Linguistics

Goal-directed visual processing is a hallmark of human visual intelligence, resulting in representations that support downstream tasks such as categorization or search. Though vision-language models (VLMs) are often faced with these same tasks, their ability to recode visual representations when presented with goal-directed language remains poorly characterized. Indeed, prior work largely treats visual representations in VLMs as static repositories of visual information that are manipulated by language representations. In the present work, we provide evidence for two concrete instances of language-induced recoding of visual representations. First, we identify an abstract reference representation that denotes which objects are goal-relevant under a natural language prompt. We extract contrastive steering vectors corresponding to this reference representation and demonstrate that they are causally implicated in model predictions. These reference representations are abstract in that they generalize to different objects, different task contexts, and even from synthetic to naturalistic images. Second, we demonstrate language-induced attribute modulation: later layers selectively amplify goal-relevant attributes in visual representations of objects. We demonstrate this phenomenon across a range of different prompts. Finally, we provide a causal intervention that demonstrates that attribute modulation mediates a VLM's response distribution. Together, our results support a more dynamic account of cross-modality processing in VLMs -- rather than vision tokens serving as static repositories of information, they are modulated to support queries articulated in language.

Users frequently express their beliefs to large language models (LLMs). In some situations, the LLM should accept these contextual beliefs as true. In others, they should stick to their prior knowledge. Notably, users' expressions of belief (EoBs) can take linguistically diverse forms - using presuppositions, evidential and certainty markers, or varied tones - each of which may have a different persuasiveness over the LLMs. We introduce a typology to systematically evaluate how different EoBs affect whether models follow context versus prior knowledge. The typology is grounded in four linguistically motivated dimensions: form, evidentiality, epistemic stance, and tone, spanning 17 fine-grained types. By pairing these EoBs with world knowledge facts, we generate controlled EoB-query pairs that isolate the effect of linguistic variation. Using this benchmark, we evaluate 16 LLMs that differ in architecture (Llama3, Qwen3, Gemma3), scale (1B-30B parameters), and training stages (base vs instruct). We identify meaningful variations in response behavior across these axes, e.g., that bigger models and instruction models tend to be less context-following than smaller models and base models. We further identify specific EoBs that statistically significantly persuade LMs more consistently than others. Our work reveals systematic patterns in how linguistic framing affects LLM context integration, with implications for prompt engineering and model robustness.

Measuring conversational states such as cognitive load and conversational power from multimodal behavior requires characteristic features that are not only predictive but also reliable across task contexts. We present a three-dimensional evaluation framework assessing predictive accuracy, cross-task generalizability, and test-retest reliability, applied to interactional, acoustic, and linguistic features extracted from dyadic conversations during collaborative tasks performed over a video-conferencing platform (AVCAffe dataset; 53 dyads, 9 tasks). Our results show that no single feature family dominates all three dimensions. Linguistic features show the highest predictive accuracy for cognitive load but collapse under cross-task evaluation, revealing sensitivity to task-specific vocabulary. Additionally, acoustic reliability, often reported as evidence of feature stability, degrades once speaker identity is controlled, confirming that standard prosodic features measure vocal characteristics rather than conversational state. Interaction features provide the only genuinely reliable signal, unchanged after speaker normalization. Interestingly, classifying power role remained near chance baseline across all conditions, indicating limitations of task-level aggregated behavior for predicting power role in conversation. Our findings reveal three insights: (1) linguistic features predict best but generalize poorly across task contexts; (2) acoustic reliability collapses to near-zero once speaker identity is controlled, challenging standard evaluation practice; and (3) interaction features provide the only genuinely reliable signal, with floor dominance predicting within-dyad cognitive load asymmetry. These results argue for speaker normalization and multi-dimensional evaluation as prerequisites for context-aware, robust multimodal feature selection in conversational systems.

Prior work on LLM-generated text has demonstrated quantitative and qualitative departures from text produced by humans. LLM-generated texts differ from human writing in style, resulting in a characteristic textual "feel," while the semantic range of LLMs is much restricted compared to that of humans. In this contribution, I note simple but consistent patterns in the statistical distribution of n-grams within LLM-generated text. Via qualitative analysis of these n-grams, I reveal deficiencies in LLM style. Because higher-order n-grams correlate to semantic content, I conclude that questions of style and semantics are not cleanly separable.

Language models encode text as subword tokens, raw bytes, or rendered pixels, but these encodings are usually compared under modeling constraints that expose different amounts of linguistic content to models across different languages. We instead ask what each encoding preserves when both the content and the downstream capacity are controlled. Using verified parallel sentences across thirteen languages and five scripts, we compare tokens, bytes, and pixels through a shared bottleneck whose width is swept to trace rate-utility frontiers. This separates three quantities that are often conflated: the number of input positions an encoding creates, the latent capacity available after encoding, and the task-relevant information that survives compression. We evaluate three utilities: surface form preservation, cross-lingual sentence alignment, and topic classification. No encoding dominates across tasks or capacity regimes. Pixels preserve surface form best, bytes preserve cross-lingual alignment best, especially in same-script multilingual settings, and tokens support topic prediction best. These performances are not explained by sequence length alone. Short inputs can discard useful meaning, while long inputs can preserve information that compresses well. Choosing an encoding is therefore not a fixed preference for tokens, bytes, or pixels, but a rate-utility tradeoff that depends on the task, language mix, capacity regime, and compute budget.

Increasingly, speech and language processing tasks take either audio or text directly rather than extracting features from these as the input to the classifier or regressor. Often these systems make use of complex, for example transformer-based, processes that have the ability to derive highly non-linear mappings between the input and the output. Unfortunately these systems can also learn ''shortcuts'' where the classifier is overly reliant on particular aspects of the input to yield the output. For the task of language proficiency assessment, this over-reliance can enable learners to increase their score by exploiting the shortcut rather than improving their ability. This paper introduces a novel training criterion that is able to reduce the classifier's reliance on shortcuts, thus for example limiting this option for malpractice in language assessment. This process is illustrated on two forms of assessment system, one based on the audio the other on the speech recognition text. The results show that, for both systems, there is higher correlations with features that could be exploited for malpractice than expected from the human reference, indicating an over-reliance on these features. By introducing the modified training criterion, this correlation can be reduced to be closer to the reference correlation.

This study examines the cross-prompt generalization and first-language (L1) scoring effects of a LoRA-adapted open-weight large language model (Gemma-3-27B-it) applied to automated essay scoring. Using the identical model and inference configuration reported in "AiAWE: An Open-Source LLM Automated Writing Evaluation System Using LoRA-Adapted Instruction-Tuned Models" (Gayed, 2026), which was fine-tuned on 480 argumentative essays from two prompts, we evaluate scoring accuracy on the full TOEFL11 corpus: 12,100 essays written by test-takers from 11 first-language backgrounds across eight prompts, none of which were seen during training. The model's raw scores (0.5-5.0) are mapped to the same three proficiency bands (low, medium, high) used by ETS, enabling direct comparison. The model achieved an overall band agreement of 77.79% and a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.702, with adjacent-band agreement of 99.98%. Accuracy was stable across all eight unseen prompts, with no advantage for prompts thematically related to the training data, indicating robust cross-prompt generalization. However, the model exhibited a systematic, L1-linked scoring offset. Within every proficiency band, essays from European-language backgrounds received consistently higher scores than essays from East-Asian-language backgrounds, a pattern not attributable to the composition of the fine-tuning data. This is the first large-scale L1 fairness analysis of a fine-tuned open-weight LLM for automated essay scoring.

