Language Has Two Parameters: Narrative-Induced Semantic Plasticity and Phase-Sensitive Interpretation
Language has two parameters. Count how often words occur together and you estimate amplitude, the strength of association.
What do a language model's hidden states say about the organization of a single text? From one forward pass, without training, we score every token position on two properties.
Language has two parameters. Count how often words occur together and you estimate amplitude, the strength of association.
arXiv:2510. 04120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on metaphor detection and interpretation tasks, yet it remains unclear what such behavioral success reveals about metaphor processing.
arXiv:2607. 16741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: B\"urger et al.
arXiv:2607. 10248v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language builds discourse contexts other than the actual: a painting, a belief, a memory, a hypothetical.
arXiv:2608. 04021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloze-style probes that vary how often a target token appears implicitly assume that more copies of a target affect prediction the same way regardless of where the readout slot sits.
arXiv:2607. 03598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a person shares something with a language model, the model often answers the surface of the message rather than what the sender was doing by sending it: share a finished project and it critiques the code; share a raw late-night line and it runs a wellness check.
arXiv:2606. 07555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Glossaries, technical specifications, and system prompts routinely ask language models to use familiar words in unfamiliar ways.
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.
arXiv:2606. 07559v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning a language model often fails silently when its correct completion must outrank a near-synonym competitor.
arXiv:2608. 09093v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How a document's arrangement is written down, its notation, is a training variable that no dataset card records.
Large language models place structured concepts on geometrically faithful manifolds: weekdays lie on a circle, months on another, usually taken to be a fixed world-model the network stores and looks up. We show that context is king: the structure a model actually uses is set by the in-context specification.
arXiv:2607. 21498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A rhetorical figure that Cicero and Quintilian catalogued two thousand years ago reappears, systematically, in the text of large language models: epanorthosis, the self-correction of the specimen {\guillemotleft}This is not a course.