Homonyms are words with identical spelling but distinct meanings, which pose challenges for many generative models. When a homonym appears in a prompt, diffusion models may generate multiple senses of the word simultaneously, which is known as homonym duplication. This issue is further complicated by an Anglocentric bias, which includes an additional translation step before the text-to-image model pipeline. As a result, even words that are not homonymous in the original language may become homonyms and lose their meaning after translation into English. In this paper, we introduce a method for measuring duplication rates and conduct evaluations of different diffusion models using both automatic evaluation utilizing Vision-Language Models (VLM) and human evaluation. Additionally, we investigate methods to mitigate the homonym duplication problem through prompt expansion, demonstrating that this approach also effectively reduces duplication related to Anglocentric bias. The code for the automatic evaluation pipeline is publicly available.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide accurate word definitions and explanations for any context. However, the scope of the definition changes for different target groups, like children or language learners. This is especially relevant for homonyms, words with multiple meanings, where oversimplification might risk information loss by omitting key senses, potentially misleading users who trust LLM outputs. We investigate how simplification impacts homonym definition quality across three target groups: Normal, Simple, and ELI5. Using two novel evaluation datasets spanning multiple languages, we test DeepSeek v3, Llama 4 Maverick, Qwen3-30B A3B, GPT-4o mini, and Llama 3.1 8B via LLM-as-Judge and human annotations. Our results show that simplification drastically degrades definition completeness by neglecting polysemy, increasing the risk of misunderstanding. Fine-tuning Llama 3.1 8B with Direct Preference Optimization substantially improves homonym response quality across all prompt types. These findings highlight the need to balance simplicity and completeness in educational NLP to ensure reliable, context-aware definitions for all learners.

Translating wordplay across languages presents unique challenges that have long confounded both professional human translators and machine translation systems. This research proposes a novel approach for translating puns from English to French by combining state-of-the-art large language models with specialized techniques for wordplay generation. Our methodology employs a three-stage approach. First, we establish a baseline using multiple frontier large language models with feedback based on a new contrastive learning dataset. Second, we implement a guided chain-of-thought pipeline with combined phonetic-semantic embeddings. Third, we implement a multi-agent generator-discriminator framework for evaluating and regenerating puns with feedback. Moving beyond the limitations of literal translation, our methodology's primary objective is to capture the linguistic creativity and humor of the source text wordplay, rather than simply duplicating its vocabulary. Our best runs earned first and second place in the CLEF JOKER 2025 Task 2 competition where they were evaluated manually by expert native French speakers. This research addresses a gap between translation studies and computational linguistics by implementing linguistically-informed techniques for wordplay translation, advancing our understanding of how language models can be leveraged to handle the complex interplay between semantic ambiguity, phonetic similarity, and the implicit cultural and linguistic awareness needed for successful humor.

This project explores methods to enhance sign language translation of German sign language, specifically focusing on disambiguation of homonyms. Sign language is ambiguous and understudied which is the basis for our experiments. We approach the improvement by training transformer-based models on various bodypart representations to shift the focus on said bodypart. To determine the impact of, e.g., the hand or mouth representations, we experiment with different combinations. The results show that focusing on the mouth increases the performance in small dataset settings while shifting the focus on the hands retrieves better results in larger dataset settings. Our results contribute to better accessibility for non-hearing persons by improving the systems powering digital assistants, enabling a more accurate interaction. The code for this project can be found on GitHub.

This research proposes a novel approach to the Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) task in the Georgian language, based on supervised fine-tuning of a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) on a dataset formed by filtering the Georgian Common Crawls corpus. The dataset is used to train a classifier for words with multiple senses. Additionally, we present experimental results of using LSTM for WSD. Accurately disambiguating homonyms is crucial in natural language processing. Georgian, an agglutinative language belonging to the Kartvelian language family, presents unique challenges in this context. The aim of this paper is to highlight the specific problems concerning homonym disambiguation in the Georgian language and to present our approach to solving them. The techniques discussed in the article achieve 95% accuracy for predicting lexical meanings of homonyms using a hand-classified dataset of over 7500 sentences.