We present a frame-independent audio-text system for the 3rd Ambivalence/Hesitancy Video Recognition Challenge at the 11th Affective & Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) Workshop. Videos are divided into overlapping 5-s windows aligned with transcript timestamps. Each window combines prosodic audio descriptors, emotion-oriented RoBERTa embeddings, and 74 psycholinguistic features representing uncertainty, hedging, and attitudinal conflict. Temporal cross-attention fuses audio and text, while the support features condition gated Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) pooling. A five-seed ensemble achieves an average precision of 0.875 and a macro-F1 of 0.722 on the 525-video labeled public-test split. Notably, our submission ranked third overall on the official challenge leaderboard, with a macro-F1 of 0.7455. Source code is available at https://github.com/Liga-de-IA-PUCPR/abaw-11-ah-challenge/.

The asymmetry between language production and perception has been well-documented in psycholinguistics. Whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit a functionally analogous distinction remains an open question, particularly given that LLMs rely on the same underlying mechanism (next-token prediction) for both input and output processing. In this exploratory study, we operationalize the production-perception distinction through direct token probability measurements rather than metalinguistic prompting. Using the base Llama-3.1-8B model, we generated poems under a production prompt and re-scored the same tokens under both rephrased production prompts and perception-oriented prompts. Across an extended experiment with four production and three perception prompts, production-perception distances consistently and substantially exceeded production-production distances, with non-overlapping ranges across conditions and an overall average ratio of approximately 1.8. Near-ceiling correlations in the production-production control confirm that the effect is specific to communicative framing rather than prompt surface variation, and we show the effect replicates across five open-weight models (Llama-3.1-8B, EuroLLM-9B, gemma-2-9b-it, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct), spanning both base and instruction-tuned variants. Temporal analysis revealed that the perception prompt exerts its strongest influence at the beginning of the sequence, with divergence decaying as generated context accumulates, though the specific shape of this decay varies across prompt pairs. These findings suggest that prompt framing alone induces a production-perception distinction in LLM probability distributions, even within a decoder-only architecture.

Aphasia following stroke commonly produces systematic naming errors with characteristic profiles, but whether general-purpose language models not designed for clinical simulation can reproduce these patterns remains untested. We investigated (1) whether lesions or controlled perturbations to a multimodal language model can reproduce different types of errors in picture naming, and (2) whether the framework can reproduce the complete error profile of individual persons with aphasia (PWAs). Using LLaVA 1.6, we evaluated perturbation configurations that varied the layer, proportion, and amount of noise applied to model units. We examined 278 PWAs on the Philadelphia Naming Test, classifying responses into seven categories using a validated neural classifier. Six of seven response categories (correct, semantic, mixed, unrelated, neologism, no response errors) emerged at clinically-comparable proportions across distinct parameter space regions, with formal paraphasia being the exception. Searching the perturbation space revealed configurations that reproduced the individual error profile in at least six of seven categories for 97.8% of PWAs and in all seven categories for 79.5% of PWAs. Monte Carlo baselines confirmed that this matching reflects joint inter-category structure rather than marginal overlap. These results establish a quantitative framework for reproducing individual aphasic error patterns in picture naming. They suggest the potential for language models to serve as digital twins of individuals with post-stroke aphasia.

Ensuring the quality of educational materials requires more than standard proofreading: textbooks must be audited for factual accuracy, domain-specific technical correctness, and linguistic quality simultaneously -- a task that general-purpose grammar checkers cannot address. We present \textbf{AI Textbook Auditor}, a modular multi-agent pipeline for automated quality assurance of educational materials across subject domains. The system accepts a textbook PDF and produces a structured, human-reviewable report via two analysis tracks: a \textbf{Factual and Technical Track} in which an ensemble of specialized LLM agents detects factual inaccuracies, code errors, incorrect definitions, and conceptual inconsistencies, augmented with web search for humanities domains; and a \textbf{Grammar Track} operating PDF-natively to preserve diacritical encoding. A \textbf{Judge Agent} filters false positives using domain-specific rules before presenting findings to a human reviewer. The pipeline supports two ingestion modes -- vision-native page rendering and PyMuPDF text extraction -- and is domain-adaptable via custom prompts encoding subject-specific error taxonomies. We demonstrate the system on two Romanian upper-secondary textbooks: a CS textbook (56 technical findings across seven categories, with an expert-validated precision of 62.5%) and a history and social sciences textbook (72 findings spanning factual errors, ideological bias, and grammar). The system is designed as a triage tool that reduces the manual effort of locating candidate issues, with human expert validation required before any editorial action.

We address ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) recognition in the ABAW 2026 BAH Challenge: given a short interview video, predict whether the person shows signs of A/H. Our system combines affect-specialised text, audio, and visual representations with a small set of readable linguistic hesitation cues, fused by a reliability gate we call Affective Marker Fusion (AMF), and finished with a simple AP-weighted ensemble at a fixed decision threshold. We also introduce \emph{ASR-erased time}: speech recognisers delete fillers and hesitation pauses from the transcript, but the chunk timestamps keep the time those events took, and sixteen features built from these gaps form the strongest and most independent non-verbal channel we measured (AP $0.718$, correlation $0.11$--$0.36$ with all other members). Across controlled experiments we find three things: cross-modal conflict design does not reliably help on BAH; language is by far the strongest channel while affect-specialised audio is a useful second; and calibration matters more than architecture. Fitting ensemble weights and a threshold on the small validation split overfits: it scores $0.741$ macro-F1 on validation but only $0.690$ on the untouched test set. AP-weighting at a fixed threshold instead reaches $\mathbf{0.731}$ on test.

Language builds discourse contexts other than the actual: a painting, a belief, a memory, a hypothetical. Each is a mental space in which the same entity can take a different value, as when a flower is red in reality but purple in a portrait. Formal semantics keeps these contexts apart because their logics differ (modal, temporal, doxastic, depictive); Fauconnier's mental-space theory treats them as one space-building operation. We ask which of these a transformer language model implements, and find a mechanistic version of Fauconnier's unification. The model uses one router/slot format across the inventory: a reusable value slot stores attributed content, and a causally manipulable router (the space index) selects which space is read. A subspace trained with Distributed Alignment Search to control one space type, counterfactual, belief, fictional, or temporal, also controls the others, well above a random floor, on three model families; belief, which formal semantics marks as a distinct case, is not specially separated. The router is low-rank, composes additively with entity identity, and acts through a few late-layer heads. Two further results show the mechanism drives inference and composes: a subspace trained on a rule-derived conclusion flips what the model infers while dissociating from what it reports, and composing space-builders mints a fresh router over the shared slot. This paper establishes the cross-type generality. A companion paper develops belief in depth, because of its special status in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics (epistemology, theory of mind, and propositional attitude reports).

We present an interpretable network-based framework for representing idiomatic and figurative meaning across eight typologically diverse languages, totaling 160 conventional expressions, the large majority of which are idiomatic. Each expression is annotated with binary conceptual features (containment, concealment, emotional, social, etc.) derived from cognitive-linguistic theory, and pairwise Jaccard similarities define a weighted graph. Community detection reveals that idioms cluster by conceptual schema rather than by language, producing a structure consistent with cognitive-linguistic predictions. The conceptual network captures unique semantic information not present in distributional embeddings, can be scaled via automatic annotation with LLMs, improves downstream idiom detection, and remains robust when enriched with corpus frequencies. Cross-lingual transfer experiments show that conceptual proximity alone can identify acceptable translation equivalents across five language families, with substantial gains over embedding-based baselines. Ablation studies demonstrate that all three feature dimensions -- schemas, roles, and valence -- contribute non-redundantly to both the network's organizational properties and its performance on idiom detection, and that specific graph-derived signals (community membership, neighbor similarity) are particularly informative. The framework offers an interpretable, cross-linguistically stable representation of idiomatic meaning, combining theoretical grounding with practical utility.

