Related papers: Do Language Models Know What Not to Say? Causal Ev…
Construction grammar posits that constructions, or form-meaning pairings, are acquired through experience with language (the distributional learning hypothesis). But how much information about constructions does this distribution actually…
Construction grammar posits that language learners acquire constructions (form-meaning pairings) from the statistics of their environment. Recent work supports this hypothesis by showing sensitivity to constructions in pretrained language…
We investigate the extent to which modern, neural language models are susceptible to structural priming, the phenomenon whereby the structure of a sentence makes the same structure more probable in a follow-up sentence. We explore how…
Causal learning is the cognitive process of developing the capability of making causal inferences based on available information, often guided by normative principles. This process is prone to errors and biases, such as the illusion of…
Model interpretability methods are often used to explain NLP model decisions on tasks such as text classification, where the output space is relatively small. However, when applied to language generation, where the output space often…
Current research on bias in language models (LMs) predominantly focuses on data quality, with significantly less attention paid to model architecture and temporal influences of data. Even more critically, few studies systematically…
Causal learning is the cognitive process of developing the capability of making causal inferences based on available information, often guided by normative principles. This process is prone to errors and biases, such as the illusion of…
Building on research arguing for the possibility of conceptual and categorical knowledge acquisition through statistics contained in language, we evaluate predictive language models (LMs) -- informed solely by textual input -- on a…
In English and other languages, multiple adjectives in noun phrases follow intricate ordering patterns. These patterns have been widely studied in linguistics and provide a useful test case for assessing how language models (LMs) acquire…
Language Models (LMs) have emerged as powerful sources of evidence for linguists seeking to develop theories of syntax. In this paper, we argue that causal interpretability methods, applied to LMs, can greatly enhance the value of such…
The logical negation property (LNP), which implies generating different predictions for semantically opposite inputs, is an important property that a trustworthy language model must satisfy. However, much recent evidence shows that…
Language models are typically evaluated on their success at predicting the distribution of specific words in specific contexts. Yet linguistic knowledge also encodes relationships between contexts, allowing inferences between word…
This paper investigates false positive constructions: grammatical structures which an LLM hallucinates as distinct constructions but which human introspection does not support. Both a behavioural probing task using contextual embeddings and…
The grammatical knowledge of language models (LMs) is often measured using a benchmark of linguistic minimal pairs, where the LMs are presented with a pair of acceptable and unacceptable sentences and required to judge which is more…
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…
Word co-occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse…
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely studied for their ability to store and utilize positive knowledge. However, negative knowledge, such as "lions don't live in the ocean", is also ubiquitous in the world but rarely mentioned…
We propose an alternate approach to quantifying how well language models learn natural language: we ask how well they match the statistical tendencies of natural language. To answer this question, we analyze whether text generated from…
Many social science questions ask how linguistic properties causally affect an audience's attitudes and behaviors. Because text properties are often interlinked (e.g., angry reviews use profane language), we must control for possible latent…
As language models (LMs) deliver increasing performance on a range of NLP tasks, probing classifiers have become an indispensable technique in the effort to better understand their inner workings. A typical setup involves (1) defining an…