Papers by Barry O’Sullivan
Disentangling Language Understanding and Reasoning Structures in Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Prompting (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has shown that cross-lingual chain-of-thought prompting improves learning in low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They examine whether benefits of cross-lingual prompting arise from language-specific reasoning structures . authors employ neuron intervention and perturbation techniques to analyze and deactivate language-related reasoning neurons . |
| Outcome: | The proposed study shows that language-specific reasoning structures are essential for reasoning in each language, but have minimal effect on reasoning in other languages. |
Disentangling Continued Pre-Training: Attention-Driven Routing and Semantic Hub Preservation in Language Adaptation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Continued Pre-Training (CPT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to acquire second-language capabilities, yet the mechanisms underlying CPT remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They investigate how CPT adapts model representations across diverse language families and scripts, model sizes, and architectures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be surgically transferred between base and CPT models with minimal loss. |