arXiv subjects

Tyler A. Chang

Publications and source records attributed to Tyler A. Chang.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Word Acquisition in Neural Language Models

We investigate how neural language models acquire individual words during training, extracting learning curves and ages of acquisition for over 600 words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al., 2007). Drawing on studies of word acquisition in children, we evaluate multiple predictors for words' ages of acquisition in LSTMs, BERT, and GPT-2. We find that the effects of concreteness, word length, and lexical class are pointedly different in children and language models, reinforcing the importance of interaction and sensorimotor experience in child language acquisition. Language models rely far more on word frequency than children, but like children, they exhibit slower learning of words in longer utterances. Interestingly, models follow consistent patterns during training for both unidirectional and bidirectional models, and for both LSTM and Transformer architectures. Models predict based on unigram token frequencies early in training, before transitioning loosely to bigram probabilities, eventually converging on more nuanced predictions. These results shed light on the role of distributional learning mechanisms in children, while also providing insights for more human-like language acquisition in language models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Convolutions and Self-Attention: Re-interpreting Relative Positions in Pre-trained Language Models

In this paper, we detail the relationship between convolutions and self-attention in natural language tasks. We show that relative position embeddings in self-attention layers are equivalent to recently-proposed dynamic lightweight convolutions, and we consider multiple new ways of integrating convolutions into Transformer self-attention. Specifically, we propose composite attention, which unites previous relative position embedding methods under a convolutional framework. We conduct experiments by training BERT with composite attention, finding that convolutions consistently improve performance on multiple downstream tasks, replacing absolute position embeddings. To inform future work, we present results comparing lightweight convolutions, dynamic convolutions, and depthwise-separable convolutions in language model pre-training, considering multiple injection points for convolutions in self-attention layers.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Encodings of Source Syntax: Similarities in NMT Representations Across Target Languages

We train neural machine translation (NMT) models from English to six target languages, using NMT encoder representations to predict ancestor constituent labels of source language words. We find that NMT encoders learn similar source syntax regardless of NMT target language, relying on explicit morphosyntactic cues to extract syntactic features from source sentences. Furthermore, the NMT encoders outperform RNNs trained directly on several of the constituent label prediction tasks, suggesting that NMT encoder representations can be used effectively for natural language tasks involving syntax. However, both the NMT encoders and the directly-trained RNNs learn substantially different syntactic information from a probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG) parser. Despite lower overall accuracy scores, the PCFG often performs well on sentences for which the RNN-based models perform poorly, suggesting that RNN architectures are constrained in the types of syntax they can learn.

cs.CL↗