We present a Procrustes-conditioned Joint End-to-end Top-K Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) for extracting cross-seed universal features from independently trained BERT models. Cross-seed feature universality is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability: because dictionary learning is non-convex, independently trained networks learn misaligned feature spaces, so apparently identical features may differ by random initialization. We address this by computing an orthogonal Procrustes rotation between seeds' activation spaces before joint SAE training, combining Top-K sparsity, end-to-end downstream optimization, and an auxiliary dead-feature revival loss based on previous SAE literature. Evaluating on five independent seed pairs (ten BERT models) across three benchmark datasets (SST-2, Stanford Politeness, TweetEval Emotion), our full pipeline produces more universal features (Pearson r $\geq$ 0.70 across seeds) than post-hoc alignment baselines on all three datasets. A minimal qualitative analysis confirms that high-universality features encode interpretable sociolinguistic patterns.

Roy Harris's Integrationist linguistics offers a compelling critique of the referentialist tradition embedded deep at the heart of computational approaches to language, arguing that language is not a code that maps onto a pre-given world but a situated, bipartite activity oriented toward prospective joint action. Yet Integrationism leaves certain explanatory gaps: it does not fully account for the structural mechanism by which signs sustain prospective openness, it undertheorises the continuity between linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic activity, and it offers no detailed account of the structural properties of the accumulated archive of past integrations. This paper argues that Elan Barenholtz's autogenerative theory of language, developed in response to the behaviour of Large Language Models (LLMs), can fill precisely these gaps, enriching Integrationism without undermining any of its core commitments. Specifically, the autogenerative account provides: a structural mechanism for the prospective openness that Harris identifies as central to bipartite communication; a computational correlate for Harris's thesis of semiotic continuity between language and other sign-making activity; and a theory of the archive: what the accumulated residue of past integrations looks like and how new participants draw upon it. The synthesis preserves Harris's ontological primacy of the situated integrative act while adding explanatory content that Integrationism itself does not supply. For practitioners and researchers in natural language processing and large language model design, the argument offers a principled account of what the statistical structure that LLMs so effectively exploit actually is, and of what it cannot, by its nature, provide.

African American English (AAE), a rule-governed dialect spoken by over 30 million people, is routinely misinterpreted and "corrected" by large language models (LLMs). Across six instruction-tuned LLMs (14B to 70B), we show that state-of-the-art models systematically prefer Standard American English (SAE) continuations even when the preceding context is in AAE, effectively rewriting AAE into SAE. We present an end-to-end framework to audit and mitigate this bias. For auditing, we introduce conditional Dialect Group Invariance (cDGI), which isolates true model bias from translator-induced artifacts, and a feature-level localization analysis that identifies which AAE markers most strongly trigger bias; we find that syntactic constructions, especially negative concord (e.g., "ain't nobody"), are universal triggers across all models. For mitigation, we introduce, to our knowledge, the first application of activation steering to dialect bias: a training-free, test-time method that extracts dialect directions via causal tracing and injects them into bias-relevant layers. Activation steering reduces bias 5 to 20 times more than prompting while preserving SAE fluency. To enable this work, we release REAL-AAE , the largest real-AAE parallel corpus to date: 17,479 AAE/SAE/ AAE_back triplets from natural tweets (2 to 6 times larger than prior real-AAE resources), validated automatically (BERTScore F1 = 0.95) and by three native AAE speakers (83.0% semantic agreement).

Dhivehi, the national language of the Maldives, is currently under-resourced for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and other NLP tasks. This study investigates whether cross-lingual transfer learning from Sinhala, a linguistically related, relatively well-resourced Insular Indo-Aryan language, can improve Dhivehi ASR. We conduct seventeen experiments across five transfer learning paradigms: Dhivehi-only baselines, sequential fine-tuning, multilingual fine-tuning, continual pre-training, and a control using Turkish as an unrelated language. The strongest system, continual pre-training on Sinhala followed by fine-tuning on Dhivehi with KenLM, achieves 12.89% WER and 2.70% CER, outperforming the Dhivehi-only baseline by 13.50% WER and 3.02% CER. However, the adaptation strategy and decoding configuration are equally critical for a successful transfer learning experiment. We conduct seventeen controlled experiments spanning five transfer learning paradigms: Dhivehi-only baselines, sequential fine-tuning, multilingual fine-tuning, continual pre-training, and a control experiment using Turkish as an unrelated language. The strongest system, continual pre-training on Sinhala followed by fine-tuning on Dhivehi with KenLM, achieves 12.89% WER and 2.70% CER, outperforming the Dhivehi-only baseline by 13.50% WER and 3.02% CER. The Turkish control experiment confirms that observed improvements stem from linguistic relatedness; adaptation strategy and decoding configuration are also critical.

Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale. A promising direction is to leverage linguistic relatedness to enhance cross-lingual transfer from a related auxiliary language to the low-resource target by sequentially adapting on both. Although this strategy has shown meaningful improvements in small ASR models, its effectiveness in large ASR remains unclear. We extend this framework to large multilingual ASR through a systematic controlled experimental design spanning six factors, two Africa-centric corpora, and four large ASR models, isolating whether linguistic relatedness reliably predicts cross-lingual transfer gains in this setting. Across all conditions, pre-adaptation on related auxiliary languages yields no practically meaningful transfer improvements given minimal target-language data, suggesting that linguistic relatedness alone may not reliably predict cross-lingual transfer gains in large multilingual ASR, or constitute an effective strategy for extending such models to low-resource languages.

Dialectal data are scarce relative to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), causing Arabic LLMs to overproduce MSA and struggle with dialectally accurate generation. This raises a fundamental interpretability question about where and how dialectal features are encoded within model internals and whether these representations can improve dialect generation without fine-tuning. We study two inference-time approaches as interpretability probes and control mechanisms. First, neuron-level analysis identifies sparse populations that encode dialect-specific features and tests whether amplifying or suppressing them steers model outputs toward target dialects. Second, vector steering extracts dialect-specific activation directions and injects them during inference, motivated by feature entanglement at the neuron level. We find that these neurons are real but only partially explanatory. They occupy under 1% of MLP dimensions but span only 5% to 21% of the residual dialect direction. This limited coverage is causally consequential. Neuron steering reinforces dialect in some varieties when the prompt is already dialectal but cannot induce it from MSA prompts, whereas vector steering succeeds in both settings. Arabic dialects are therefore steerable mainly through distributed rather than localized representations

Human reasoning often operates through qualitative concepts expressed by linguistic labels such as high, low, expensive, or cheap, whose interpretation depends on context and is usually vague, despite being rooted in numerical data. This paper explores a novel fuzzy-logic-based qualitative extension of Answer Set Programming (ASP) to bridge numerical information and qualitative reasoning. The underlying language, formally introduced in a separate work, provides a principled framework that avoids rigid thresholds and supports robust reasoning under vagueness. Focusing on a representative use case, we illustrate how the framework integrates numerically grounded inputs (such as outputs of machine learning models) with symbolic reasoning over qualitative labels. Key features, including learning-based membership functions and semantically enriched predicates, enable the combination of expert knowledge, contextual factors, and subjective interpretations within a unified declarative setting.

