Proverbs or Pythian Oracles? Sentiments and Emotions in Greek Sayings
Katerina Korre, John Pavlopoulos
Proverbs are among the most fascinating language phenomena that transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries. Yet, much of the global landscape of proverbs remains underexplored, as many cultures preserve their traditional wisdom within their own communities due to the oral tradition of the phenomenon. Taking advantage of the current advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), we focus on Greek proverbs, analyzing their sentiment and emotion. Departing from an annotated dataset of Greek proverbs, (1) we propose a multi-label annotation framework and dataset that captures the emotional variability of the proverbs, (2) we up-scale to local varieties, (3) we sketch a map of Greece that provides an overview of the distribution of emotions. Our findings show that the interpretation of proverbs is multidimensional, a property manifested through both multi-labeling and instance-level polarity. LLMs can capture and reproduce this complexity, and can therefore help us better understand the proverbial landscape of a place, as in the case of Greece, where surprise and anger compete and coexist within proverbs.
Understanding Network Behaviors through Natural Language Question-Answering
Mingzhe Xing, Chang Tian, Jianan Zhang
et al.
Modern large-scale networks introduce significant complexity in understanding network behaviors, increasing the risk of misconfiguration. Prior work proposed to understand network behaviors by mining network configurations, typically relying on domain-specific languages interfaced with formal models. While effective, they suffer from a steep learning curve and limited flexibility. In contrast, natural language (NL) offers a more accessible and interpretable interface, motivating recent research on NL-guided network behavior understanding. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) further enhance this direction, leveraging their extensive prior knowledge of network concepts and strong reasoning capabilities. However, three key challenges remain: 1) numerous router devices with lengthy configuration files challenge LLM's long-context understanding ability; 2) heterogeneity across devices and protocols impedes scalability; and 3) complex network topologies and protocols demand advanced reasoning abilities beyond the current capabilities of LLMs. To tackle the above challenges, we propose NetMind, a novel framework for querying networks using NL. Our approach introduces a tree-based configuration chunking strategy to preserve semantic coherence while enabling efficient partitioning. We then construct a unified fact graph as an intermediate representation to normalize vendor-specific configurations. Finally, we design a hybrid imperative-declarative language to reduce the reasoning burden on LLMs and enhance precision. We contribute a benchmark consisting of NL question-answer pairs paired with network configurations. Experiments demonstrate that NetMind achieves accurate and scalable network behavior understanding, outperforming existing baselines.
PL-Guard: Benchmarking Language Model Safety for Polish
Aleksandra Krasnodębska, Karolina Seweryn, Szymon Łukasik
et al.
Despite increasing efforts to ensure the safety of large language models (LLMs), most existing safety assessments and moderation tools remain heavily biased toward English and other high-resource languages, leaving majority of global languages underexamined. To address this gap, we introduce a manually annotated benchmark dataset for language model safety classification in Polish. We also create adversarially perturbed variants of these samples designed to challenge model robustness. We conduct a series of experiments to evaluate LLM-based and classifier-based models of varying sizes and architectures. Specifically, we fine-tune three models: Llama-Guard-3-8B, a HerBERT-based classifier (a Polish BERT derivative), and PLLuM, a Polish-adapted Llama-8B model. We train these models using different combinations of annotated data and evaluate their performance, comparing it against publicly available guard models. Results demonstrate that the HerBERT-based classifier achieves the highest overall performance, particularly under adversarial conditions.
[Berg, Baukje van den; Manolova, Divna; Marciniak, Przemysław (eds.). Byzantine commentaries on Ancient Greek texts, 12th-15th centuries]
Michael Abdelsayed
History of Greece, Translating and interpreting
Open foundation models for Azerbaijani language
Jafar Isbarov, Kavsar Huseynova, Elvin Mammadov
et al.
The emergence of multilingual large language models has enabled the development of language understanding and generation systems in Azerbaijani. However, most of the production-grade systems rely on cloud solutions, such as GPT-4. While there have been several attempts to develop open foundation models for Azerbaijani, these works have not found their way into common use due to a lack of systemic benchmarking. This paper encompasses several lines of work that promote open-source foundation models for Azerbaijani. We introduce (1) a large text corpus for Azerbaijani, (2) a family of encoder-only language models trained on this dataset, (3) labeled datasets for evaluating these models, and (4) extensive evaluation that covers all major open-source models with Azerbaijani support.
