
The category of figurative language contains many varieties, some of which are non-compositional in nature. This type of phrase or multi-word expression (MWE) includes idioms, which represent a single meaning that does not consist of the…
Compositionality is considered central to language abilities. As performant language systems, how do large language models (LLMs) do on compositional tasks? We evaluate adjective-noun compositionality in LLMs using two complementary setups:…
The historical and geographical spread from older to more modern languages has long been studied by examining textual changes and in terms of changes in phonetic transcriptions. However, it is more difficult to analyze language change from…
Statistical significance testing of differences in values of metrics like recall, precision and balanced F-score is a necessary part of empirical natural language processing. Unfortunately, we find in a set of experiments that many commonly…
Recent years have brought great advances into solving morphological tasks, mostly due to powerful neural models applied to various tasks as (re)inflection and analysis. Yet, such morphological tasks cannot be considered solved, especially…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
The study of language variation examines how language varies between and within different groups of speakers, shedding light on how we use language to construct identities and how social contexts affect language use. A common method is to…
Received wisdom in linguistic typology holds that if the structure of a language becomes more complex in one dimension, it will simplify in another, building on the assumption that all languages are equally complex (Joseph and Newmeyer,…
We analyze the frequency-rank relationship in sub-vocabularies corresponding to three different grammatical classes (nouns, verbs, and others) in a collection of literary works in English, whose words have been automatically tagged…
Counting letters in written texts is a very ancient practice. It has accompanied the development of Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics. In Cryptology, counting frequencies of the different characters in an encrypted…
Mandarin Chinese is characterized by being a tonal language; the pitch (or $F_0$) of its utterances carries considerable linguistic information. However, speech samples from different individuals are subject to changes in amplitude and…
The statistical over-representation of phonological features in the basic vocabulary of languages is often interpreted as reflecting potentially universal sound symbolic patterns. However, most of those results have not been tested…
Measurement devices always add noise to the signal of interest and it is necessary to evaluate the variance of the results. This article focuses on stationary random processes whose Power Spectrum Density is a power law of frequency. For…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
Understanding how Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) process low-level visual features is critical for evaluating their perceptual abilities and has not been systematically characterized. Inspired by human psychophysics, we introduce…
Motivation: Alignment-free (AF) distance/similarity functions are a key tool for sequence analysis. Experimental studies on real datasets abound and, to some extent, there are also studies regarding their control of false positive rate…
Model interpretability methods are often used to explain NLP model decisions on tasks such as text classification, where the output space is relatively small. However, when applied to language generation, where the output space often…
Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between phonemic inventory size and the relative entropy of the…
Factorial experiments in research on memory, language, and in other areas are often analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA). However, for effects with more than one numerator degrees of freedom, e.g., for experimental factors with more…
The complexity of a system description is a function of the entropy of its symbolic description. Prior to computing the entropy of the system description, an observation scale has to be assumed. In natural language texts, typical scales are…