4 papers
From sunblock to softblock: Analyzing the correlates of neology in published writing and on social media
Maria Ryskina, Matthew R. Gormley, Kyle Mahowald +3
Living languages are shaped by a host of conflicting internal and external evolutionary pressures. While some of these pressures are universal across languages and cultures, others…
Transformer-Enabled Diachronic Analysis of Vedic Sanskrit: Neural Methods for Quantifying Types of Language Change
Ananth Hariharan, David Mortensen
This study demonstrates how hybrid neural-symbolic methods can yield significant new insights into the evolution of a morphologically rich, low-resource language. We challenge the…
The Translation Barrier Hypothesis: Multilingual Generation with Large Language Models Suffers from Implicit Translation Failure
Niyati Bafna, Tianjian Li, Kenton Murray +4
Multilingual generation with large language models (LLMs) is often of poor quality for mid- to low-resource languages, but the causes for this are not well-understood. We first dem…
Programming by Examples Meets Historical Linguistics: A Large Language Model Based Approach to Sound Law Induction
Atharva Naik, Darsh Agrawal, Hong Sng +8
Historical linguists have long written "programs" that convert reconstructed words in an ancestor language into their attested descendants via ordered string rewrite functions (cal…