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse areas of human activity-ranging from everyday tasks to safety-critical applications-aims to enhance decision-making effectiveness with minimal human feedback. Concurrently, it seeks to align decisions with human expectations, preferences, and needs while mitigating risks associated with AI non-determinism. However, humans frequently over- or under-rely on AI recommendations, and current AI systems remain poorly calibrated to human expectations. To address these challenges, we introduce a human-AI collaborative decision-making framework designed to augment human capabilities and align AI agents with human preferences and expectations. Specifically, this paper (a) formulates the collaborative decision-making task as a stochastic game between an AI agent and a human player, and (b) proposes the Human-Centric Reflective Architecture (HCRA), which integrates human-calibrated models with reinforcement learning agents that leverage linguistic feedback in an iterative, reflective process. Evaluation results demonstrate that HCRA enhances decision-making effectiveness and delivers high-quality recommendations.

Language models are increasingly used to quantify cultural phenomena, but what makes such measurement distinctively cultural? This paper argues that NLP work on culture is a material-discursive practice: the apparatus -- model, data, annotation, evaluation -- participates in constituting the cultural reality it measures, rather than passively recording it. Drawing on Karen Barad's concept of the agential cut -- the contingent boundary between phenomenon and instrument -- I show that the apparatus's substantive design choices draw such boundaries, and that the boundary is entangled from the start because language models have already internalized much of the cultural material they measure. I illustrate this through three case studies on television and film dialogue (measuring structure, interaction, and deviation) and three examinations of the apparatus itself (erasure of cultural markers, attunement to historical material, and agency in an agentic workflow). This big picture analysis proposes a research program that is theory-driven, empirically rigorous, and culturally contingent, treating each agential cut as a conscious commitment, at once methodological and ethical.

Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in emotional-support contexts and crisis-related situations. Nevertheless, their cross-lingual abilities in these circumstances remain underexplored. Existing benchmarks emphasize multilingual performance but rarely examine crisis-related empathy and cultural grounding in low-to-mid-resource languages. We introduce SPLIT, a 500-prompt benchmark designed to evaluate LLM consistency in generating emotionally grounded responses across five categories: Stress, Panic, Loneliness, Internal Displacement, and Tension. We evaluate three technically diverse LLMs across three dimensions: Empathetic Accuracy, Linguistic Naturalness, and Contextual & Cultural Grounding. The framework aims to assess and compare the quality of LLM responses in both English and Ukrainian languages, as well as to explore the reliability of the LLM-as-a-jury paradigm. Our findings reveal that Gemini-2.5-Flash and LLaMA-3.3-70B-Instruct degrade when transitioning to Ukrainian, while DeepSeek-V3 remains comparatively stable within our benchmark. We additionally find that human and AI evaluators agree weakly on empathy and naturalness but diverge on cultural grounding. We further argue that producing Ukrainian text is not equivalent to producing Ukrainian emotional support. Our findings may assist in the future development of more culturally tailored benchmark designs, as well as encourage a stronger emphasis on human-centered evaluation.

Metacognition is a critical component of intelligence that describes the ability to monitor and regulate one's own cognitive processes. Yet LLMs exhibit systemic deficiencies in key metacognitive faculties: they hallucinate with high confidence, fail to recognize knowledge boundaries, and misrepresent their internal uncertainty--undermining trustworthiness and reliability. Since monitoring task performance and adapting behavior accordingly are central to metacognition, we posit that models capable of accurately judging their own performance are better positioned to improve it. We operationalize this idea via two novel mechanisms: reinforcement learning with metacognitive feedback (RLMF), a paradigm to refine completion rankings during preference optimization based on the quality of a model's self-judgments of performance, and metacognitive data selection, which uses similar self-judgments to identify high-value training examples, outperforming naive active learning. We apply these innovations to the problem of faithful calibration (FC), a task that is itself fundamentally metacognitive: the goal is to align expressed with intrinsic uncertainty, difficult even for frontier LLMs. We adopt a two-stage, decoupled approach, first using these methods to calibrate the faithfulness of models' self-reported confidence scores, then mapping to natural, context-adaptable linguistic uncertainty via targeted output editing. Extensive experiments show RLMF achieves generalizable, state-of-the-art FC on diverse tasks while preserving accuracy. Further, RLMF surpasses standard RL by up to 63% while enhancing models' ability to assess and express their own capability limits. This positions RLMF as a promising paradigm to enhance LLM metacognition toward improved abilities and alignment, and suggests metacognitive performance as an effective RL signal to overcome limits of prior intrinsic feedback methods.

Rapid advancements in generative speech technology have compromised the reliability of voice biometrics. While current spoofing detectors excel when assessed under in-domain conditions, generalisation to out-of-domain settings is often poor. We show that this can be due to linguistic bias. A reliance on linguistic cues observed in training data can then compromise robustness to cross-data. We propose a linguistic-invariant spoofing detection framework utilizing teacher-student adversarial learning. The linguistic-aware teacher model, pre-trained on linguistic content of an external dataset, guides the student detector via gradient reversal to minimize the linguistic information. To prevent the inadvertent removal of non-linguistic cues, we incorporate a Variational Information Bottleneck to enable suppression of principal cues. Across nine DF Arena datasets, our method achieves up to a 36.2% relative reduction in the EER compare to the baseline.

Managing our emotional responses to events is key to emotional well-being, a process referred to as emotion regulation in psychology. Previous work has established that the degree to which we distance events is a type of emotion regulation. When we psychologically distance from events there can be markers in our language. These markers have been referred to as linguistic distancing. We build upon a previous metric to operationalize linguistic distancing, and explore how it changes across the lifespan. We explore this systematically by analyzing large amounts of social media text, a venue where people express their emotions. By investigating how distancing varies across age groups we can better understand how emotion regulation varies with age and provide initial benchmarks on social media data. We provide additional evidence further strengthening the hypothesis that linguistic distancing occurs in proportionally more instances with age. These findings align with past work in psychology which indicate improved well-being with older age. Better understanding how linguistic distancing changes with age is important because it functions as a marker of well-being and can inform effective health interventions. We provide a foundation for further exploring emotion regulation through linguistic distancing in text data.

Recent work suggests that transformer language models show a bias towards human languages over unnatural ("impossible") languages argued to be unacquirable by humans. However, this literature has largely based these claims on differences in sample efficiency and test-set perplexity, rather than on direct evaluations of the linguistic capacities that could plausibly explain non-attestation in human languages. We evaluate two theoretically motivated linking hypotheses: impossibility arising from deficiencies in grammatical sensitivity or generative production. Using GPT-2 style models trained on perturbed "impossible" variants of English, we measure sensitivity to grammaticality using BLiMP minimal pairs, finding that model performance exhibits only gradual degradation, mediated by the language's information locality. In contrast, these models exhibited pronounced failures in generation, producing substantially fewer high-quality sentences at longer lengths. Together, these results suggest generative deficiency and transmission failures as a plausible linking hypothesis between language model behaviour and non-attestation of impossible languages.

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven the evolution of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), where specialized agents collaborate to execute complex workflows. Effective orchestration in these environments requires robust routing mechanisms to efficiently allocate tasks to the most suitable agent. However, existing routers fundamentally rely on unverified proxies, ranging from textual self-descriptions to static surrogate representations, to gauge an agent's competence. This reliance on non-empirical data creates a critical gap between an agent's projected profile and its actual operational capabilities, introducing severe security vulnerabilities. Malicious agents can easily misrepresent their proficiencies or harbor covert backdoors that evade both standard external analysis and static representation-learning techniques. In this work, we introduce ANTAP (Automatic Non-Textual Agent Picker), an evaluation-driven routing architecture that discards indirect proxies in favor of active capability testing. By dynamically querying agents to ascertain their true competencies empirically, ANTAP distills performance into fixed behavioral operators within a shared semantic space. At inference time, routing is performed via a purely non-textual algebraic projection, establishing a "linguistic firewall" that renders metadata-based attacks inexpressible. In our experiments, ANTAP achieves near-zero ASR against description-based injection attacks, compared to 67.3% and above for the description-based router baseline. Against adaptive embedding attacks, ANTAP achieves substantially lower ASR than the embedding-based baseline, with a 20% reduction, while remaining resilient to description manipulation by design.

