Related papers: Language Models Learn Rare Phenomena from Less Rar…
Artificial neural networks can generalize productively to novel contexts. Can they also learn exceptions to those productive rules? We explore this question using the case of restrictions on English passivization (e.g., the fact that "The…
Knowledge of syntax includes knowledge of rare, idiosyncratic constructions. LLMs must overcome frequency biases in order to master such constructions. In this study, I prompt GPT-3 to give acceptability judgments on the English-language…
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.…
Neural language models learn, to varying degrees of accuracy, the grammatical properties of natural languages. In this work, we investigate whether there are systematic sources of variation in the language models' accuracy. Focusing on…
Humans can learn structural properties about a word from minimal experience, and deploy their learned syntactic representations uniformly in different grammatical contexts. We assess the ability of modern neural language models to reproduce…
Humans have a remarkable ability to acquire and understand grammatical phenomena that are seen rarely, if ever, during childhood. Recent evidence suggests that language models with human-scale pretraining data may possess a similar ability…
Grammatical rules in natural languages are often characterized by exceptions. How do language learners learn these exceptions to otherwise general patterns? Here, we study this question through the case study of English passivization. While…
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…
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,…
Neural language models (LMs) are typically trained using only lexical features, such as surface forms of words. In this paper, we argue this deprives the LM of crucial syntactic signals that can be detected at high confidence using existing…
Autoregressive language models are powerful and relatively easy to train. However, these models are usually trained without explicit conditioning labels and do not offer easy ways to control global aspects such as sentiment or topic during…
Transformers have supplanted recurrent models in a large number of NLP tasks. However, the differences in their abilities to model different syntactic properties remain largely unknown. Past works suggest that LSTMs generalize very well on…
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…
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been shown to capture various aspects of syntax from raw linguistic input. In most previous experiments, however, learning happens over unrealistic corpora, which do not reflect the type and amount of…
Despite the fact that Transformers perform well in NLP tasks, recent studies suggest that self-attention is theoretically limited in learning even some regular and context-free languages. These findings motivated us to think about their…
Despite the success of language models using neural networks, it remains unclear to what extent neural models have the generalization ability to perform inferences. In this paper, we introduce a method for evaluating whether neural models…
Much theoretical work has described the ability of transformers to represent formal languages. However, linking theoretical results to empirical performance is not straightforward due to the complex interplay between the architecture, the…
How do language models learn to make predictions during pre-training? To study this, we extract learning curves from five autoregressive English language model pre-training runs, for 1M unseen tokens in context. We observe that the language…
Sample efficiency is a crucial property of language models with practical implications for training efficiency. In real-world text, information follows a long-tailed distribution. Yet, we expect models to learn and recall frequent and…
It's been said that "Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners." Indeed, self-supervised language models trained on "positive" examples of English text generalize in desirable ways to many natural language tasks. But if such…