6 papers
Where's the Indirect Evidence? Investigating Grammatical Generalization with Influence Functions
William Dai, Zhenghao Herbert Zhou, Maya Viswanathan +1
Language models generalize beyond their training corpus to learn linguistic phenomena (Patil et al., 2024; Misra and Mahowald, 2024), showing that there exists indirect evidence dr…
What Exactly do Children Receive in Language Acquisition? A Case Study on CHILDES with Automated Detection of Filler-Gap Dependencies
Zhenghao Herbert Zhou, William Dai, Maya Viswanathan +3
Children's acquisition of filler-gap dependencies has been argued by some to depend on innate grammatical knowledge, while others suggest that the distributional evidence available…
The Structural Sources of Verb Meaning Revisited: Large Language Models Display Syntactic Bootstrapping
Xiaomeng Zhu, R. Thomas McCoy, Robert Frank
Syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman, 1990) is the hypothesis that children use the syntactic environments in which a verb occurs to learn its meaning. In this paper, we examine wheth…
Meaning Beyond Truth Conditions: Evaluating Discourse Level Understanding via Anaphora Accessibility
Xiaomeng Zhu, Zhenghao Zhou, Simon Charlow +1
We present a hierarchy of natural language understanding abilities and argue for the importance of moving beyond assessments of understanding at the lexical and sentence levels to…
Is In-Context Learning a Type of Error-Driven Learning? Evidence from the Inverse Frequency Effect in Structural Priming
Zhenghao Zhou, Robert Frank, R. Thomas McCoy
Large language models (LLMs) have shown the emergent capability of in-context learning (ICL). One line of research has claimed that ICL is functionally equivalent to gradient desce…
LIEDER: Linguistically-Informed Evaluation for Discourse Entity Recognition
Xiaomeng Zhu, Robert Frank
Discourse Entity (DE) recognition is the task of identifying novel and known entities introduced within a text. While previous work has found that large language models have basic,…