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Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language…
Compositionality has traditionally been understood as a major factor in productivity of language and, more broadly, human cognition. Yet, recently, some research started to question its status, showing that artificial neural networks are…
One of the problems in part-of-speech tagging of real-word texts is that of unknown to the lexicon words. In Mikheev (ACL-96 cmp-lg/9604022), a technique for fully unsupervised statistical acquisition of rules which guess possible…
We conducted three experiments to investigate how large language models (LLMs) evaluate posterior probabilities. Our results reveal the coexistence of two modes in posterior judgment among state-of-the-art models: a normative mode, which…
Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand how neural networks generalize beyond their training data by reverse-engineering their internal structures. We introduce patterning as the dual problem: given a desired form of generalization,…
It remains debated how well any LM understands natural language or generates reliable metalinguistic judgments. Moreover, relatively little work has demonstrated that LMs can represent and respect subtle relationships between form and…
When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs…
In this work we explore deep generative models of text in which the latent representation of a document is itself drawn from a discrete language model distribution. We formulate a variational auto-encoder for inference in this model and…
Understanding how language model performance varies with scale is critical to benchmark and algorithm development. Scaling laws are one approach to building this understanding, but the requirement of training models across many different…
While recurrent neural networks have found success in a variety of natural language processing applications, they are general models of sequential data. We investigate how the properties of natural language data affect an LSTM's ability to…
In this research note, I derive explicit dynamical systems for language within an acquisition-driven framework (Niyogi \& Berwick, 1997; Niyogi, 2006) assuming that children/learners follow the Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2016) to determine…
In the present paper we show that distributional information is particularly important when considering concept availability under implicit language learning conditions. Based on results from different behavioural experiments we argue that…
While large language models (LLMs) are generally considered proficient in generating language, how similar their language usage is to that of humans remains understudied. In this paper, we test whether models exhibit linguistic convergence,…
A controversial test for Large Language Models concerns the ability to discern possible from impossible language. While some evidence attests to the models' sensitivity to what crosses the limits of grammatically impossible language, this…
Language models (LMs) are statistical models trained to assign probability to human-generated text. As such, it is reasonable to question whether they approximate linguistic variability exhibited by humans well. This form of statistical…
Learning rate schedule can significantly affect generalization performance in modern neural networks, but the reasons for this are not yet understood. Li-Wei-Ma (2019) recently proved this behavior can exist in a simplified non-convex…
Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication, and present a long-standing challenge for artificial language models. We perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven…
Large-scale pretrained language models are the major driving force behind recent improvements in performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge, a widely employed test of common sense reasoning ability. We show, however, with a new diagnostic…
Emergence is a fascinating property of large language models and neural networks more broadly: as models scale and train for longer, they sometimes develop new abilities in sudden ways. Despite initial studies, we still lack a comprehensive…
A major target of linguistics and cognitive science has been to understand what class of learning systems can acquire the key structures of natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue…