AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect.

Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing to informing hiring decisions. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement.

Explaining pretrained language models' understanding of linguistic structures using construction grammar.

Construction Grammar (CxG) is a paradigm from cognitive linguistics emphasizing the connection between syntax and semantics. Rather than rules that operate on lexical items, it posits as the central building blocks of language, i.e.