no code implementations • NAACL (SIGTYP) 2022 • Sihan Chen, Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald
Using data from Nintemann et al. (2020), we explore the variability in complexity and informativity across spatial demonstrative systems using spatial deictic lexicons from 223 languages.
no code implementations • NAACL (DADC) 2022 • Venelin Kovatchev, Trina Chatterjee, Venkata S Govindarajan, Jifan Chen, Eunsol Choi, Gabriella Chronis, Anubrata Das, Katrin Erk, Matthew Lease, Junyi Jessy Li, Yating Wu, Kyle Mahowald
Developing methods to adversarially challenge NLP systems is a promising avenue for improving both model performance and interpretability.
no code implementations • ACL 2022 • Isabel Papadimitriou, Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald
Because meaning can often be inferred from lexical semantics alone, word order is often a redundant cue in natural language.
no code implementations • 28 Mar 2024 • Kanishka Misra, Kyle Mahowald
Training on a corpus of human-scale in size (100M words), we iteratively trained transformer language models on systematically manipulated corpora and then evaluated their learning of a particular rare grammatical phenomenon: the English Article+Adjective+Numeral+Noun (AANN) construction (``a beautiful five days'').
1 code implementation • 19 Jan 2024 • Jennifer Hu, Kyle Mahowald, Gary Lupyan, Anna Ivanova, Roger Levy
Do Large Language Models (LLMs) make human-like linguistic generalizations?
1 code implementation • 12 Jan 2024 • Julie Kallini, Isabel Papadimitriou, Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, Christopher Potts
Chomsky and others have very directly claimed that large language models (LLMs) are equally capable of learning languages that are possible and impossible for humans to learn.
no code implementations • 12 Jan 2024 • Kanishka Misra, Allyson Ettinger, Kyle Mahowald
Recent zero-shot evaluations have highlighted important limitations in the abilities of language models (LMs) to perform meaning extraction.
no code implementations • 10 Jan 2024 • Harvey Lederman, Kyle Mahowald
A challenge for this idea, which we call bibliotechnism, is that LLMs often generate entirely novel text.
no code implementations • 6 Dec 2023 • Tiago Pimentel, Clara Meister, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Kyle Mahowald, Ryan Cotterell
Under this method, we find that a language's word lengths should instead be proportional to the surprisal's expectation plus its variance-to-mean ratio.
1 code implementation • 29 Oct 2023 • Anirudh Srinivasan, Venkata S Govindarajan, Kyle Mahowald
We use one such technique, AlterRep, a method of counterfactual probing, to explore the internal structure of multilingual models (mBERT and XLM-R).
1 code implementation • 26 Oct 2023 • Venkata S Govindarajan, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Kaj Bostrom, Kyle Mahowald
We pretrained our masked language models with three ingredients: an initial pretraining with music data, training on shorter sequences before training on longer ones, and masking specific tokens to target some of the BLiMP subtasks.
1 code implementation • 29 May 2023 • Gabriella Chronis, Kyle Mahowald, Katrin Erk
We study semantic construal in grammatical constructions using large language models.
1 code implementation • 25 May 2023 • Venkata S Govindarajan, Kyle Mahowald, David I. Beaver, Junyi Jessy Li
While existing work on studying bias in NLP focues on negative or pejorative language use, Govindarajan et al. (2023) offer a revised framing of bias in terms of intergroup social context, and its effects on language behavior.
no code implementations • 17 May 2023 • Yating Wu, William Sheffield, Kyle Mahowald, Junyi Jessy Li
Automated text simplification, a technique useful for making text more accessible to people such as children and emergent bilinguals, is often thought of as a monolingual translation task from complex sentences to simplified sentences using encoder-decoder models.
1 code implementation • 16 Feb 2023 • Michail Mersinias, Kyle Mahowald
We explore incorporating natural language inference (NLI) into the text generative pipeline by using a pre-trained NLI model to assess whether a generated sentence entails, contradicts, or is neutral to the prompt and preceding text.
no code implementations • 29 Jan 2023 • Kyle Mahowald
I validate the prompt using the CoLA corpus of acceptability judgments and then zero in on the AANN construction.
no code implementations • 16 Jan 2023 • Kyle Mahowald, Anna A. Ivanova, Idan A. Blank, Nancy Kanwisher, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Evelina Fedorenko
Large Language Models (LLMs) have come closest among all models to date to mastering human language, yet opinions about their linguistic and cognitive capabilities remain split.