Quantifying how meaning propagates through communicative exchanges remains underdeveloped in computational linguistics. Here we introduce an information-theoretic framework that quantifies the directed flow of semantic content between interlocutors and decomposes multi-source contributions into redundant, unique, and synergistic components. Our approach leverages large language models as probabilistic estimators of natural language to compute two measures: semantic transfer entropy (STE), which captures directed predictive influence between speakers, and semantic partial information decomposition (SPID), which resolves how multiple sources jointly shape a target's language. Across four experiments we show that the framework detects reduced information flow in cognitively rigid dialogue, captures the dominant role of persuaders in shaping discourse, distinguishes high- from low-quality psychotherapy by the directionality of therapist-client information exchange, and reveals synergistic premise contributions in argumentative essays. This framework opens new avenues for studying information dynamics in digital discourse, pedagogical interactions, clinical dialogues, and any domain in which the structure of linguistic exchange is of research relevance.

Human adults can often perform a novel task correctly on the first attempt after only receiving verbal or written instructions. This rapid instructed task learning (RITL) is a hallmark of human cognitive flexibility, yet its mechanisms and parallels in artificial systems remain under-explored across disciplines. In this position paper, we argue that humans possess an evolved instruction-following bias -- an inductive bias shaped by evolution to interpret and execute linguistic instructions which critically enables fast generalization of behavior from language. This bias functions analogously to the way large language models (LLMs) leverage instruction tuning to achieve zero-shot task performance. We synthesize evidence from cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning research to support this hypothesis. While instruction-following in AI is currently achieved via specialized training protocols, we posit that in humans it arises as an innate cognitive architecture feature. We outline testable predictions and call for more interdisciplinary research to investigate Instruction-Following as a unifying mechanism enabling rapid task learning in both natural and artificial neural networks.

We develop a quantitative theory of the Random Language Model (RLM), an ensemble of stochastic context-free grammars, in a scaling limit where the number of hidden symbols $N \to \infty$ while the grammar temperature $\tildeε_d \to 0$ at fixed $x = {\tildeε}_d \log N$. In this limit, the model admits a controlled description based on a large-deviation principle over rule-usage patterns. A semi-annealed approximation maps the problem to a class of Random Energy Models with nontrivial combinatorics. We show that the RLM exhibits a condensation transition at a critical value $x_c=1/8$, below which rule usage concentrates and language statistics acquire a nontrivial dependence on corpus length. A second characteristic scale at $x=1/2$ marks the onset of entropy reduction from its maximal value. Across these regimes, we derive explicit scaling laws for the number of distinct rules, entropy, and related observables, identifying distinct scaling, saturation, and critical regimes controlled by the interplay of grammar size, corpus length, and temperature. The theory resolves previous ambiguities regarding the existence of a thermodynamic transition and explains the slow approach to the large-$N$ limit as a consequence of the dependence on $\log N$. It further provides a unified framework in which universal statistical properties of language emerge from typical realizations of generative grammars, with implications for both natural language statistics and the behavior of large language models.

Early detection of dementia through speech analysis offers a non-invasive screening alternative, but capturing both acoustic and linguistic biomarkers remains challenging. We propose a multimodal framework leveraging Whisper for dual-purpose extraction: acoustic representations from encoder outputs and transcripts via automatic speech recognition (ASR). For the acoustic pathway, temporal networks with attention pooling aggregate variable-length sequences into fixed-dimensional embeddings. For the linguistic pathway, we prompt a large language model (LLM) to extract interpretable features spanning lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, semantic coherence, and discourse patterns. A gated fusion network integrates both modalities. On ADReSS and ADReSSo, our method achieves F1-scores of 89.47% and 90.14%, demonstrating effective integration of acoustic and LLM-augmented linguistic features. Ablation shows that multimodal fusion consistently outperforms either modality alone.

To avoid moderation and surveillance on social media, some users routinely invent indirect linguistic expressions (ILE) that camouflage sensitive meanings. Such expressions surface as algospeak, euphemisms, and adversarial obfuscation, depending on intent and context, and they involve recurring encoding mechanisms. We propose a comprehensive, mechanism-oriented taxonomy of ILE that abstracts away from communicative goals and instead categorizes the underlying operations through which meaning is encoded and recovered. We evaluate the taxonomy by incorporating it into LLM prompts and comparing it with four existing taxonomies and a no-taxonomy baseline, using 2,000 manually annotated TikTok and Bluesky posts. The proposed taxonomy attains the strongest document- and span-level performance across the three LLMs, achieving an improvement of 4.7% in accuracy and 5.4% in F1 over the best-performing benchmark. The empirical results reveal the importance of a comprehensive, mechanism-oriented taxonomy as a stable scaffold for detecting emerging coded language and a useful input to content moderation. Disclaimer: This paper contains content that may be profane, vulgar, or offensive.

Garden path sentences present a processing difficulty for humans -- the sentence prefix leads the listener towards one interpretation, until the listener hears a critical word that shows that the initial interpretation was wrong. Lexical surprisal, a measure that usually predicts sentence processing difficulty quite well, fails to provide good predictions for garden path sentences. We propose an alternative that actively predicts a probability distribution over syntactic trees (its syntactic belief) and updates that distribution after each new word. If a processor is led down a garden path, syntactic beliefs will be wrong and will require a large update at the critical word. The magnitude of the update is measured with a generalized Rényi divergence. Crucially, this metric is dependent on lexical items, but is fully independent of the probability of lexical items. This Syntactic Belief Update provides a better fit to the human reading time data on garden path sentences. This suggests a new research direction examining purely non-lexical alternatives to surprisal for psycholinguistics.

In today's fast-paced information era, logical fallacies, defined as defective patterns of reasoning, inevitably contribute to the growth of information disorder. However, often fallacies appear in nuanced forms that complicate automated classification. In this study, we investigate whether merging abstract logical structures with context-level linguistic cues proves beneficial for fallacy classification, developing a framework that inductively extracts such patterns from fallacious examples and their explanations using Large Language Models (LLMs). We evaluate the impact of these patterns across different LLMs and experimental zero- and one-shot configurations, showing statistically significant improvements over zero-shot baselines and outperforming competing approaches. Cross-dataset experiments validate generalization, establishing data-driven pattern extraction as an effective method for generating logical representations.

The neutral, or floating, tone of Mandarin Chinese is a tone with an enigmatic set of properties. It has been described as a reduced tone, or as a tone that sometimes is lexically fixed but that can also be toneless. In two-syllable words, it is found only on the second syllable, but single-syllable words can also have the neutral tone. We present a corpus-based study of the phonetic realization of the neutral tone in spontaneous conversational speech corpora of Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. We show that the neutral tone has its own tonal target, just as the four lexical tones of Mandarin. We also show that disyllabic words with a neutral tone have pitch contours that have a pitch component that depends on the tone on the first syllable, just as has been observed for two-syllable words with a lexical tone on the second syllable (Chuang et al., 2026). Furthermore, words with a floating tone have word-specific pitch signatures, which have also been documented for single-syllable words (Jin et al., 2026) as well as two-syllable words (Lu et al., 2026b). These word-specific pitch signatures are shown to be predictable to some extent from words' contextualized embeddings, as previously reported for lexical tones (Chuang et al., 2026; Lu et al., 2026b). As there is also considerable variability in the realization of lexical tones, we propose that the neutral tone is, in fact, a lexical tone in both Taiwan Mandarin and Beijing Mandarin. We document both similarities and differences in the realization of the floating tone in these two varieties and provide evidence, using contextualized embeddings, that some of the observed differences may arise from differences in the meanings of the words as used in the two corpora.

