Related papers: Language Models Can Learn Exceptions to Syntactic …
Neural models excel at extracting statistical patterns from large amounts of data, but struggle to learn patterns or reason about language from only a few examples. In this paper, we ask: Can we learn explicit rules that generalize well…
Previous work suggests that RNNs trained on natural language corpora can capture number agreement well for simple sentences but perform less well when sentences contain agreement attractors: intervening nouns between the verb and the main…
Although transformer-based Neural Language Models demonstrate impressive performance on a variety of tasks, their generalization abilities are not well understood. They have been shown to perform strongly on subject-verb number agreement in…
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 explore unconstrained natural language feedback as a learning signal for artificial agents. Humans use rich and varied language to teach, yet most prior work on interactive learning from language assumes a particular form of input (e.g.,…
We present a dataset for evaluating the grammaticality of the predictions of a language model. We automatically construct a large number of minimally different pairs of English sentences, each consisting of a grammatical and an…
Neural network language models can serve as computational hypotheses about how humans process language. We compared the model-human consistency of diverse language models using a novel experimental approach: controversial sentence pairs.…
How is knowledge of position-role mappings in natural language learned? We explore this question in a computational setting, testing whether a variety of well-performing pertained language models (BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT) exhibit…
With a handful of demonstration examples, large-scale language models show strong capability to perform various tasks by in-context learning from these examples, without any fine-tuning. We demonstrate that in-context learning performance…
Linguistic evaluations of how well LMs generalize to produce or understand language often implicitly take for granted that natural languages are generated by symbolic rules. According to this perspective, grammaticality is determined by…
How do typological properties such as word order and morphological case marking affect the ability of neural sequence models to acquire the syntax of a language? Cross-linguistic comparisons of RNNs' syntactic performance (e.g., on…
Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before…
Models for learning probability distributions such as generative models and density estimators behave quite differently from models for learning functions. One example is found in the memorization phenomenon, namely the ultimate convergence…
Although neural models have achieved impressive results on several NLP benchmarks, little is understood about the mechanisms they use to perform language tasks. Thus, much recent attention has been devoted to analyzing the sentence…
Pre-trained language models perform well on a variety of linguistic tasks that require symbolic reasoning, raising the question of whether such models implicitly represent abstract symbols and rules. We investigate this question using the…
Large language models are highly capable of answering difficult questions by retrieving, recombining, and attending to information in long contexts. For agentic tasks, an additional capability is required: the preservation of an exact state…
Human languages are rule governed, but almost invariably these rules have exceptions in the form of irregularities. Since rules in language are efficient and productive, the persistence of irregularity is an anomaly. How does irregularity…
We develop original models to study interacting agents in financial markets and in social networks. Within these models randomness is vital as a form of shock or news that decays with time. Agents learn from their observations and learning…
Transformers have recently been shown to be capable of reliably performing logical reasoning over facts and rules expressed in natural language, but abductive reasoning - inference to the best explanation of an unexpected observation - has…
A growing body of literature has focused on detailing the linguistic knowledge embedded in large, pretrained language models. Existing work has shown that non-linguistic biases in models can drive model behavior away from linguistic…