Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Hale Sirin

Publications and source records attributed to Hale Sirin.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

GlossoGen: Emergent Language in Complex Multi-Agent LLM Interactions

The growing rate at which LLM agents interact with one another raises key questions about language evolution in multi-LLM-agent settings, with implications for safety and monitorability as well as for linguistic accounts of LLMs. To address these questions, we introduce GlossoGen, a novel platform for studying multi-agent language evolution in complex scenarios. Within GlossoGen, we build the SaveVeyru scenario, which requires agents with partial information to communicate under pressure. We find that language evolution does occur between LLM agents, that the resulting languages are compositional and morphologically productive, and that they deviate from the LLMs' English prior in ways that render them incomprehensible to humans. Moreover, we identify several qualities essential to this evolution: pressure towards efficiency; the strength of the models backing the agents; and access to a "postmortem" stage in which agents can agree on linguistic conventions. Importantly, we observe that different conditions govern the transmission of language to new agents. Specifically, we find that agents learn new languages from usage alone, take an active role in this learning, and that while stronger models are required for novel language emergence, weaker models can learn an existing language once it has emerged. Taken together, our results indicate that current LLMs have the potential for cumulative cultural evolution -- previously attested only in humans -- with mixed populations of agents developing capacities that go beyond their lowest common denominator.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Cultivar: A Contrastive and Locale-Oriented Translation Benchmark for Investigating Contamination and Localisation Robustness

Multilingual translation benchmarks are typically sourced in English and translated into other languages, treating language pairs as the unit of evaluation---a design that is prone to contamination over time and overlooks locale and cultural considerations. We therefore advocate for source-contrastive evaluation and instantiate it with Cultivar, a localised subset of FLORES, which enables locale-specific translation evaluation. When paired with unlocalised counterparts, performance discrepancy allows the probing of data contamination and localisation robustness. We benchmark 32 open-weight models and find that MT-specialised models are less robust, a few models potentially overfit FLORES, and models tend to translate US content better than that of other locales, regardless of language.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

When Models Know More Than They Say: Probing Analogical Reasoning in LLMs

Analogical reasoning is a core cognitive faculty essential for narrative understanding. While LLMs perform well when surface and structural cues align, they struggle in cases where an analogy is not apparent on the surface but requires latent information, suggesting limitations in abstraction and generalisation. In this paper we compare a model's probed representations with its prompted performance at detecting narrative analogies, revealing an asymmetry: for rhetorical analogies, probing significantly outperforms prompting in open-source models, while for narrative analogies, they achieve a similar (low) performance. This suggests that the relationship between internal representations and prompted behavior is task-dependent and may reflect limitations in how prompting accesses available information.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Rashid: A Cipher-Based Framework for Exploring In-Context Language Learning

Where there is growing interest in in-context language learning (ICLL) for unseen languages with large language models, such languages usually suffer from the lack of NLP tools, data resources, and researcher expertise. This means that progress is difficult to assess, the field does not allow for cheap large-scale experimentation, and findings on ICLL are often limited to very few languages and tasks. In light of such limitations, we introduce a framework (Rashid), for studying ICLL wherein we reversibly cipher high-resource languages (HRLs) to construct truly unseen languages with access to a wide range of resources available for HRLs, unlocking previously impossible exploration of ICLL phenomena. We use our framework to assess current methods in the field with SOTA evaluation tools and manual analysis, explore the utility of potentially expensive resources in improving ICLL, and test ICLL strategies on rich downstream tasks beyond machine translation. These lines of exploration showcase the possibilities enabled by our framework, as well as providing actionable insights regarding current performance and future directions in ICLL.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

The Translation Barrier Hypothesis: Multilingual Generation with Large Language Models Suffers from Implicit Translation Failure

Multilingual generation with large language models (LLMs) is often of poor quality for mid- to low-resource languages, but the causes for this are not well-understood. We first demonstrate the existence of an implicit task-solving-->translation pipeline for generation, whereby the model first solves the required task in a largely target-language-agnostic manner, and subsequently translates answer concepts into the intended target language. We hypothesize that the failure of the translation stage, despite task-solving success, is an important culprit for the observed low quality of final outputs, and formalize this as the translation barrier hypothesis. We quantify the extent to which either stage in the pipeline is responsible for final failure for a word translation task across 108 language pairs, and find that the translation barrier explains a dominant portion of error for a majority of language pairs, and is especially severe for low-resource target languages. Our results highlight an important bottleneck for end-to-end multilingual generation, relevant for future work seeking to improve multilinguality in LLMs.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

