Using psycholinguistic and computational experiments we compare the ability of humans and several pre-trained masked language models to correctly identify control dependencies in Spanish sentences such as ‘José le prometió/ordenó a María ser ordenado/a’ (‘Joseph promised/ordered Mary to be tidy’). These structures underlie complex anaphoric and agreement relations at the interface of syntax and semantics, allowing us to study lexically-guided antecedent retrieval processes. Our results show that while humans correctly identify the (un)acceptability of the strings, language models often fail to identify the correct antecedent in non-adjacent dependencies, showing their reliance on linearity. Additional experiments on Galician reinforce these conclusions. Our findings are equally valuable for the evaluation of language models’ ability to capture linguistic generalizations, as well as for psycholinguistic theories of anaphor resolution.

The development of language technologies (LTs) such as machine translation, text analytics, and dialogue systems is essential in the current digital society, culture and economy. These LTs, widely supported in languages in high demand worldwide, such as English, are also necessary for smaller and less economically powerful languages, as they are a driving force in the democratization of the communities that use them due to their great social and cultural impact. As an example, dialogue systems allow us to communicate with machines in our own language; machine translation increases access to contents in different languages, thus facilitating intercultural relations; and text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems broaden different categories of users’ access to technology. In the case of Galician (co-official language, together with Spanish, in the autonomous region of Galicia, located in northwestern Spain), incorporating the language into state-of-the-art AI applications can not only significantly favor its prestige (a decisive factor in language normalization), but also guarantee citizens’ language rights, reduce social inequality, and narrow the digital divide. This is the main motivation behind the Nós Project (Proxecto Nós), which aims to have a significant contribution to the development of LTs in Galician (currently considered a low-resource language) by providing openly licensed resources, tools, and demonstrators in the area of intelligent technologies.