Related papers: Measuring Form and Function in Language Models
Much of the success of modern language models depends on finding a suitable prompt to instruct the model. Until now, it has been largely unknown how variations in the linguistic expression of prompts affect these models. This study…
Comparative reasoning is a process of comparing objects, concepts, or entities to draw conclusions, which constitutes a fundamental cognitive ability. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to pre-train language models for enhancing…
Manner and result verbs encode different aspects of event structure and have been discussed in developmental work as a potentially informative distinction for studying early verb learning. However, this distinction remains difficult to…
This paper presents an initial study performed by the MODOMA system. The MODOMA is a computational multi-agent laboratory environment for unsupervised language acquisition experiments such that acquisition is based on the interaction…
Probing is a popular method to discern what linguistic information is contained in the representations of pre-trained language models. However, the mechanism of selecting the probe model has recently been subject to intense debate, as it is…
The probing methodology allows one to obtain a partial representation of linguistic phenomena stored in the inner layers of the neural network, using external classifiers and statistical analysis. Pre-trained transformer-based language…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
Despite the recent successes of large, pretrained neural language models (LLMs), comparatively little is known about the representations of linguistic structure they learn during pretraining, which can lead to unexpected behaviors in…
Teacher education requires deliberate practice with learners who exhibit identifiable strengths, weaknesses, and partial mastery. Large language models could support such practice by simulating students with known skill components, enabling…
Language sciences rely less and less on formal syntax as their base. The reason is probably its lack of psychological reality, knowingly avoided. Philosophers of science call for a paradigm shift in which explanations are by mechanisms, as…
Research has shown that neural models implicitly encode linguistic features, but there has been no research showing \emph{how} these encodings arise as the models are trained. We present the first study on the learning dynamics of neural…
Interactions involving children span a wide range of important domains from learning to clinical diagnostic and therapeutic contexts. Automated analyses of such interactions are motivated by the need to seek accurate insights and offer…
Text-based conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly used in mental health, yet evaluation practices remain fragmented. We conducted a PRISMA-guided systematic review (May-June 2024) across ACM Digital Library, Scopus, and PsycINFO. From…
This paper is concerned with what intermediate syntactic categories children acquire during first language development, and in what order. Maturational theories make different predictions. Bottom-up accounts (GROWING) propose that lexical…
Recent approaches have explored language-guided classifiers capable of classifying examples from novel tasks when provided with task-specific natural language explanations, instructions or prompts (Sanh et al., 2022; R. Menon et al., 2022).…
This paper presents a qualitative study that investigates the effects of some language choices in expressing the trigger part of a trigger-action rule on the users' mental models. Specifically, we explored how 11 non-programmer participants…
In this paper, we investigate the effect of context on usability evaluation. The focus is on how children behave and perform when they are tested in different settings. Two most commonly applied usability evaluation methods: the think-aloud…
Current syntactic theory limits the range of grammatical variation so severely that the logical problem of grammar learning is trivial. Yet, children exhibit characteristic stages in syntactic development at least through their sixth year.…
Recent advances in self-supervised modeling of text and images open new opportunities for computational models of child language acquisition, which is believed to rely heavily on cross-modal signals. However, prior studies have been limited…
Many self-supervised speech models, varying in their pre-training objective, input modality, and pre-training data, have been proposed in the last few years. Despite impressive successes on downstream tasks, we still have a limited…