DialUp! Modeling the Language Continuum by Adapting Models to Dialects and Dialects to Models

Most of the world's languages and dialects are low-resource, and lack support in mainstream machine translation (MT) models. However, many of them have a closely-related high-resource language (HRL) neighbor, and differ in linguistically regular ways from it. This underscores the importance of model robustness to dialectal variation and cross-lingual generalization to the HRL dialect continuum. We present DialUp, consisting of a training-time technique for adapting a pretrained model to dialectal data (M->D), and an inference-time intervention adapting dialectal data to the model expertise (D->M). M->D induces model robustness to potentially unseen and unknown dialects by exposure to synthetic data exemplifying linguistic mechanisms of dialectal variation, whereas D->M treats dialectal divergence for known target dialects. These methods show considerable performance gains for several dialects from four language families, and modest gains for two other language families. We also conduct feature and error analyses, which show that language varieties with low baseline MT performance are more likely to benefit from these approaches.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

Evaluating Morphological Compositional Generalization in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in various natural language generation and understanding tasks. However, their linguistic generalization capabilities remain questionable, raising doubts about whether these models learn language similarly to humans. While humans exhibit compositional generalization and linguistic creativity in language use, the extent to which LLMs replicate these abilities, particularly in morphology, is under-explored. In this work, we systematically investigate the morphological generalization abilities of LLMs through the lens of compositionality. We define morphemes as compositional primitives and design a novel suite of generative and discriminative tasks to assess morphological productivity and systematicity. Focusing on agglutinative languages such as Turkish and Finnish, we evaluate several state-of-the-art instruction-finetuned multilingual models, including GPT-4 and Gemini. Our analysis shows that LLMs struggle with morphological compositional generalization particularly when applied to novel word roots, with performance declining sharply as morphological complexity increases. While models can identify individual morphological combinations better than chance, their performance lacks systematicity, leading to significant accuracy gaps compared to humans.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

Characterizing the Effects of Translation on Intertextuality using Multilingual Embedding Spaces

Rhetorical devices are difficult to translate, but they are crucial to the translation of literary documents. We investigate the use of multilingual embedding spaces to characterize the preservation of intertextuality, one common rhetorical device, across human and machine translation. To do so, we use Biblical texts, which are both full of intertextual references and are highly translated works. We provide a metric to characterize intertextuality at the corpus level and provide a quantitative analysis of the preservation of this rhetorical device across extant human translations and machine-generated counterparts. We go on to provide qualitative analysis of cases wherein human translations over- or underemphasize the intertextuality present in the text, whereas machine translations provide a neutral baseline. This provides support for established scholarship proposing that human translators have a propensity to amplify certain literary characteristics of the original manuscripts.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

Computational Discovery of Chiasmus in Ancient Religious Text

Chiasmus, a debated literary device in Biblical texts, has captivated mystics while sparking ongoing scholarly discussion. In this paper, we introduce the first computational approach to systematically detect chiasmus within Biblical passages. Our method leverages neural embeddings to capture lexical and semantic patterns associated with chiasmus, applied at multiple levels of textual granularity (half-verses, verses). We also involve expert annotators to review a subset of the detected patterns. Despite its computational efficiency, our method achieves robust results, with high inter-annotator agreement and system precision@k of 0.80 at the verse level and 0.60 at the half-verse level. We further provide a qualitative analysis of the distribution of detected chiasmi, along with selected examples that highlight the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2024

Dynamic embedded topic models and change-point detection for exploring literary-historical hypotheses

We present a novel combination of dynamic embedded topic models and change-point detection to explore diachronic change of lexical semantic modality in classical and early Christian Latin. We demonstrate several methods for finding and characterizing patterns in the output, and relating them to traditional scholarship in Comparative Literature and Classics. This simple approach to unsupervised models of semantic change can be applied to any suitable corpus, and we conclude with future directions and refinements aiming to allow noisier, less-curated materials to meet that threshold.

cs.CL↗