The paper investigates energy-based transformers as predictors of reading difficulty, extending the use of transformer language models in psycholinguistics. It demonstrates that the energy measure from these models robustly predicts reading times across multiple corpora, outperforming traditional metrics like surprisal and attention entropy. In a controlled experiment on relative clause processing, energy captures known asymmetries, suggesting it may unify previously complementary predictors.
By Jakub Dotlacil, Ece Takmaz
arXiv:2608. 14681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Words recur constantly in natural language use, yet it remains unclear whether language models reactivate prior representations or re-evaluate repeated words afresh, and whether post-training changes this default behavior.
By Jinglei Ren, Yuyue Wang
The paper examines whether adding syntactic and rhetorical structure to text can improve the prediction of incoherence in large language model outputs. Experiments show that plain text actually yields higher accuracy, as the added structural information conflicts with the models’ architectures. The authors also demonstrate that coherence assessment can help detect misleading content by applying zero‑shot experiments to a Brazilian disinformation dataset.
By Victor Mazzotti, Luiz Pereira, Marina Bitencourt dos Santos, Helena Maia, Carlos Caetano, N\'adia Felix, Sandra Avila
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.
By Han-yu Wang
The paper studies structural priming in language model production by conducting controlled sentence‑completion experiments on dative constructions. Results show that language models exhibit priming effects, especially when sentences are semantically coherent, with stronger relative increases for double‑object datives and larger absolute increases for prepositional‑object datives. The study also finds that primed completions involve more lexico‑semantic repetition, indicating that priming operates across syntactic, lexical, and semantic levels.
By Giulia Pucci, Ruizhe Li, Arabella Sinclair
arXiv:2511. 21338v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs), leveraging a denoising objective that, in principle, should enable more uniform context utilisation.
By Julianna Piskorz, Cristina Pinneri, Alvaro Correia, Motasem Alfarra, Risheek Garrepalli, Christos Louizos