---
title: "Elections go bananas — paper by Spaziani et al. (2026)"
description: "The paper examines pluralia tantum, nouns whose plural form dominates or fully replaces the singular (e.g., scissors , RU… 33 references."
authors: ["Elena Spaziani", "Kamyar Zeinalipour", "Pierluigi Cassotti", "Nina Tahmasebi"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.308/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/2026.eacl-long.308"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/spaziani-2026-elections-go-bananas-first-large/"
---
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# Elections go bananas: A First Large-scale Multilingual Study of Pluralia Tantum using LLMs

**Authors:** Elena Spaziani, [Kamyar Zeinalipour](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/kamyar-zeinalipour/), Pierluigi Cassotti and [Nina Tahmasebi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/nina-tahmasebi/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/eacl/) ([EACL 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/eacl/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.308/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.308.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.eacl-long.308](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.eacl-long.308) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7140108391)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary

The paper examines pluralia tantum, nouns whose plural form dominates or fully replaces the singular (e.g., *scissors*, RU *выборы* 'elections'). It asks how such nouns develop over time, and in particular whether full loss of the singular (morphological pluralia tantum, mPT) grows out of plural-dominant (PD) nouns or semantic pluralia tantum (sPT). The authors gathered candidate nouns for Italian, Russian and English from one reference dictionary per language. They kept only words whose singular/plural ratio visibly shifts in a diachronic corpus. OpenAI and DeepSeek models were then tested on a hand-annotated set using the Lexicalization profiles framework. After the models proved adequate, DeepSeek Reasoner annotated every corpus context for semantic, syntactic and sense features. These large-scale annotations show the plural becoming semantically separated from the singular. Semantic features turn out more informative than colligational ones. Case studies of *fondello* and *rifiuto* suggest that plural senses can move toward either mPT or sPT. This is presented as the first computational, cross-linguistic, multi-century study of the phenomenon.

## Key points

- **Data sources by language:**
  - Italian: De Mauro's dictionary and the La Stampa Corpus.
  - Russian: Ožegov & Švedova's dictionary and the Russian National Corpus. Pre-reform spelling was converted to modern orthography, and UDPipe and Pymorphy were used for lemmatization.
  - English: the OED and The Times Archive.
- **Word selection:** dictionaries yielded roughly 800–5,000 candidates per language. Frequency filtering reduced these to 70 (IT), 60 (RU) and 241 (EN) target words.
- **Model accuracy:** on the hand-annotated test set, LLM accuracy averaged across feature groups and languages ranged from 51% to 89%. Sense relations remained the hardest category.
- **Annotation scale:** DeepSeek Reasoner processed about 1.5M prompts, with an average of 1,592, 978 and 1,284 contexts per word for IT, RU and EN.
- **Limitations:** three-shot prompting slightly helped overall but lowered Italian scores, so the authors judge zero-shot prompting the safer choice. Corpus licensing prevents release of the annotated contexts, although the code is shared.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Sapienza University of Rome](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/sapienza-university-of-rome/) — University, Rome, Italy · 57 works · 9,564 citations
- [University of Gothenburg](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-gothenburg/) — University, Gothenburg, Sweden · 34 works · 1,625 citations
- [University of Siena](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-siena/) — University, Siena, Italy · 9 works · 198 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Elena Spaziani, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Pierluigi Cassotti and Nina Tahmasebi. 2026. Elections go bananas: A First Large-scale Multilingual Study of Pluralia Tantum using LLMs. Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{spaziani2026elections,
  title = {{Elections go bananas: A First Large-scale Multilingual Study of Pluralia Tantum using LLMs}},
  author = {Elena Spaziani, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Pierluigi Cassotti and Nina Tahmasebi},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.eacl-long.308},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.eacl-long.308}
}
```

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*Updated 1 November 2026*