11 papers
Causal Interventions on Continuous Variables: A Case Study on Verb Bias in Steering Vectors for In-Context Learning
Zhenghao Herbert Zhou, R. Thomas McCoy, Robert Frank
Causal interventions in language model representations have largely targeted discrete features, like grammatical number. However, language models must also make use of features tha…
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…
Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks
Claire Hobbs, R. Thomas McCoy
In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regul…
Levels of Analysis for Large Language Models
Alexander Y. Ku, Declan Campbell, Xuechunzi Bai +10
Modern artificial intelligence systems, such as large language models, are increasingly powerful but also increasingly hard to understand. Recognizing this problem as analogous to…
Evaluating the Usage of African-American Vernacular English in Large Language Models
Deja Dunlap, R. Thomas McCoy
In AI, most evaluations of natural language understanding tasks are conducted in standardized dialects such as Standard American English (SAE). In this work, we investigate how acc…
Convolutional Neural Networks Can (Meta-)Learn the Same-Different Relation
Max Gupta, Sunayana Rane, R. Thomas McCoy +1
While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have come to match and exceed human performance in many settings, the tasks these models optimize for are largely constrained to the leve…