Related papers: Learning the Wrong Lessons: Syntactic-Domain Spuri…
Using prompted language models as classifiers enables classification in domains with limited training data, but misses some of the robustness and performance benefits that fine-tuning can bring. We study whether training on multiple…
Targeted studies testing knowledge of subject-verb agreement (SVA) indicate that pre-trained language models encode syntactic information. We assert that if models robustly encode subject-verb agreement, they should be able to identify when…
Large language models (LLMs) can reliably distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, but how grammatical knowledge is represented within the models remains an open question. We investigate whether different syntactic phenomena…
Instruction tuning on a mixture of tasks has improved zero-shot capabilities in natural language processing (NLP). Nevertheless, existing methods often learn features that exhibit correlations between instruction-formatted samples and…
Transfer learning techniques are particularly useful in NLP tasks where a sizable amount of high-quality annotated data is difficult to obtain. Current approaches directly adapt a pre-trained language model (LM) on in-domain text before…
We propose a novel task-agnostic in-domain pre-training method that sits between generic pre-training and fine-tuning. Our approach selectively masks in-domain keywords, i.e., words that provide a compact representation of the target…
Combining a pretrained language model (PLM) with textual patterns has been shown to help in both zero- and few-shot settings. For zero-shot performance, it makes sense to design patterns that closely resemble the text seen during…
Most human interactions occur in the form of spoken conversations where the semantic meaning of a given utterance depends on the context. Each utterance in spoken conversation can be represented by many semantic and speaker attributes, and…
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language modeling, recent studies reveal that they often fail on out-of-distribution (OOD) samples due to spurious correlations acquired during pre-training.…
Recognizing visual entities in a natural language sentence and arranging them in a 2D spatial layout require a compositional understanding of language and space. This task of layout prediction is valuable in text-to-image synthesis as it…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a robust mastery of syntax when processing and generating text. While this suggests internalized understanding of hierarchical syntax and dependency relations, the precise mechanism by which they…
Most natural language processing systems based on machine learning are not robust to domain shift. For example, a state-of-the-art syntactic dependency parser trained on Wall Street Journal sentences has an absolute drop in performance of…
Accurate syntactic representations are essential for robust generalization in natural language. Recent work has found that pre-training can teach language models to rely on hierarchical syntactic features - as opposed to incorrect linear…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in educational and learning applications. Research has demonstrated that controlling for style, to fit the needs of the learner, fosters increased understanding, promotes inclusion,…
Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), or providing context on the expected model of operation, is an effective way to steer the outputs of such models to satisfy human desiderata after they have been trained. But in rapidly evolving…
Semantic and syntactic bootstrapping posit that children use their prior knowledge of one linguistic domain, say syntactic relations, to help later acquire another, such as the meanings of new words. Empirical results supporting both…
Large language models are highly sensitive to prompts, but this sensitivity is usually studied through task-relevant instructions, demonstrations, or reasoning cues. In this paper, we study a different form of prompt sensitivity: whether…
We present an approach for assessing how multilingual large language models (LLMs) learn syntax in terms of multi-formalism syntactic structures. We aim to recover constituent and dependency structures by casting parsing as sequence…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on reasoning tasks, yet their logical abilities remain contested. To address this, we study LLMs' reasoning in a well-defined fragment of logic: syllogistic reasoning. We cast the…
Domain adaptation allows generative language models to address specific flaws caused by the domain shift of their application. However, the traditional adaptation by further training on in-domain data rapidly weakens the model's ability to…