The Sociolinguistic Foundations of Language Modeling

In this paper, we introduce a sociolinguistic perspective on language modeling. We claim that large language models are inherently models of varieties of language, and we consider how this insight can inform the development and deployment of large language models. We begin by presenting a technical definition of the concept of a variety of language as developed in sociolinguistics. We then discuss how this perspective can help address five basic challenges in language modeling: social bias, domain adaptation, alignment, language change, and scale. Ultimately, we argue that it is crucial to carefully define and compile training corpora that accurately represent the specific varieties of language being modeled to maximize the performance and societal value of large language models.

ALMs: Authorial Language Models for Authorship Attribution

In this paper, we introduce an authorship attribution method called Authorial Language Models (ALMs) that involves identifying the most likely author of a questioned document based on the perplexity of the questioned document calculated for a set of causal language models fine-tuned on the writings of a set of candidate author. We benchmarked ALMs against state-of-art-systems using the CCAT50 dataset and the Blogs50 datasets. We find that ALMs achieves a macro-average accuracy score of 83.6% on Blogs50, outperforming all other methods, and 74.9% on CCAT50, matching the performance of the best method. To assess the performance of ALMs on shorter texts, we also conducted text ablation testing. We found that to reach a macro-average accuracy of 70%, ALMs needs 40 tokens on Blogs50 and 400 tokens on CCAT50, while to reach 60% ALMs requires 20 tokens on Blogs50 and 70 tokens on CCAT50.