Related papers: Neural reality of argument structure constructions
Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies show that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop differentiated…
Understanding how language and linguistic constructions are processed in the brain is a fundamental question in cognitive computational neuroscience. In this study, we explore the representation and processing of Argument Structure…
Neural language models trained with a predictive or masked objective have proven successful at capturing short and long distance syntactic dependencies. Here, we focus on verb argument structure in German, which has the interesting property…
This study investigates how BERT processes and represents Argument Structure Constructions (ASCs), extending previous LSTM analyses. Using a dataset of 2000 sentences across four ASC types (transitive, ditransitive, caused-motion,…
We investigate the extent to which modern, neural language models are susceptible to structural priming, the phenomenon whereby the structure of a sentence makes the same structure more probable in a follow-up sentence. We explore how…
Language models are typically evaluated on their success at predicting the distribution of specific words in specific contexts. Yet linguistic knowledge also encodes relationships between contexts, allowing inferences between word…
The AMR (Abstract Meaning Representation) formalism for representing meaning of natural language sentences was not designed to deal with scope and quantifiers. By extending AMR with indices for contexts and formulating constraints on these…
Verbs occur in different syntactic environments, or frames. We investigate whether artificial neural networks encode grammatical distinctions necessary for inferring the idiosyncratic frame-selectional properties of verbs. We introduce five…
We study semantic construal in grammatical constructions using large language models. First, we project contextual word embeddings into three interpretable semantic spaces, each defined by a different set of psycholinguistic feature norms.…
The syntactic structures of sentences can be readily read-out from the activations of large language models (LLMs). However, the ``structural probes'' that have been developed to reveal this phenomenon are typically evaluated on an…
This paper investigates false positive constructions: grammatical structures which an LLM hallucinates as distinct constructions but which human introspection does not support. Both a behavioural probing task using contextual embeddings and…
Convincing someone of the truth value of a premise requires understanding and articulating the core logical structure of the argument which proves or disproves the premise. Understanding the logical structure of an argument refers to…
Construction grammar posits that language learners acquire constructions (form-meaning pairings) from the statistics of their environment. Recent work supports this hypothesis by showing sensitivity to constructions in pretrained language…
The choice of sentence encoder architecture reflects assumptions about how a sentence's meaning is composed from its constituent words. We examine the contribution of these architectures by holding them randomly initialised and fixed,…
Linear sequences of words are implicitly represented in our brains by hierarchical structures that organize the composition of words in sentences. Linguists formalize different frameworks to model this hierarchy; two of the most common…
Large language models (LLMs) offer a new empirical setting in which long-standing theories of linguistic meaning can be examined. This paper contrasts two broad approaches: social constructivist accounts associated with language games, and…
Language is not only a tool for communication but also a medium for human cognition and reasoning. If, as linguistic relativity suggests, the structure of language shapes cognitive patterns, then large language models (LLMs) trained on…
Construction Grammar (CxG) is a paradigm from cognitive linguistics emphasising the connection between syntax and semantics. Rather than rules that operate on lexical items, it posits constructions as the central building blocks of…
We study structured abstraction-based reasoning for the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) and compare its generalization to test-time approaches. Purely neural architectures lack reliable combinatorial generalization, while strictly…
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature,…