arXiv AI

A theoretical model of dynamical grammatical gender shifting based on set-valued set function

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

The Limits of BPE Tokenization in Polish: Segmentation-Flexional Forms, Grammatical Anchoring, and First-Person Stability in Inflectional Language Models

The article examines how Byte‑Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization handles Polish, an inflectional language, and finds that BPE tends to stabilize frequent surface fragments of grammatical exponents rather than true grammatical categories. It introduces the concept of grammatical form anchoring, showing that certain Polish verb forms can signal the speaking subject without an explicit pronoun, and highlights that language models may lack a stable grammatical "I" and can shift gender or mirror user forms. The study proposes Roclawski’s segmentation‑flexional forms as a diagnostic framework and suggests that more stable Polish modeling would require sublexical stabilization, anchoring grammatical form in the inflectional system, and maintaining the grammatical "I" in dialogue.

By Elzbieta Dawidek (University of Lower Silesia DSW Ideis)
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Generalization through Lexical Abstraction in Transformer Models: The Case of Functional Words

The study investigates whether pretrained transformer models encode functional words—such as pronouns and adverbs—in a way that mirrors human usage. By comparing embeddings of nouns with those of their functional counterparts in both isolated and parallel sentences, the authors find that functional words occupy a central yet distinct position in embedding space and that parallel lexicalized and functional sentences reside in different subspaces. Experiments show that only a mixed training set of functional and lexicalized sentences reveals shared syntactic and semantic structure, whereas training on either type alone fails to capture this parallelism.

By Giuseppe Samo, Vivi Nastase, Paola Merlo
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Fixed Suffix Dependency Ratio: Quantifying the Dual-Track Mechanism of Gender Assignment in Latvian Loanwords

The paper introduces the Fixed Suffix Dependency Ratio (FSDR) as a metric to measure how much loanwords depend on fixed derivational suffixes for gender assignment. Analyzing 1,832 Latvian noun lemmas, it finds that feminine loanwords rely more on fixed suffixes while masculine loanwords are largely free‑choice, a pattern that has intensified in recent usage. FSDR offers a quantitative tool for distinguishing morphological anchoring from default gender in language contact scenarios.

By Yelingyun Zhang, Atis Kapenieks, Marina Platonova
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Fixed Suffix Dependency Ratio: Quantifying the Dual-Track Mechanism of Gender Assignment in Latvian Loanwords

The paper introduces the Fixed Suffix Dependency Ratio (FSDR) as a metric to measure how much loanwords depend on fixed derivational suffixes for gender assignment. Analyzing 1,832 Latvian noun lemmas, it finds that feminine loanwords rely more on fixed suffixes, whereas masculine loanwords are more often assigned freely, a pattern that has intensified in recent usage. This asymmetry highlights a dual-track mechanism in gender assignment under language contact.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Representing and Parsing Korean Constituency Structure at Different Levels of Granularity

The paper investigates how different representations of Korean constituency structure affect parsing performance. It compares three formats—Morpheme+XPOS, Eojeol+XPOS, and Eojeol+UPOS—derived from the Penn Korean Treebank, using gold segmentation and labels to evaluate transition-based parsers. Results show that fine-grained morphological and XPOS information yields the best parsing accuracy, while eojeol-based representations offer shorter transition sequences but lower performance when only UPOS is used.

By Jungyeul Park, KyungTae Lim, Zihao Huang, Eunkyul Leah Jo, Yige Chen, Chulwoo Park
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

MoirfEolas and Cr\'iochScore: Developing Resources for and the Evaluation of Tokenization Alignment with Irish Morphology

The paper introduces MoirfEolas, a dataset of over 35,000 Irish words annotated with their morphological components, and CríochScore, a metric that measures how well tokenization aligns with these morphological boundaries. Using CríochScore, the authors evaluate common tokenization algorithms and find that the Unigram Language Model best aligns with Irish morphology. They also discuss trade‑offs between morphological alignment, compression, and vocabulary efficiency, offering practical guidance for Irish NLP development.

By Jane Adkins, Abigail Walsh, Brian Davis, Elaine U\'i Dhonnchadha