@inproceedings{james-2026-borrowed,
    title = "Borrowed Words, Borrowed Minds: Probing {LLM} Choice of {E}nglish-Derived Loanwords in {J}apanese",
    author = "James, Joseph",
    editor = "Card, Dallas  and
      Field, Anjalie  and
      Keith, Katherine  and
      Mendelsohn, Julia",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.nlpcss-1.2/",
    pages = "22--36",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-426-2",
    abstract = "The choice between English-derived loanwords (gairaigo) and native Japanese equivalents is a socially meaningful aspect of language use, carrying implications for register, style, and pragmatic interpretation. We introduce a controlled evaluation dataset probing how large language models encode this form of sociolinguistic variation. The dataset comprises 113 interchangeable lexical pairs embedded across six communicative contexts spanning formal and informal, spoken and written registers. We evaluate 16 Japanese-capable LLMs across three complementary tasks: sentence rating, pairwise choice, and masked word prediction. Although both lexical forms were generally rated as natural, models diverged substantially in contextual sensitivity and lexical preference, revealing architectural differences in how socially grounded lexical alternatives are represented. These findings suggest that surface fluency may mask instability in modeling pragmatic variation, with implications for socially aware language generation and evaluation."
}