Bulletin bibliographique
Stefano Rozzi
Le Bulletin présente par ordre alphabétique tous les titres signalés au cours du semestre précédent par la Newsletter en ligne gratuite de la SIAC, qui est envoyée aux abonnés toutes les quatre semaines.
Philology. Linguistics, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
Officina di IG XIV2 – Firma su due statuette da Taranto
Di Sarro, Fabrizio
The paper provides a new reading of a mould-made inscription on the back of two clay statuettes found at the end of the 19th century in the Taranto necropolis of Contrada Santa Lucia and dated between the second half of the 1st c. BC and the beginning of the 1st c. AD. The technique of making the inscription, which was imprinted inside the mould after being scratched on the patrix, is not widespread in the Taranto area. The inscription, a Roman anthroponym written in Greek language (a signature), represents an element of complex interpretation, because it remains uncertain whether it is to be attributed to a coroplast or to a workshop owner.
Ancient history, Greek philology and language
Can Language Models Be Tricked by Language Illusions? Easier with Syntax, Harder with Semantics
Yuhan Zhang, Edward Gibson, Forrest Davis
Language models (LMs) have been argued to overlap substantially with human beings in grammaticality judgment tasks. But when humans systematically make errors in language processing, should we expect LMs to behave like cognitive models of language and mimic human behavior? We answer this question by investigating LMs' more subtle judgments associated with "language illusions" -- sentences that are vague in meaning, implausible, or ungrammatical but receive unexpectedly high acceptability judgments by humans. We looked at three illusions: the comparative illusion (e.g. "More people have been to Russia than I have"), the depth-charge illusion (e.g. "No head injury is too trivial to be ignored"), and the negative polarity item (NPI) illusion (e.g. "The hunter who no villager believed to be trustworthy will ever shoot a bear"). We found that probabilities represented by LMs were more likely to align with human judgments of being "tricked" by the NPI illusion which examines a structural dependency, compared to the comparative and the depth-charge illusions which require sophisticated semantic understanding. No single LM or metric yielded results that are entirely consistent with human behavior. Ultimately, we show that LMs are limited both in their construal as cognitive models of human language processing and in their capacity to recognize nuanced but critical information in complicated language materials.
Los bárbaros medievales: de Heródoto a Alfonso X
Aníbal A. Biglieri
En este artículo se estudian las ideas de bárbaros y barbarie desde Heródoto hasta Alfonso X. A partir de las oposiciones entre centro y periferia, y civilización y barbarie, se estudian los temas del sedentarismo y nomadismo, la historia y los mitos en torno de la región de Cólquida y el etnocentrismo inverso en relación con los escitas.
Philology. Linguistics, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
Potenzialità metodologiche dell’analisi di alcuni exempla prosodici di imitatio a Cicerone nel retore tardoantico Favonio Eulogio
Rosamaria Pau, RP
Il commento al Somnium del pressoché ignoto retore tardoantico Favonio Eulogio costituisce un prezioso alleato nello studio della Letteratura Latina classica e posteriore non solo in virtù dell’esegesi contenutistica, condotta da un punto di vista aritmologico e mitopoietico, che della cosmologia dell’antecedente ciceroniano conduce, ma anche per l’operazione intertestuale e allusiva che della fonte classica opera, in conformità al clima dell’intellettualismo coevo, sia dal punto di vista dell’impostazione filosofica, sia da quello della sostanza retorica, dei cui canoni si fa imitatore in termini sia generali sia specificatamente prosodici. La ripresa strumentale delle antiche clausole ciceroniane è qui piegata alla valorizzazione del dettato della dissertazione tecnico-retorica e dei riferimenti letterari che ne costellano il tessuto argomentativo ed esegetico sul celeberrimo finale del De re publica ciceroniano.
Philology. Linguistics, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
Legal and Political Stance Detection of SCOTUS Language
Noah Bergam, Emily Allaway, Kathleen McKeown
We analyze publicly available US Supreme Court documents using automated stance detection. In the first phase of our work, we investigate the extent to which the Court's public-facing language is political. We propose and calculate two distinct ideology metrics of SCOTUS justices using oral argument transcripts. We then compare these language-based metrics to existing social scientific measures of the ideology of the Supreme Court and the public. Through this cross-disciplinary analysis, we find that justices who are more responsive to public opinion tend to express their ideology during oral arguments. This observation provides a new kind of evidence in favor of the attitudinal change hypothesis of Supreme Court justice behavior. As a natural extension of this political stance detection, we propose the more specialized task of legal stance detection with our new dataset SC-stance, which matches written opinions to legal questions. We find competitive performance on this dataset using language adapters trained on legal documents.
