papers

Publications (29)

cs.CL2024

Paloma: A Benchmark for Evaluating Language Model Fit

Ian Magnusson, Akshita Bhagia, Valentin Hofmann +13

Evaluations of language models (LMs) commonly report perplexity on monolithic data held out from training. Implicitly or explicitly, this data is composed of domains--varying distr…

cs.CL2024

Geographic Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models

Valentin Hofmann, Goran Glavaš, Nikola Ljubešić +2

While pretrained language models (PLMs) have been shown to possess a plethora of linguistic knowledge, the existing body of research has largely neglected extralinguistic knowledge…

cs.CL2022

Unsupervised Detection of Contextualized Embedding Bias with Application to Ideology

Valentin Hofmann, Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Hinrich Schütze

We propose a fully unsupervised method to detect bias in contextualized embeddings. The method leverages the assortative information latently encoded by social networks and combine…

cs.CL2025

IssueBench: Millions of Realistic Prompts for Measuring Issue Bias in LLM Writing Assistance

Paul Röttger, Musashi Hinck, Valentin Hofmann +4

Large language models (LLMs) are helping millions of users write texts about diverse issues, and in doing so expose users to different ideas and perspectives. This creates concerns…

cs.CL2021

Superbizarre Is Not Superb: Derivational Morphology Improves BERT's Interpretation of Complex Words

Valentin Hofmann, Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Hinrich Schütze

How does the input segmentation of pretrained language models (PLMs) affect their interpretations of complex words? We present the first study investigating this question, taking B…

cs.CL2025

Signal and Noise: A Framework for Reducing Uncertainty in Language Model Evaluation

David Heineman, Valentin Hofmann, Ian Magnusson +5

Developing large language models is expensive and involves making decisions with small experiments, typically by evaluating on large, multi-task evaluation suites. In this work, we…

cs.CL2022

Modeling Ideological Salience and Framing in Polarized Online Groups with Graph Neural Networks and Structured Sparsity

Valentin Hofmann, Xiaowen Dong, Janet B. Pierrehumbert +1

The increasing polarization of online political discourse calls for computational tools that automatically detect and monitor ideological divides in social media. We introduce a mi…

cs.CL2024

Dialect prejudice predicts AI decisions about people's character, employability, and criminality

Valentin Hofmann, Pratyusha Ria Kalluri, Dan Jurafsky +1

Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from serving as a writing aid to informing hiring decisions. Yet these language models are known…

cs.AI2025

BLAB: Brutally Long Audio Bench

Orevaoghene Ahia, Martijn Bartelds, Kabir Ahuja +13

Developing large audio language models (LMs) capable of understanding diverse spoken interactions is essential for accommodating the multimodal nature of human communication and ca…

cs.CL2025

Measuring what Matters: Construct Validity in Large Language Model Benchmarks

Andrew M. Bean, Ryan Othniel Kearns, Angelika Romanou +39

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is crucial for both assessing their capabilities and identifying safety or robustness issues prior to deployment. Reliably measuring abstrac…

cs.CL2025

Aligned but Blind: Alignment Increases Implicit Bias by Reducing Awareness of Race

Lihao Sun, Chengzhi Mao, Valentin Hofmann +1

Although value-aligned language models (LMs) appear unbiased in explicit bias evaluations, they often exhibit stereotypes in implicit word association tasks, raising concerns about…

cs.CL2022

The Better Your Syntax, the Better Your Semantics? Probing Pretrained Language Models for the English Comparative Correlative

Leonie Weissweiler, Valentin Hofmann, Abdullatif Köksal +1

Construction Grammar (CxG) is a paradigm from cognitive linguistics emphasising the connection between syntax and semantics. Rather than rules that operate on lexical items, it pos…

cs.CL2026

Greater accessibility can amplify discrimination in generative AI

Carolin Holtermann, Minh Duc Bui, Kaitlyn Zhou +3

Hundreds of millions of people rely on large language models (LLMs) for education, work, and even healthcare. Yet these models are known to reproduce and amplify social biases pres…

cs.CL2026

Different Demographic Cues Yield Inconsistent Conclusions About LLM Personalization and Bias