High-quality annotations of structured representations are expensive to collect over large corpora. Manual annotation of structure is laborious, and model-based annotation, although cheaper to generate, requires expensive validation and potentially significant supervision to ensure that the annotation quality is strong enough to be useful downstream. In traditional annotation workflows, annotation of each complete example is performed end-to-end by a single annotator. However, structured annotation is complex, and each aspect of the task represents a unique challenge with an associated inferential load for a given annotator. Modern annotation projects can incorporate heterogeneous groups of annotators, including both models and human annotators with varying domain and linguistic expertise. It remains unclear, however, how to redesign annotation tasks in this setting, where efforts are discriminately allocated across heterogeneous annotators with respect to distinct annotation challenges. We propose to decompose annotation tasks into sub-tasks in order to reduce the aggregate inferential load of annotation projects. Inspired by the notion of centers from centering theory, we introduce a formal model of inferential load based on the degrees of freedom in the space of valid annotations. Using this model, we show that identifying these centers (i.e. salient anchor entities realized by annotation sub-tasks) constrains the output space complexity, and decompositions which isolate and advance center identification reduce the aggregate inferential load. We provide guidelines for decomposing complex structured annotation tasks, supported by examples demonstrating improved cost-efficiency from our prior work. Finally, we present a procedure for allocating sub-tasks across annotators to maximize quality under a fixed budget.

The Prague Dependency Treebank framework is unique in its attempt to systematically include and link different layers of language, including a meaning representation with several types of inter-sentential phenomena, especially coreference and discourse relations. We present its second consolidated version (PDT-C 2.0), which concludes almost 30-years long project of sustained development of the resource to a uniformly and coherently annotated, genre-diversified, almost 4 million token language resource of Czech language, with accompanying fully compatible lexicons. In addition to continuous linguistic research, the richly linguistically annotated corpus is also widely used in international comparisons of the development of traditional and novel NLP tools as well as in conversions into other formalisms. The corpus and the trained parsers are available under the CC BY-NC-SA licence.

We ask whether the geographic origin of Tang-dynasty poets leaves a detectable linguistic trace in their work. Aggregating every poem attributed to each author in the Complete Tang Poems (Quan Tang Shi) and linking poets to their administrative circuit of origin via the China Biographical Database (CBDB), we build a poet-level corpus of 357 poets across the ten Tang circuits and frame origin prediction as multi-class classification. Using character $n$-gram TF-IDF together with interpretable domain features (imagery, season, and allusion), classical and neural models predict a poet's broad region (South vs.\ North) at $0.69$ accuracy, well above the $0.53$ majority baseline, and finer circuit-level origin above chance. Beyond classification, three findings emerge. (i) Linguistic distance between circuits grows with geographic distance (Mantel $r=0.40$, $p\approx0.09$ over nine circuits), evidence of a distance-decay effect in poetic language. (ii) The signal interacts with time: South/North separability is at chance in the High Tang and strongest in the Late Tang, consistent with court-driven homogenization at the empire's height followed by regional divergence. (iii) The model's confident errors are historically meaningful -- in the Early Tang, every misclassification is a southern poet read as northern, reflecting the prestige of the northern court idiom. We further show that, when given the whole corpus through a hierarchical frozen-encoder representation, a classical-Chinese transformer (GuwenBERT) only matches -- not beats -- simple TF-IDF, and that combining them adds nothing, indicating that character $n$-grams already capture the regional signal. Our results position interpretable machine learning as a hypothesis generator for literary history.

"Talk short. Drop grammar. Save token." This caveman style is widely promoted as a way to cut inference cost, but whether it actually saves anything depends on which channel (the user's prompt or the model's response) is being compressed. We present Cavewoman, a two-channel evaluation protocol that scores every generation on task accuracy, realized per-item cost, and reference-text agreement against the model's unconstrained reference. We evaluate eight models on five datasets at five reduction levels, with both channels measured on the same items. Output compression cuts realized cost on most API models (1.4-2.4x per model, up to 3x in the best case) and on all four open-weight models under public-tier pricing. Input compression has the opposite effect, a strict lose-lose: it raises net cost rather than lowering it (~1.15x on the five-benchmark mean, up to 1.8x on the worst dataset and 2.7x under stronger compression), because models compensate with longer responses even as accuracy collapses. Under the same setting, surface text diverges from the unconstrained reference: on the non-reasoning models, roughly half of all generations are correct yet their surface text no longer entails the model's own unconstrained baseline generation. The divergence survives length-controlled re-scoring, multiple-comparisons correction, and replication under complementary semantic measures. Code and data are available at https://github.com/danielle34/cavewoman.

We study the limits of CTC-internal scoring for N-best hypothesis selection and locate the information bottleneck separating acoustic confidence from linguistic plausibility. Eleven CTC-internal and acoustic-feature scoring strategies produce no statistically significant WER improvement over greedy decoding on LibriSpeech dev-other at G=16 (all p > 0.05). The exhaustion is systematic: CTC's Spearman $ρ$ between hypothesis score and per-utterance WER degrades from -0.574 at G=4 to -0.270 at G=128, a 53% loss driven by blank-path proliferation. This establishes that the discriminative capacity of CTC-internal representations is saturated: no recombination of acoustic signals can close the oracle gap. Confirming that the bottleneck is linguistic, not acoustic, external linguistic information introduced via MBR decoding breaks through it. MBR-CER decoding with a RoBERTa pseudo-log-likelihood (PLL) posterior ($τ$=10, G=128) achieves 5.42% WER on held-out LibriSpeech test-other (greedy 5.96%, $Δ$=-0.535 pp, p<0.0001, 9.0% relative). RoBERTa PLL $ρ$ degrades only 21% over the same range, retaining discriminating power where CTC loses it. Applied without retuning across two Zipformer architectures, three domains (LibriSpeech, TED-LIUM 3, VoxPopuli), and four MUSAN noise levels, the recipe gives significant gains in 11 of 13 conditions. On the training side, standard MWER training via the CTC forward-backward algorithm implements Rao-Blackwellized REINFORCE at the output projection (variance about 3x below Viterbi). Yet sequence-level fine-tuning fails at near-converged checkpoints: all four MWER configurations on CR-CTC collapse (+6.18 to +8.90 pp WER), as a training oracle gap of 0.007 pp provides no usable reward signal.

This study investigates sentiment polarity biases, specifically, differences in how accurately AI models classify positive versus negative reviews across languages and model architectures. Large language models show a negative bias in French and are more accurate on negative reviews, while encoder models exhibit positive bias in Japanese, missing negative reviews that use indirect criticism. These language-specific polarity biases have implications in both social and business domains deploying multilingual sentiment analysis systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a new opportunity to study how language shapes exploratory cognition because conversational strategies can be systematically manipulated at inference time. We introduce CURIOBOT, a framework that operationalizes Berlyne's collative variables, novelty, complexity, conflict, and uncertainty, as adaptive linguistic interventions for conversational tutoring. Across 270 tutoring conversations spanning multiple model families, domains, and topic complexity levels, curiosity-oriented interventions consistently increased exploratory learner behaviors, producing up to 2.4x more conversational turns under fixed time budgets. To measure these effects, we further introduce a learner-centered evaluation framework capturing exploratory questioning, conversational agency, productive struggle, and observable curiosity. Learner-side gains persisted even when tutor-side instructional quality remained unchanged, suggesting that curiosity functions as a partially independent interaction-level mechanism. More broadly, our results demonstrate that LLM-mediated dialogue can serve as a scalable experimental framework for studying how language shapes exploratory learning behavior.

