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Related papers: Can Transformers Learn $n$-gram Language Models?

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We present a systematic review of 337 articles evaluating the syntactic abilities of Transformer-based language models (TLMs), reporting on over 3,000 datapoints spanning a wide range of syntactic phenomena, languages, models, and methods.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Nora Graichen , Iria de-Dios-Flores , Gemma Boleda

State-of-the-art neural language models (LMs) represented by Transformers are highly complex. Their use of fixed, deterministic parameter estimates fail to account for model uncertainty and lead to over-fitting and poor generalization when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-10 Boyang Xue , Jianwei Yu , Junhao Xu , Shansong Liu , Shoukang Hu , Zi Ye , Mengzhe Geng , Xunying Liu , Helen Meng

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are theoretically Turing-complete and established themselves as a dominant model for language processing. Yet, there still remains an uncertainty regarding their language learning capabilities. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Mirac Suzgun , Yonatan Belinkov , Stuart M. Shieber

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Tyler A. Chang , Benjamin K. Bergen

We are interested in understanding how well Transformer language models (TLMs) can perform reasoning tasks when trained on knowledge encoded in the form of natural language. We investigate their systematic generalization abilities on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Nicolas Gontier , Koustuv Sinha , Siva Reddy , Christopher Pal

State-of-the-art deep-learning-based approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) are credited with various capabilities that involve reasoning with natural language texts. In this paper we carry out a large-scale empirical study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Viktor Schlegel , Kamen V. Pavlov , Ian Pratt-Hartmann

Transformer models have recently emerged as one of the foundational models in natural language processing, and as a byproduct, there is significant recent interest and investment in scaling these models. However, the training and inference…

Efforts to apply transformer-based language models (TLMs) to the problem of reasoning in natural language have enjoyed ever-increasing success in recent years. The most fundamental task in this area to which nearly all others can be reduced…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tharindu Madusanka , Ian Pratt-Hartmann , Riza Batista-Navarro

Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Wei Shi , Yuan Cao

With the recent developments in the field of Natural Language Processing, there has been a rise in the use of different architectures for Neural Machine Translation. Transformer architectures are used to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Aditya Mandke , Onkar Litake , Dipali Kadam

Transformers have significantly impacted domains like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics, where they improve performance compared to other neural networks. This survey explores how transformers are used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Pranav Agarwal , Aamer Abdul Rahman , Pierre-Luc St-Charles , Simon J. D. Prince , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

We present evidence that language models (LMs) of code can learn to represent the formal semantics of programs, despite being trained only to perform next-token prediction. Specifically, we train a Transformer model on a synthetic corpus of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Charles Jin , Martin Rinard

Are $n$-gram language models still relevant in this era of neural large language models (LLMs)? Our answer is yes, and we showcase their values in both text analysis and improving neural LLMs. This was done by modernizing $n$-gram LMs in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Jiacheng Liu , Sewon Min , Luke Zettlemoyer , Yejin Choi , Hannaneh Hajishirzi

This study explores an LLM's ability to learn new languages using explanations found in a grammar book, a process we term "explicit learning." To rigorously assess this ability, we design controlled translation experiments between English…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Malik Marmonier , Rachel Bawden , Benoît Sagot

Neural machine translation (MT) models obtain state-of-the-art performance while maintaining a simple, end-to-end architecture. However, little is known about what these models learn about source and target languages during the training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Yonatan Belinkov , Nadir Durrani , Fahim Dalvi , Hassan Sajjad , James Glass

Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Nuri Mert Vural , Alberto Bietti , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Denny Wu

Transformer-based large language models have achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. However, they often struggle with seemingly easy tasks like arithmetic despite their vast capabilities. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Luyu Qiu , Jianing Li , Chi Su , Chen Jason Zhang , Lei Chen

Transformer-based language models (LMs) continue to achieve state-of-the-art performance on natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks, including tasks designed to mimic human-inspired "commonsense" competencies. To better understand the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-13 Antonio Laverghetta , Animesh Nighojkar , Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov , John Licato

Neural networks have in recent years shown promise for helping software engineers write programs and even formally verify them. While semantic information plays a crucial part in these processes, it remains unclear to what degree popular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Shizhuo Dylan Zhang , Curt Tigges , Stella Biderman , Maxim Raginsky , Talia Ringer

Some Transformer-based models can perform cross-lingual transfer learning: those models can be trained on a specific task in one language and give relatively good results on the same task in another language, despite having been pre-trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Félix Gaschi , François Plesse , Parisa Rastin , Yannick Toussaint