CoNLL 2026

47 papers

Uncovering Autoregressive LLM Knowledge of Thematic Fit in Event Representation

Safeyah Khaled Alshemali, Daniel Bauer, Yuval Marton

Automated Refinement of Essay Scoring Rubrics for Language Models via Reflect-and-Revise

Keno Harada, Lui Yoshida, Takeshi Kojima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo

Metric Grammars: A usage-based grammatical formalism that supports generation, parsing and morphological innovation

Whitney Tabor, Hyosun Lee

Traces of Social Competence in Large Language Models

Tom Kouwenhoven, Michiel T. van der Meer, Max J. van Duijn

Bridging Linguistic Structure and Mechanistic Interpretability for Conceptual Interpretation in Language Models

Nura Aljaafari, Danilo Carvalho, Andre Freitas

An Information-Theoretic Study of RLHF-Induced Uniformity in Large Language Model Outputs

Nolan Chai, Tianqi Zhang, Alex Warstadt

What Exactly do Children Receive in Language Acquisition? A Case Study on CHILDES with Automated Detection of Filler-Gap Dependencies

Zhenghao Zhou, William Dai, Maya Viswanathan, Simon Charlow, R. Thomas McCoy

Logic-Level Evaluation of Logical Table-to-Text Generation

Lena Trigg, Dean F. Hougen, Ahsan Bilal

Revisiting Age of Acquisition in Curriculum Learning: Disentangling Lexical Features and Semantic Structure

Ian Gifford, Aaron Shah, Catherine Chen, Taimaa Kassab Bachi, Eva Portelance

Discovering Lexical Gaps Using Embeddings from Multilingual LLMs

Yoonwon Jung, Aaron S. Cohen, Ben Bergen

Mechanistic Interpretability of Animacy Effects on Structure Choice in GPT-2

Yue Li, Yan Cong, Elaine J. Francis

Examining Large Language Models’ form-meaning mappings of information structure constructions in Mandarin Chinese

Shihui Li, Xiaojuan Tan, Jelke Bloem

From Dependency to CCG to Incremental CCG: Approaches to Flexible Word Order in Turkish

Özge Bakay, Oğuz Kerem Yıldız, Rajesh Bhatt, Brian Dillon, Olcay Taner Yıldız

A Dataset for Oral Reading in Young English Readers

Madison Rose, Michael Bennie, Valeria Pagliai, Hatice Kubra Karakis, Qian Shen

A framework for analyzing concept representations in neural models

Burin Naowarat, Hao Tang, Sharon Goldwater

RECAP: Resistance Capture in Text-based Mental Health Counseling with Large Language Models

Anqi Li, Yuqian Chen, Yu Lu, Zhaoming Chen, Yi Zhu

On the scaling relationship between cloze probabilities and language model next-token prediction

Cassandra L Jacobs, Morgan Grobol

Capturing Classic Authorial Style in Long-Form Story Generation with GRPO Fine-Tuning

Jinlong Liu, Mark G. Lee, Mohammed Bahja, Venelin Kovatchev

Event-Guided Slot Interaction for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking

Ying Xia, Wei Liu

From Sparse to Sense-Grounded: Wikipedia Training for Ukrainian Visual-WSD

Yurii Laba, Rostyslav O. Hryniv

Could language models win the International Linguistics Olympiad?

Jamie Garnham, Ehsan Shareghi

ThinkStruct: RST-Aware Attention for Logical Reasoning in Machine Reading Comprehension

Nhi Thao Tran, Tien Le, Toan Pham, Quoc Hoang Vu

Presupposition and Reasoning in Conditionals: A Theory-Based Study of Humans and LLMs

Tara Azin, Yongan Yu, Raj Singh, Olessia Jouravlev

Readers make targeted regressions to plausible errors in reanalysis of “noisy-channel garden-path” sentences

Thomas Hikaru Clark, Roger P. Levy, Edward Gibson

When transformers learn “impossible” languages, what do they learn?

Ram Janarthan, Coleman Haley, Sharon Goldwater

CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child–Adult InTeractions

Francesca Padovani, Xiulin Yang, Bastian Bunzeck, Jaap Jumelet, Yevgen Matusevych

Modeling Human Adversarial Strategy Adaptation in Multi-Turn Language Model Interactions

Zijun Ding

Who Generates More Empathetic Responses—Humans or LLMs? A Comparative Evaluation with Human and LLM Judges

Anuradha Welivita, Fawzia Zeitoun, Pearl Pu

Now They See It, Now They Don’t: Multimodal Reward Models Exhibit Unreliability in Physical World Constraints

Sadaf Ghaffari, Nikhil Krishnaswamy

Symbolic Grounding Reveals Representational Bottlenecks in Abstract Visual Reasoning

Mohit Vaishnav, Tanel Tammet

Measuring the Effects of Visual Salience in Human and AI Descriptions with Image Editing

Nina Gregorio, Edoardo Ponti, Sharon Goldwater

Harnessing Linguistic Dissimilarity for Language Generalization on Unseen Low-Resource Varieties

Jinju Kim, Haeji Jung, Youjeong Roh, Jong Hwan Ko, David R. Mortensen

Differences in Typological Alignment in Language Models’ Treatment of Differential Argument Marking

Iskar Deng, Nathalia Xu, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

Language Models Learn Constructional Semantics, Not To Mention Syntax: Investigating LM Understanding of Paired-Focus Constructions

Wesley Scivetti, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Nathan Schneider, Kanishka Misra, Leonie Weissweiler

Child-directed speech facilitates production, not comprehension, in BabyLMs

Bastian Bunzeck, Sina Zarrieß

A Method for Learning Large-Scale Computational Construction Grammars from Semantically Annotated Corpora

Paul Van Eecke, Katrien Beuls

What Brain Data Adds to Language Model Training

Gabriele Merlin, Omer Moussa, Mariya Toneva

Linguistic Profiling of Transformer Embedding Geometry

Lucia Domenichelli, Dominique Brunato, Felice Dell’Orletta

Addressing the Ecological Fallacy in Larger LMs with Human Context

Nikita Soni, Dhruv Vijay Kunjadiya, Pratham Piyush Shah, Dikshya Mohanty, H. Andrew Schwartz

Cognitively Inspired Developmental Trajectories Improve Explore-Exploit Dynamics in Neural Agent Emergent Communication

Jan Dziewoński, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Tessa Verhoef

Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks

Claire Hobbs, R. Thomas McCoy

Shuqi Wang, Zhenguang Cai

Syntactically-guided Information Maintenance in Sentence Comprehension

Shinnosuke Isono, Kohei Kajikawa

Sense and Sensitivity: “Reasoning” Models are More Robust, but can Diverge from Human Consensus in a Legal Interpretation Task

Dawson Petersen, Abhishek Purushothama, Nathan Schneider

Word predictability estimates from language models are not robust to tokenizer vocabulary

Kien Nguyen, Suhas Arehalli

Information-Theoretic Storage Cost in Sentence Comprehension

Kohei Kajikawa, Shinnosuke Isono, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox

Evaluating Humanlike Memory Effects in Transformers Using Item Recognition Tasks

Christian Clark, William Schuler