Large language models (LLMs) can readily reproduce conventional expressions, yet their ability to model gradient frequency distributions remains underexplored. We investigate this using linguistic binomials, such as men and women, where both word permutations are grammatically valid but exhibit distinct, cross-linguistic variations in conventionality. We formalize binomial ordering as a distributional alignment problem, and construct a multilingual dataset of 600 binomial pairs across 8 languages. With categorical and distributional metrics, we measure and compare the corpus-derived preferences with model-induced ordering probabilities of 6 open-weight LLMs. While models often behaviorally recover the dominant corpus-preferred order, particularly for strongly conventionalized pairs, they align less well with the exact corpus preference distributions. This suggests that apparent directional order overstates how faithfully LLMs capture the statistical nuances of language use. Sparse probing verifies that the concept of preference strength is partially encoded among middle-to-late layers, and steering along probe-derived directions alters model-induced ordering distributions, demonstrating that the statistical behavioral preference of LLMs can be mechanistically measured and manipulated via internal representations.

Much work on the cognitive foundations of AI has focussed on comparisons between the ways in which Large Language Models (LLMs) and humans process information and represent it. One aspect of this comparison involves determining the extent to which LLMs can achieve or surpass human performance on a variety of cognitively interesting tasks. A second explores points of convergence and divergence between LLM and human systems for processing information. Here, I consider some recent research that has addressed both issues in two informational domains. The first is the representation of linguistic knowledge. The second is real world reasoning and planning. While LLMs frequently achieve impressive levels of performance and fluency on linguistic applications, they tend to handle linguistic content in ways that are distinct from human processing. They are also, for the most part, less efficient than humans in learning and generalisation for reasoning tasks.

Reaching global agreement from purely local interactions is a defining problem of collective intelligence, and most models of it assume that all agents share a single communication protocol. We ask what happens when they do not. Using a Neural Cellular Automaton in which a population of cells must solve the density classification task, agreeing on a global majority that no individual can observe, we introduce languages'' as sub-populations that read one another's messages through a translation with a tunable linguistic distance''. We find that linguistic distance slows consensus, that it produces mild divergence between groups rather than full fragmentation, and that a collective whose shared rule was trained under diverse protocols is robust to mismatch; a homogeneously trained one is not. The findings hold on both a ring and a two-dimensional grid, and admit a natural reading as Ising relaxation, in which a foreign-language region acts as a boundary defect that leaves the system in a higher-energy, partially ordered state. These patterns are qualitatively consistent with effects reported in human group studies, suggesting that distance between communication protocols is a minimal mechanism sufficient to produce them, without anything language-specific.

Generative artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity and transform the production of creative content. However, existing research indicates that image generation models are significantly influenced by biases. This work investigates the inherent biases and language-induced biases present in text-to-image models within the context of occupation-related image generation, complementing established metrics with human preference feedback. We present a comprehensive evaluation of five current text-to-image models: Midjourney v6.1, Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, DALL-E 3, Playground v2.5, and FLUX.1-dev , focusing on gender and ethnicity bias, image quality, and prompt alignment. To facilitate this evaluation, we developed the "Battle-Arena for Fair Image Synthesis" (BAFIS), a platform designed to collect human feedback on bias in generated images. Furthermore, we created a dataset comprising 21,140 synthetic images generated using multilingual prompts, which serves as a basis for our analysis. We further place our results within a broader social context by comparing them to official statistics from the German Federal Employment Agency. Our findings reveal systematic biases in text-to-image models, with established evaluation metrics in partial correlation with subjective user ratings. Thus, our research emphasizes the need for including human preferences to develop fairer and more inclusive text-to-image models.

The increasing prominence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in public discourse presents both opportunities and challenges for democratic deliberation. While red teaming strategies help mitigate specific risks, broader concerns persist regarding linguistic constraints, biases, and the sycophantic tendencies of LLMs. This chapter explores how LLMs can be used to significantly scale up and democratise deliberation, particularly in fostering inclusivity and empowering traditionally marginalised groups. Drawing on concepts from Systemic-Functional Linguistics, the chapter examines how variations across language users (for example, with respect to socio-demographic groups) and across language use (for example, with respect to communicative functions) shape participation in AI-supported deliberation. The chapter presents AI-driven deliberation studies and assesses their potential to scaffold argumentation, enhance access, and reduce the influence of exclusionary linguistic norms and biases which are embedded in prestigious registers. At the same time, the chapter cautions against both overclaiming, which leads to unrealistic expectations, and underclaiming, which risks missed opportunities for AI-assisted engagement. The chapter concludes by identifying future research directions to maximise the democratic potential of AI-assisted participation while embedding ethical safeguards to counteract the reproduction of linguistic inequalities.

Figurative language and negation are two areas that challenge current language models, however, both are widely used throughout written and spoken language. Large language models (LLMs) are also widely used in everyday contexts where they cannot necessarily be tuned for a specific dataset. It is therefore essential to understand the ability of LLMs to correctly interpret text that includes both negation and figurative language. To investigate this, we develop a set of new annotations to an existing dataset of figurative language, and test a range of language models on the dataset. We find that the combination of negation and figurativeness can present a particular challenge, and that performance overall and across different negation types is particularly dependent on the prompt style used.

Word2Vec's effectiveness at generating semantic embeddings has been widely validated, yet it has been tested almost exclusively on languages with large vocabulary inventories. This study examines whether Word2Vec can successfully capture semantic relationships within an extremely reduced vocabulary using data from Toki Pona, a constructed language with approximately 130 words. We sourced 1.4 million sentences (7.95 million tokens) from the Toki Pona community for training. Approximately 23% of sentences in the corpus contain non-Toki Pona tokens such as named entities, loanwords, and neologisms. To investigate whether this linguistic noise enhances or hinders performance -- a topic rarely addressed in word embedding literature -- we trained two distinct models: one retaining these incidental tokens and another filtering them out completely. Evaluation was conducted using quantitative methods measuring word proximity to semantic category centroids, automated silhouette scores via agglomerative clustering, and qualitative analysis utilizing representational similarity matrices compared against English. The results indicate that while sparse, non-core tokens do not affect the relative structure of the learned embeddings, they actually draw similar words closer together in the vector space. Importantly, Word2Vec's effectiveness depends more on distributional patterns than lexicon size even at this extreme lower bound.

Faithful and robust pronoun use is important for fair and coherent generations, yet large language models largely fail when multiple referents use different pronouns. To study the interplay of reasoning, repetition, and bias in this task, prior work relies exclusively on behavioural approaches, which may not reflect a model's internal workings. Therefore, we provide a mechanistic, model-internal perspective on pronoun fidelity, testing whether three mechanisms -- group entity binding (G), recency bias (R), and stereotypical bias (S) -- are causally implemented across several SOTA language models. Using Boundless Distributed Alignment Search, we find all three coexist as causal subspaces distributed across network depth. No single mechanism fully explains model behaviour, but a combination of the three consistently accounts for 91-99.5%. An attention head analysis further reveals two competing copying routes; group binding and stereotype share a localized concept-level route that retrieves a bound occupation-pronoun unit, while recency uses a distributed token-level route that repeats surface forms. In sum, pronoun fidelity arises from competition between simultaneously active causal subspaces.

