Publications by authors named "Ryan Cotterell"

Regressions, or backward saccades, are common during reading, accounting for between 5% and 20% of all saccades. And yet, relatively little is known about what causes them. We provide an information-theoretic operationalization for two previous qualitative hypotheses about regressions, which we dub reactivation and reanalysis.

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During real-time language comprehension, our minds rapidly decode complex meanings from sequences of words. The difficulty of doing so is known to be related to words' contextual predictability, but what cognitive processes do these predictability effects reflect? In one view, predictability effects reflect facilitation due to anticipatory processing of words that are predictable from context. This view predicts a linear effect of predictability on processing demand.

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Recent research has demonstrated that large pre-trained language models reflect societal biases expressed in natural language. The present paper introduces a simple method for probing language models to conduct a multilingual study of gender bias towards politicians. We quantify the usage of adjectives and verbs generated by language models surrounding the names of politicians as a function of their gender.

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Neural language models are widely used; however, their model parameters often need to be adapted to the specific domains and tasks of an application, which is time- and resource-consuming. Thus, adapters have recently been introduced as a lightweight alternative for model adaptation. They consist of a small set of task-specific parameters with a reduced training time and simple parameter composition.

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