Biomedical entity linking (BEL) is the task of grounding entity mentions to a knowledge base (KB). A popular approach to the task are name-based methods, i.e. those identifying the most appropriate name in the KB for a given mention, either via dense retrieval or autoregressive modeling. However, as these methods directly return KB names, they cannot cope with homonyms, i.e. different KB entities sharing the exact same name. This significantly affects their performance, especially for KBs where homonyms account for a large amount of entity mentions (e.g. UMLS and NCBI Gene). We therefore present BELHD (Biomedical Entity Linking with Homonym Disambiguation), a new name-based method that copes with this challenge. Specifically, BELHD builds upon the BioSyn (Sung et al.,2020) model introducing two crucial extensions. First, it performs a preprocessing of the KB in which it expands homonyms with an automatically chosen disambiguating string, thus enforcing unique linking decisions. Second, we introduce candidate sharing, a novel strategy to select candidates for contrastive learning that enhances the overall training signal. Experiments with 10 corpora and five entity types show that BELHD improves upon state-of-the-art approaches, achieving the best results in 6 out 10 corpora with an average improvement of 4.55pp recall@1. Furthermore, the KB preprocessing is orthogonal to the core prediction model and thus can also improve other methods, which we exemplify for GenBioEL (Yuan et al, 2022), a generative name-based BEL approach. Code is available at: link added upon publication.

Although deep language representations have become the dominant form of language featurization in recent years, in many settings it is important to understand a model's decision-making process. This necessitates not only an interpretable model but also interpretable features. In particular, language must be featurized in a way that is interpretable while still characterizing the original text well. We present SenteCon, a method for introducing human interpretability in deep language representations. Given a passage of text, SenteCon encodes the text as a layer of interpretable categories in which each dimension corresponds to the relevance of a specific category. Our empirical evaluations indicate that encoding language with SenteCon provides high-level interpretability at little to no cost to predictive performance on downstream tasks. Moreover, we find that SenteCon outperforms existing interpretable language representations with respect to both its downstream performance and its agreement with human characterizations of the text.

This paper presents a novel approach to the acquisition of language models from corpora. The framework builds on Cobweb, an early system for constructing taxonomic hierarchies of probabilistic concepts that used a tabular, attribute-value encoding of training cases and concepts, making it unsuitable for sequential input like language. In response, we explore three new extensions to Cobweb -- the Word, Leaf, and Path variants. These systems encode each training case as an anchor word and surrounding context words, and they store probabilistic descriptions of concepts as distributions over anchor and context information. As in the original Cobweb, a performance element sorts a new instance downward through the hierarchy and uses the final node to predict missing features. Learning is interleaved with performance, updating concept probabilities and hierarchy structure as classification occurs. Thus, the new approaches process training cases in an incremental, online manner that it very different from most methods for statistical language learning. We examine how well the three variants place synonyms together and keep homonyms apart, their ability to recall synonyms as a function of training set size, and their training efficiency. Finally, we discuss related work on incremental learning and directions for further research.

We study the way DALLE-2 maps symbols (words) in the prompt to their references (entities or properties of entities in the generated image). We show that in stark contrast to the way human process language, DALLE-2 does not follow the constraint that each word has a single role in the interpretation, and sometimes re-use the same symbol for different purposes. We collect a set of stimuli that reflect the phenomenon: we show that DALLE-2 depicts both senses of nouns with multiple senses at once; and that a given word can modify the properties of two distinct entities in the image, or can be depicted as one object and also modify the properties of another object, creating a semantic leakage of properties between entities. Taken together, our study highlights the differences between DALLE-2 and human language processing and opens an avenue for future study on the inductive biases of text-to-image models.

The aim of the present paper is to develop this general scheme to a level of a realistic algorithm.