Related papers: Discourse Context Predictability Effects in Hindi …
In English and other languages, multiple adjectives in noun phrases follow intricate ordering patterns. These patterns have been widely studied in linguistics and provide a useful test case for assessing how language models (LMs) acquire…
Predicting the structure of a discourse is challenging because relations between discourse segments are often implicit and thus hard to distinguish computationally. I extend previous work to classify implicit discourse relations by…
Prior work has shown that the ordering in which concepts are shown to a commonsense generator plays an important role, affecting the quality of the generated sentence. However, it remains a challenge to determine the optimal ordering of a…
A possible explanation for the impressive performance of masked language model (MLM) pre-training is that such models have learned to represent the syntactic structures prevalent in classical NLP pipelines. In this paper, we propose a…
A standard measure of the influence of a research paper is the number of times it is cited. However, papers may be cited for many reasons, and citation count offers limited information about the extent to which a paper affected the content…
Accurate syntactic representations are essential for robust generalization in natural language. Recent work has found that pre-training can teach language models to rely on hierarchical syntactic features - as opposed to incorrect linear…
Sentence formation is a highly structured, history-dependent, and sample-space reducing (SSR) process. While the first word in a sentence can be chosen from the entire vocabulary, typically, the freedom of choosing subsequent words gets…
As speakers turn their thoughts into sentences, they maintain a balance between the complexity of words and syntax. However, it is unclear whether this syntax-lexicon tradeoff is unique to the spoken language production that is under the…
Dependency distance minimization (DDm) is a well-established principle of word order. It has been predicted theoretically that DDm implies compression, namely the minimization of word lengths. This is a second order prediction because it…
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
Despite their success in speech processing, neural networks often operate as black boxes, prompting the question: what informs their decisions, and how can we interpret them? This work examines this issue in the context of lexical stress. A…
This report explores the use of paragraph break probability estimates to help predict the location of sentence breaks in English natural language text. We show that a sentence break predictor based almost solely on paragraph break…
To answer a question, language models often need to integrate prior knowledge learned during pretraining and new information presented in context. We hypothesize that models perform this integration in a predictable way across different…
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…
It is often stated that human languages, as other biological systems, are shaped by cost-cutting pressures but, to what extent? Attempts to quantify the degree of optimality of languages by means of an optimality score have been scarce and…
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…
Syntax is a latent hierarchical structure which underpins the robust and compositional nature of human language. In this work, we explore the hypothesis that syntactic dependencies can be represented in language model attention…
Neural language models (LMs) perform well on tasks that require sensitivity to syntactic structure. Drawing on the syntactic priming paradigm from psycholinguistics, we propose a novel technique to analyze the representations that enable…
This research investigates the effect of prompt design on dialogue evaluation using large language models (LLMs). While LLMs are increasingly used for scoring various inputs, creating effective prompts for dialogue evaluation remains…
When a language model is trained to predict natural language sequences, its prediction at each moment depends on a representation of prior context. What kind of information about the prior context can language models retrieve? We tested…