mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Speaking of Language: Reflections on Metalanguage Research in NLP

arXiv 2604.02645 ↗First posted 3 Apr 2026cs.CL cs.AIcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

This work aims to shine a spotlight on the topic of metalanguage. We first define metalanguage, link it to NLP and LLMs, and then discuss our two labs' metalanguage-centered efforts. Finally, we discuss four dimensions of metalanguage and metalinguistic tasks, offering a list of understudied future research directions.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 31 of its 83 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2026.

Builds on

31 of 83 references.

References · 31

  1. 2022Interpretability in the Wild: a Circuit for Indirect Object Identification in GPT-2 smallcited by 1,165
  2. 2019BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipelinecited by 1,059
  3. 2019BLiMP: The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for Englishcited by 564
  4. 2019Linguistic Knowledge and Transferability of Contextual Representationscited by 383
  5. 2023A Benchmark for Learning to Translate a New Language from One Grammar Bookcited by 75
  6. 2025Language Models Fail to Introspect About Their Knowledge of Languagecited by 30
  7. 2024LINGOLY: A Benchmark of Olympiad-Level Linguistic Reasoning Puzzles in Low-Resource and Extinct Languagescited by 28
  8. 2024Can LLMs Really Learn to Translate a Low-Resource Language from One Grammar Book?cited by 23
  9. 2024NLP Systems That Can't Tell Use from Mention Censor Counterspeech, but Teaching the Distinction Helpscited by 20
  10. 2023Large Linguistic Models: Investigating LLMs' metalinguistic abilitiescited by 18
  11. 2024Shortcomings of LLMs for Low-Resource Translation: Retrieval and Understanding are Both the Problemcited by 17
  12. 2024Linguini: A benchmark for language-agnostic linguistic reasoningcited by 17
19 more
  1. 2021Decrypting Cryptic Crosswords: Semantically Complex Wordplay Puzzles as a Target for NLPcited by 16
  2. 2020PuzzLing Machines: A Challenge on Learning From Small Datacited by 15
  3. 2023"You Are An Expert Linguistic Annotator": Limits of LLMs as Analyzers of Abstract Meaning Representationcited by 15
  4. 2020SIGTYP 2020 Shared Task: Prediction of Typological Featurescited by 13
  5. 2025Understanding In-Context Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study on Manchucited by 13
  6. 2024Back to School: Translation Using Grammar Bookscited by 11
  7. 2021Linguistic Frameworks Go Toe-to-Toe at Neuro-Symbolic Language Modelingcited by 10
  8. 2023Lost in Translationese? Reducing Translation Effect Using Abstract Meaning Representationcited by 10
  9. 2024I am a Strange Dataset: Metalinguistic Tests for Language Modelscited by 10
  10. 2020Automatic Extraction of Rules Governing Morphological Agreementcited by 9
  11. 2024Natural Language Processing RELIES on Linguisticscited by 9
  12. 2022ELQA: A Corpus of Metalinguistic Questions and Answers about Englishcited by 8
  13. 2023The Past, Present, and Future of Typological Databases in NLPcited by 7
  14. 2025Explicit Learning and the LLM in Machine Translationcited by 6
  15. 2025LingGym: How Far Are LLMs from Thinking Like Field Linguists?cited by 6
  16. 2021When is Wall a Pared and when a Muro? -- Extracting Rules Governing Lexical Selectioncited by 5
  17. 2025Prompting from the bench: Large-scale pretraining is not sufficient to prepare LLMs for ordinary meaning analysiscited by 4
  18. 2022Teacher Perception of Automatically Extracted Grammar Concepts for L2 Language Learningcited by 3
  19. 2023CuRIAM: Corpus re Interpretation and Metalanguage in U.S. Supreme Court Opinionscited by 2

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

  1. 2026LLM Agents as Computational Typologistscited by 0