Sample-Efficient Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Speech Recognition Systems A case study for Modern Greek
Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Theodoros Kouzelis, Georgios Rouvalis
et al.
Modern speech recognition systems exhibits rapid performance degradation under domain shift. This issue is especially prevalent in data-scarce settings, such as low-resource languages, where diversity of training data is limited. In this work we propose M2DS2, a simple and sample-efficient finetuning strategy for large pretrained speech models, based on mixed source and target domain self-supervision. We find that including source domain self-supervision stabilizes training and avoids mode collapse of the latent representations. For evaluation, we collect HParl, a $120$ hour speech corpus for Greek, consisting of plenary sessions in the Greek Parliament. We merge HParl with two popular Greek corpora to create GREC-MD, a test-bed for multi-domain evaluation of Greek ASR systems. In our experiments we find that, while other Unsupervised Domain Adaptation baselines fail in this resource-constrained environment, M2DS2 yields significant improvements for cross-domain adaptation, even when a only a few hours of in-domain audio are available. When we relax the problem in a weakly supervised setting, we find that independent adaptation for audio using M2DS2 and language using simple LM augmentation techniques is particularly effective, yielding word error rates comparable to the fully supervised baselines.
Why is constrained neural language generation particularly challenging?
Cristina Garbacea, Qiaozhu Mei
Recent advances in deep neural language models combined with the capacity of large scale datasets have accelerated the development of natural language generation systems that produce fluent and coherent texts (to various degrees of success) in a multitude of tasks and application contexts. However, controlling the output of these models for desired user and task needs is still an open challenge. This is crucial not only to customizing the content and style of the generated language, but also to their safe and reliable deployment in the real world. We present an extensive survey on the emerging topic of constrained neural language generation in which we formally define and categorize the problems of natural language generation by distinguishing between conditions and constraints (the latter being testable conditions on the output text instead of the input), present constrained text generation tasks, and review existing methods and evaluation metrics for constrained text generation. Our aim is to highlight recent progress and trends in this emerging field, informing on the most promising directions and limitations towards advancing the state-of-the-art of constrained neural language generation research.
Prompting Is Programming: A Query Language for Large Language Models
Luca Beurer-Kellner, Marc Fischer, Martin Vechev
Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance on a wide range of tasks such as question answering and code generation. On a high level, given an input, a language model can be used to automatically complete the sequence in a statistically-likely way. Based on this, users prompt these models with language instructions or examples, to implement a variety of downstream tasks. Advanced prompting methods can even imply interaction between the language model, a user, and external tools such as calculators. However, to obtain state-of-the-art performance or adapt language models for specific tasks, complex task- and model-specific programs have to be implemented, which may still require ad-hoc interaction. Based on this, we present the novel idea of Language Model Programming (LMP). LMP generalizes language model prompting from pure text prompts to an intuitive combination of text prompting and scripting. Additionally, LMP allows constraints to be specified over the language model output. This enables easy adaption to many tasks while abstracting language model internals and providing high-level semantics. To enable LMP, we implement LMQL(short for Language Model Query Language), which leverages the constraints and control flow from an LMP prompt to generate an efficient inference procedure that minimizes the number of expensive calls to the underlying language model. We show that LMQL can capture a wide range of state-of-the-art prompting methods in an intuitive way, especially facilitating interactive flows that are challenging to implement with existing high-level APIs. Our evaluation shows that we retain or increase the accuracy on several downstream tasks, while also significantly reducing the required amount of computation or cost in the case of pay-to-use APIs (26-85% cost savings).
Challenges in Measuring Bias via Open-Ended Language Generation
Afra Feyza Akyürek, Muhammed Yusuf Kocyigit, Sejin Paik
et al.
Researchers have devised numerous ways to quantify social biases vested in pretrained language models. As some language models are capable of generating coherent completions given a set of textual prompts, several prompting datasets have been proposed to measure biases between social groups -- posing language generation as a way of identifying biases. In this opinion paper, we analyze how specific choices of prompt sets, metrics, automatic tools and sampling strategies affect bias results. We find out that the practice of measuring biases through text completion is prone to yielding contradicting results under different experiment settings. We additionally provide recommendations for reporting biases in open-ended language generation for a more complete outlook of biases exhibited by a given language model. Code to reproduce the results is released under https://github.com/feyzaakyurek/bias-textgen.
