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We advance a novel explanation of similarity-based interference effects in subject-verb and reflexive pronoun agreement processing, grounded in surprisal values computed from a pretrained large-scale Transformer model, GPT-2. Specifically,…
The Random Language Model (De Giuli 2019) is an ensemble of stochastic context-free grammars, quantifying the syntax of human and computer languages. The model suggests a simple picture of first language learning as a type of annealing in…
Neural Processes (NPs) are appealing due to their ability to perform fast adaptation based on a context set. This set is encoded by a latent variable, which is often assumed to follow a simple distribution. However, in real-word settings,…
We define general linguistic intelligence as the ability to reuse previously acquired knowledge about a language's lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatic conventions to adapt to new tasks quickly. Using this definition, we analyze…
Supervised machine learning provides the learner with a set of input-output examples of the target task. Humans, however, can also learn to perform new tasks from instructions in natural language. Can machines learn to understand…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the capacity to reconstruct and trace learned content from their training data under specific elicitation conditions, yet this capability does not manifest in standard generation contexts. This…
Understanding natural language requires common sense, one aspect of which is the ability to discern the plausibility of events. While distributional models -- most recently pre-trained, Transformer language models -- have demonstrated…
Recent work on evaluating grammatical knowledge in pretrained sentence encoders gives a fine-grained view of a small number of phenomena. We introduce a new analysis dataset that also has broad coverage of linguistic phenomena. We annotate…
We study whether automatically-induced prompts that effectively extract information from a language model can also be used, out-of-the-box, to probe other language models for the same information. After confirming that discrete prompts…
Learning structural information from observational data is central to producing new knowledge outside the training corpus. This holds for mechanistic understanding in scientific discovery as well as flexible test-time compositional…
Machine-translated data is widely used in multilingual NLP, particularly when native text is scarce. However, translated text differs systematically from native text. This phenomenon is known as translationese, and it reflects both traces…
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) harness linguistic associations in vast natural language data for practical applications. However, their ability to understand the physical world using only language data remains a…
This thesis presents a computational theory of unsupervised language acquisition, precisely defining procedures for learning language from ordinary spoken or written utterances, with no explicit help from a teacher. The theory is based…
It is not fully understood why adversarial examples can deceive neural networks and transfer between different networks. To elucidate this, several studies have hypothesized that adversarial perturbations, while appearing as noises, contain…
While end-to-end learning with fully differentiable models has enabled tremendous success in natural language process (NLP) and machine learning, there have been significant recent interests in learning with latent discrete structures to…
In this paper we provide a quantitative framework for the study of phonological networks (PNs) for the English language by carrying out principled comparisons to null models, either based on site percolation, randomization techniques, or…
Humans perceive discrete events such as "restaurant visits" and "train rides" in their continuous experience. One important prerequisite for studying human event perception is the ability of researchers to quantify when one event ends and…
While sentence anomalies have been applied periodically for testing in NLP, we have yet to establish a picture of the precise status of anomaly information in representations from NLP models. In this paper we aim to fill two primary gaps,…
We investigate learning collections of languages from texts by an inductive inference machine with access to the current datum and a bounded memory in form of states. Such a bounded memory states (BMS) learner is considered successful in…
Travel decisions tend to exhibit sensitivity to uncertainty and information processing constraints. These behavioural conditions can be characterized by a generative learning process. We propose a data-driven generative model version of…