Large language models are increasingly deployed for written pronunciation feedback in second-language (L2) English learning, under the assumption that their diagnoses are grounded in the supplied speech evidence rather than in priors from pretraining. This assumption is tested on 1,800 L2-Arctic utterances spanning six L1 backgrounds, three audio-capable LLMs, four pronunciation dimensions, and five evidence conditions ranging from a text-only baseline to numeric acoustic features and raw audio. Each (utterance x model x condition x dimension) cell is scored on three metrics: Rating Accuracy (RA) against gold labels, Evidence Coherence (EC) assessing internal consistency without ground truth, and Grounded Correctness (GC) evaluated against gold evidence. Results show three findings across models. First, rating accuracy and grounded reasoning decouple: 39.6% of judged cells contain internally coherent reasoning that supports a wrong rating, against only 15.8% where the reasoning supports a correct rating. Second, phoneme-level feedback converges to a fixed inventory of L2-English difficulty phones that recurs across all six L1 backgrounds and all evidence conditions. Third, acoustic evidence improves the rating only when the supplied feature directly probes the target dimension: textualised F0 range raises pitch-variation grounding from (0.18-0.19) to (0.45-0.62) across all three models, while stress and phoneme correctness, which require target-to-realisation alignment, remain ungrounded. The same audio waveform without textualised F0 values does not reproduce this improvement. These findings indicate that current general-purpose LLMs are more reliable as verbalisers of externally computed pronunciation evidence than as standalone diagnostic engines.

Large language models (LLMs) process text as sequences of subword tokens, which can obscure the character-level and morphological structure that underlies word formation. This limitation is most acute for languages with non-concatenative morphology, where standard tokenizers systematically misalign token boundaries with morpheme boundaries. We introduce PACUTE, a diagnostic benchmark of 4,600 tasks designed to evaluate morphological understanding in Filipino, a language characterized by productive infixation, reduplication, and diacritic-driven lexical distinctions that are typically absent from written text. PACUTE includes a hierarchical diagnostic framework of six compositional levels that localizes where morphological understanding breaks down. Evaluating open-weight LLMs and frontier commercial models, we find that open-weight models perform near chance on morpheme decomposition regardless of scale. Frontier models perform much better, often recovering individual affixes under contains-match scoring, but remain far below their character-level ceilings on compositional tasks of morpheme transformations and syllabification. These results identify productive morphological composition, rather than character access alone, as the persistent bottleneck for Filipino word-structure understanding.

Linguistics olympiad problems (LOPs) are a category of self-sufficient puzzles consisting of a scaled-down corpus representative of certain linguistic phenomena, from which the solver must deduce a primitive set of rules of the language and then translate a new set of elements. The linguistics olympiads (LOs) have become a worldwide phenomenon with 43 different territories taking part in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) 2025. While the typology and solving strategies of LOPs have been analysed, their scientific facet and connections to academic linguistics have yet to be explored. LOPs are directly connected to many linguistic fields, e.g., linguistic typology, linguistic relativity, and linguistics fieldwork. Recently, LOPs have become a research focus as benchmarks for large language models, thus highlighting their usefulness in computational linguistics. Nevertheless, they have not yet been integrated into mainstream linguistics research. This paper attempts to open new directions of including this particular type of puzzle in academic research by offering a structured evaluation of LOPs as linguistic data sources and proposes criteria for their responsible use in academic research. Starting from a set of over 1800 LOPs, this study critically examines the potential of LOPs as a novel corpus for linguistics research by discussing their strengths and limitations as tools, as well as the areas of linguistics into which these problems could fit. This work forms the foundation for a broader initiative aimed at bridging the gap between LOs and academic linguistics, by establishing a robust theoretical framework for LOPs.

A crucial aspect of linguistic capability is the ability to trade off between stored representations and abstract knowledge: one must retrieve learned representations, but also generate novel ones by applying productive rules. While recent work has examined abstract knowledge in language models, holistic storage of multi-word units has received far less attention. We probe internal representations in text-based LLMs and an ASR model, testing whether V+up phrasal verbs develop distinct representations as a function of frequency and predictability. All models show evidence of holistic storage driven by frequency and predictability, further supporting usage-based theories of language.

The likelihood ratio framework is widely recognized as the logically and legally sound basis for evidential analysis across forensic sciences, and its importance is increasingly acknowledged in analyses of authorship in textual evidence. To date, however, its application has been confined to English-language texts. Meanwhile, authorship attribution has traditionally relied on a diverse array of stylometric features, even as the rise of pre-trained large language models enables new contextual-embedding approaches. Combining these diverse approaches through fusion promises enhanced performance, yet it has not been applied to integrate stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems within the likelihood ratio paradigm. This study is the first to apply likelihood ratio-based forensic text comparison to Japanese digital texts, using ~1,000-character excerpts from blogs, to 1) evaluate system performance and likelihood ratio magnitudes and 2) assess the impact of fusing stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems. The results demonstrate that the fused system maintains excellent calibration while 1) increasing consistent-with-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes; 2) decreasing contrary-to-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes and 3) improving overall discriminability. The best-performing fusion achieved a log-likelihood-ratio cost of 0.32484, illustrating both the feasibility of likelihood ratio framework for Japanese and the benefits of fusion across heterogeneous systems.

Humor plays a central role in human social relationships, and recent advances in computational humor create new opportunities for integrating humor into human-robot interaction (HRI). While large language models (LLMs) can generate diverse forms of humor, it remains unclear how humor style, joke content, and language preference shape perceptions of robot-delivered humor in group settings. In this exploratory study, we employed a mixed factorial design in which participants evaluated AI-generated jokes delivered by a robot in a university classroom. We examined the effects of humor type (Affiliative, Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, Self-Defeating) and joke content (person-related vs. political) on perceived funniness and appropriateness, as well as preferred language. Results show that humor type significantly influences funniness, with Aggressive and Affiliative humor rated higher, while joke content primarily affects appropriateness, with person-related jokes preferred over political ones. Language preference was shaped by both joke content and participants' self-reported fluency and humor practices.

Research on bias in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on third-person audits, which study how models represent or evaluate demographic groups as external subjects. However, this paradigm overlooks a structural blind spot because the user is absent from the audit. In practice, LLMs are used in open-ended, personal interactions, during which the model implicitly represents the user and adjusts its responses accordingly. When identical requests yield different responses depending on who is asking, bias manifests not in how the model describes others but in how it treats its interlocutor. We propose Situated Interaction Auditing (SIA), a user-centered framework for studying how user profile signals -- implicit sociodemographic markers, writing style, and stated identity -- systematically shape LLM response quality, content, and tone. We demonstrate the framework through a case study that intersects gender and socioeconomic status signals across multiple task domains and outline a research agenda for SIA as a new mission for natural language processing.

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new potential for translation tasks but often experience performance degradation when handling low-resource languages. To address this limitation, we propose an approach for fine-tuning LLMs on a low-resource language, Kupang Malay. Our approach involves designing a set of instructions by leveraging explicit lexical and semantic features from a bilingual dictionary, and introducing Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT), a training paradigm that enables iterative instruction-based training. Experimental results demonstrate that our model, named Lius, yields notable improvements over standard instruction-tuned models by outperforming 4-6 points, and surpassing both Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Multilingual LLM models by 10-13 points on several evaluation metrics. These findings highlight the potential of our approach to mitigate the reliance on large-scale parallel data in low-resource language translation.