6 papers
GlossoGen: Emergent Language in Complex Multi-Agent LLM Interactions
Elias Stengel-Eskin, Newton Sander, Carlos Bonetti +4
The growing rate at which LLM agents interact with one another raises key questions about language evolution in multi-LLM-agent settings, with implications for safety and monitorab…
Causal Interventions Reveal Typologically Organized Syntactic Mechanisms in Multilingual Language Models
Sasha Boguraev, Toshiki Nakai, Kyle Mahowald +1
Linguistic theory has long recognized cross-linguistic syntactic regularities, leading to claims that these similar structures are processed by similar mechanisms. However, this hy…
Causal Drawbridges: Characterizing Gradient Blocking of Syntactic Islands in Transformer LMs
Sasha Boguraev, Kyle Mahowald
We show how causal interventions in Transformer models provide insights into English syntax by focusing on a long-standing challenge for syntactic theory: syntactic islands. Extrac…
France or Spain or Germany or France: A Neural Account of Non-Redundant Redundant Disjunctions
Sasha Boguraev, Qing Yao, Kyle Mahowald
Sentences like "She will go to France or Spain, or perhaps to Germany or France." appear formally redundant, yet become acceptable in contexts such as "Mary will go to a philosophy…
Causal Interventions Reveal Shared Structure Across English Filler-Gap Constructions
Sasha Boguraev, Christopher Potts, Kyle Mahowald
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…
Models Can and Should Embrace the Communicative Nature of Human-Generated Math
Sasha Boguraev, Ben Lipkin, Leonie Weissweiler +1
Math is constructed by people for people: just as natural language corpora reflect not just propositions but the communicative goals of language users, the math data that models ar…