1 code implementation • 19 Dec 2022 • Jing Huang, Zhengxuan Wu, Kyle Mahowald, Christopher Potts
Language tasks involving character-level manipulations (e. g., spelling corrections, arithmetic operations, word games) are challenging for models operating on subword units.
1 code implementation • 1 Nov 2022 • Anuj Diwan, Layne Berry, Eunsol Choi, David Harwath, Kyle Mahowald
Recent visuolinguistic pre-trained models show promising progress on various end tasks such as image retrieval and video captioning.
no code implementations • 29 Jun 2022 • Venelin Kovatchev, Trina Chatterjee, Venkata S Govindarajan, Jifan Chen, Eunsol Choi, Gabriella Chronis, Anubrata Das, Katrin Erk, Matthew Lease, Junyi Jessy Li, Yating Wu, Kyle Mahowald
Developing methods to adversarially challenge NLP systems is a promising avenue for improving both model performance and interpretability.
1 code implementation • NAACL 2022 • Ayush Kaushal, Kyle Mahowald
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) that use subword tokenization schemes can succeed at a variety of language tasks that require character-level information, despite lacking explicit access to the character composition of tokens.
1 code implementation • 11 Mar 2022 • Isabel Papadimitriou, Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald
Because meaning can often be inferred from lexical semantics alone, word order is often a redundant cue in natural language.
no code implementations • 30 Jan 2022 • Kyle Mahowald, Evgeniia Diachek, Edward Gibson, Evelina Fedorenko, Richard Futrell
The conclusion is that grammatical cues such as word order are necessary to convey subjecthood and objecthood in a minority of naturally occurring transitive clauses; nevertheless, they can (a) provide an important source of redundancy and (b) are crucial for conveying intended meaning that cannot be inferred from the words alone, including descriptions of human interactions, where roles are often reversible (e. g., Ray helped Lu/Lu helped Ray), and expressing non-prototypical meanings (e. g., "The bone chewed the dog.
1 code implementation • EMNLP 2021 • Alex Jones, William Yang Wang, Kyle Mahowald
We verify some of our linguistic findings by looking at the effect of morphological segmentation on English-Inuktitut alignment, in addition to examining the effect of word order agreement on isomorphism for 66 zero-shot language pairs from a different corpus.
no code implementations • NAACL 2021 • Tiago Pimentel, Irene Nikkarinen, Kyle Mahowald, Ryan Cotterell, Damián Blasi
Examining corpora from 7 typologically diverse languages, we use those upper bounds to quantify the lexicon's optimality and to explore the relative costs of major constraints on natural codes.
1 code implementation • NeurIPS 2021 • Joshua Rozner, Christopher Potts, Kyle Mahowald
Cryptic crosswords, the dominant crossword variety in the UK, are a promising target for advancing NLP systems that seek to process semantically complex, highly compositional language.
1 code implementation • EACL 2021 • Isabel Papadimitriou, Ethan A. Chi, Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald
Further examining the characteristics that our classifiers rely on, we find that features such as passive voice, animacy and case strongly correlate with classification decisions, suggesting that mBERT does not encode subjecthood purely syntactically, but that subjecthood embedding is continuous and dependent on semantic and discourse factors, as is proposed in much of the functional linguistics literature.
2 code implementations • EMNLP 2020 • Dallas Card, Peter Henderson, Urvashi Khandelwal, Robin Jia, Kyle Mahowald, Dan Jurafsky
Despite its importance to experimental design, statistical power (the probability that, given a real effect, an experiment will reject the null hypothesis) has largely been ignored by the NLP community.
no code implementations • 1 Oct 2015 • Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, Edward Gibson
We address recent criticisms (Liu et al., 2015; Ferrer-i-Cancho and G\'omez-Rodr\'iguez, 2015) of our work on empirical evidence of dependency length minimization across languages (Futrell et al., 2015).