The study examined how the choice of corpus affects estimates of dependency distance in language. By comparing 38 pairs of treebanks from the same language, the authors found that cross-treebank agreement was only moderate, with nearly 40% of language orderings reversed when switching treebanks. Treebank selection explained about 29% of the variance, a discrepancy that far exceeds within-treebank sampling error and persists across multiple preprocessing settings, yet all treebanks still supported the principle of dependency-length minimization.
arXiv:2605. 02608v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer-based models achieve state-of-the-art dependency parsing for high-resource languages, yet their advantage over simpler architectures in low-resource settings remains poorly understood.
arXiv:2606. 12708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite their linguistic diversity and global significance, African languages remain underrepresented in research and resources to support NLP.
FreqBLiMP is a frequency‑controlled extension of the BLiMP minimal‑pair benchmark that regenerates all 67 paradigms under explicit Zipf‑frequency regimes while preserving grammatical contrasts. The study evaluates multiple open‑weight LLM families and finds that lower lexical frequency consistently reduces sentence likelihood, yet overall contrastive acceptability accuracy drops only modestly. However, the stability in aggregate accuracy hides significant variability across linguistic phenomena, with models remaining robust on overt morphosyntactic generalization but degrading on lemma‑specific tasks.
Preference optimisation has proven effective for improving large language models but typically relies on costly human preference annotations. Extending these methods to morphologically rich, low-resource languages remains challenging because such annotations are scarce.
arXiv:2608. 06179v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference optimisation has proven effective for improving large language models but typically relies on costly human preference annotations.
The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.
arXiv:2608. 10137v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grammar Constrained Decoding (GCD) forces Language Models (LMs) to produce syntactically valid outputs by masking out non-conforming tokens at each step.
arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.
arXiv:2608. 16643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated detection of errors in clinical documentation is a promising application of large language models (LLMs), yet decisions to deploy such models rest on benchmarks that evaluate each clinical note in isolation.
The paper evaluates four metrics—CKA, ANC, GMM dominance per token, and ILO—used to measure cross‑lingual representation sharing in multilingual language models. Across 21 models ranging from 125 M to 14 B parameters, the metrics disagree, and the authors attribute this to anisotropy, where representations cluster in a narrow embedding cone. Only ILO shows a strong, robust correlation with cross‑lingual transfer performance (Spearman’s ρ = 0.90) after controlling for model size, family, and task variation, leading the authors to recommend ILO as the primary metric alongside anisotropy diagnostics.
arXiv:2608.27813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structural probes were introduced by Hewitt and Manning to reconstruct syntactic trees from a neural language model's latent representations. They are...
Automated detection of errors in clinical documentation is a promising application of large language models (LLMs), yet decisions to deploy such models rest on benchmarks that evaluate each clinical note in isolation. Error-detection benchmarks are typically constructed by injecting errors into notes, such that each erroneous note has a natural counterpart.