Manuel Tonneau, Neil K. R. Seghal, Niyati Malhotra +7

Demographic cue-based evaluation is widely used to study how large language models (LLMs) adapt their responses to signaled demographic attributes within and across groups. This ap…

cs.AI2024

Graph-enhanced Large Language Models in Asynchronous Plan Reasoning

Fangru Lin, Emanuele La Malfa, Valentin Hofmann +3

Planning is a fundamental property of human intelligence. Reasoning about asynchronous plans is challenging since it requires sequential and parallel planning to optimize time cost…

cs.CL2020

DagoBERT: Generating Derivational Morphology with a Pretrained Language Model

Valentin Hofmann, Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Hinrich Schütze

Can pretrained language models (PLMs) generate derivationally complex words? We present the first study investigating this question, taking BERT as the example PLM. We examine BERT…

cs.CL2025

Assessing Dialect Fairness and Robustness of Large Language Models in Reasoning Tasks

Fangru Lin, Shaoguang Mao, Emanuele La Malfa +7

Language is not monolithic. While benchmarks, including those designed for multiple languages, are often used as proxies to evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs)…

cs.CL2024

MAGNET: Improving the Multilingual Fairness of Language Models with Adaptive Gradient-Based Tokenization

Orevaoghene Ahia, Sachin Kumar, Hila Gonen +4

In multilingual settings, non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages are usually disadvantaged in terms of language models' utility, efficiency, and cost. Specifically, previous…

cs.CL2025

SuperBPE: Space Travel for Language Models

Alisa Liu, Jonathan Hayase, Valentin Hofmann +3

The assumption across nearly all language model (LM) tokenization schemes is that tokens should be subwords, i.e., contained within word boundaries. While providing a seemingly rea…

cs.CL2024

Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research

Luca Soldaini, Rodney Kinney, Akshita Bhagia +33

Information about pretraining corpora used to train the current best-performing language models is seldom discussed: commercial models rarely detail their data, and even open model…

cs.CL2026

Can Large Language Models Generalize Procedures Across Representations?

Fangru Lin, Valentin Hofmann, Xingchen Wan +4

Large language models (LLMs) are trained and tested extensively on symbolic representations such as code and graphs, yet real-world user tasks are often specified in natural langua…

cs.CL2025

Large Language Models Discriminate Against Speakers of German Dialects

Minh Duc Bui, Carolin Holtermann, Valentin Hofmann +2

Dialects represent a significant component of human culture and are found across all regions of the world. In Germany, more than 40% of the population speaks a regional dialect (Ad…

cs.CL2021

Dynamic Contextualized Word Embeddings

Valentin Hofmann, Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Hinrich Schütze

Static word embeddings that represent words by a single vector cannot capture the variability of word meaning in different linguistic and extralinguistic contexts. Building on prio…

cs.CL2024

Political Compass or Spinning Arrow? Towards More Meaningful Evaluations for Values and Opinions in Large Language Models

Paul Röttger, Valentin Hofmann, Valentina Pyatkin +4

Much recent work seeks to evaluate values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) using multiple-choice surveys and questionnaires. Most of this work is motivated by concerns…

cs.CL2026

Bolmo: Byteifying the Next Generation of Language Models

Benjamin Minixhofer, Tyler Murray, Tomasz Limisiewicz +6

Recent advances in generative AI have been largely driven by large language models (LLMs), deep neural networks that operate over discrete units called tokens. To represent text, t…

cs.CL2025

Fluid Language Model Benchmarking

Valentin Hofmann, David Heineman, Ian Magnusson +7

Language model (LM) benchmarking faces several challenges: comprehensive evaluations are costly, benchmarks often fail to measure the intended capabilities, and evaluation quality…

cs.CL2024

Derivational Morphology Reveals Analogical Generalization in Large Language Models

Valentin Hofmann, Leonie Weissweiler, David Mortensen +2

What mechanisms underlie linguistic generalization in large language models (LLMs)? This question has attracted considerable attention, with most studies analyzing the extent to wh…

cs.CL2022

CaMEL: Case Marker Extraction without Labels

Leonie Weissweiler, Valentin Hofmann, Masoud Jalili Sabet +1

We introduce CaMEL (Case Marker Extraction without Labels), a novel and challenging task in computational morphology that is especially relevant for low-resource languages. We prop…

cs.CL2023

Counting the Bugs in ChatGPT's Wugs: A Multilingual Investigation into the Morphological Capabilities of a Large Language Model

Leonie Weissweiler, Valentin Hofmann, Anjali Kantharuban +10

Large language models (LLMs) have recently reached an impressive level of linguistic capability, prompting comparisons with human language skills. However, there have been relative…