Align, Reason and Learn: Enhancing Medical Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Knowledge
Zhihong Chen, Guanbin Li, Xiang Wan
Medical vision-and-language pre-training (Med-VLP) has received considerable attention owing to its applicability to extracting generic vision-and-language representations from medical images and texts. Most existing methods mainly contain three elements: uni-modal encoders (i.e., a vision encoder and a language encoder), a multi-modal fusion module, and pretext tasks, with few studies considering the importance of medical domain expert knowledge and explicitly exploiting such knowledge to facilitate Med-VLP. Although there exist knowledge-enhanced vision-and-language pre-training (VLP) methods in the general domain, most require off-the-shelf toolkits (e.g., object detectors and scene graph parsers), which are unavailable in the medical domain. In this paper, we propose a systematic and effective approach to enhance Med-VLP by structured medical knowledge from three perspectives. First, considering knowledge can be regarded as the intermediate medium between vision and language, we align the representations of the vision encoder and the language encoder through knowledge. Second, we inject knowledge into the multi-modal fusion model to enable the model to perform reasoning using knowledge as the supplementation of the input image and text. Third, we guide the model to put emphasis on the most critical information in images and texts by designing knowledge-induced pretext tasks. To perform a comprehensive evaluation and facilitate further research, we construct a medical vision-and-language benchmark including three tasks. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, where state-of-the-art performance is achieved on all downstream tasks. Further analyses explore the effects of different components of our approach and various settings of pre-training.
The Ciceronian Book and its Influence: A Statistical Approach
Justin Stover, JS
The length of books in the era of the bookroll has never received more than sporadic attention. Using electronic counting methods, this study constructs statistical models of the Ciceronian book in three different genres, rhetoric, philosophy, and epistolography, and argues that Cicero’s literary production marks an inflection point in the development of the Roman literary book, and whose book-model would influence literary production down to the age of Apuleius and Gellius.
Philology. Linguistics, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
Intrinsically Motivated Compositional Language Emergence
Rishi Hazra, Sonu Dixit, Sayambhu Sen
Recently, there has been a great deal of research in emergent communication on artificial agents interacting in simulated environments. Recent studies have revealed that, in general, emergent languages do not follow the compositionality patterns of natural language. To deal with this, existing works have proposed a limited channel capacity as an important constraint for learning highly compositional languages. In this paper, we show that this is not a sufficient condition and propose an intrinsic reward framework for improving compositionality in emergent communication. We use a reinforcement learning setting with two agents -- a \textit{task-aware} Speaker and a \textit{state-aware} Listener that are required to communicate to perform a set of tasks. Through our experiments on three different referential game setups, including a novel environment gComm, we show intrinsic rewards improve compositionality scores by $\approx \mathbf{1.5-2}$ times that of existing frameworks that use limited channel capacity.
Towards Machine Translation for the Kurdish Language
Sina Ahmadi, Mariam Masoud
Machine translation is the task of translating texts from one language to another using computers. It has been one of the major tasks in natural language processing and computational linguistics and has been motivating to facilitate human communication. Kurdish, an Indo-European language, has received little attention in this realm due to the language being less-resourced. Therefore, in this paper, we are addressing the main issues in creating a machine translation system for the Kurdish language, with a focus on the Sorani dialect. We describe the available scarce parallel data suitable for training a neural machine translation model for Sorani Kurdish-English translation. We also discuss some of the major challenges in Kurdish language translation and demonstrate how fundamental text processing tasks, such as tokenization, can improve translation performance.
Speech Recognition for Endangered and Extinct Samoyedic languages
Niko Partanen, Mika Hämäläinen, Tiina Klooster
Our study presents a series of experiments on speech recognition with endangered and extinct Samoyedic languages, spoken in Northern and Southern Siberia. To best of our knowledge, this is the first time a functional ASR system is built for an extinct language. We achieve with Kamas language a Label Error Rate of 15\%, and conclude through careful error analysis that this quality is already very useful as a starting point for refined human transcriptions. Our results with related Nganasan language are more modest, with best model having the error rate of 33\%. We show, however, through experiments where Kamas training data is enlarged incrementally, that Nganasan results are in line with what is expected under low-resource circumstances of the language. Based on this, we provide recommendations for scenarios in which further language documentation or archive processing activities could benefit from modern ASR technology. All training data and processing scripts haven been published on Zenodo with clear licences to ensure further work in this important topic.