@inproceedings{basirat-etal-2026-computational,
    title = "A Computational Approach to Language Contact {--} A Case Study of {P}ersian",
    author = "Basirat, Ali  and
      Namazifard, Danial  and
      Hemmati, Navid Baradaran",
    editor = "Merchant, Rayyan  and
      Megerdoomian, Karine",
    booktitle = "The Proceedings of the First Workshop on {NLP} and {LLM}s for the {I}ranian Language Family",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/manual-author-scripts/2026.silkroadnlp-1.5/",
    pages = "38--49",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-371-5",
    abstract = "We investigate structural traces of language contact in the intermediate representations of a monolingual language model. Focusing on Persian (Farsi) as a historically contact-rich language, we probe the representations of a Persian-trained model when exposed to languages with varying degrees and types of contact with Persian. Our methodology quantifies the amount of linguistic information encoded in intermediate representations and assesses how this information is distributed across model components for different morphosyntactic features. The results show that universal syntactic information is largely insensitive to historical contact, whereas morphological features such as CASE and GENDER are strongly shaped by language-specific structure, suggesting that contact effects in monolingual language models are selective and structurally constrained."
}