[SynSem Meeting] Oct. 27 (Mon) 3:30-5PM: Wesley Scivetti on Language Models' understanding of the 'let alone' construction

[Min-Chun Hsiao]

Hi all,

The SynSem lab at CU Boulder is excited to welcome Wesley Scivetti from Georgetown University Linguistics for a talk at the intersection of Construction Grammar and Natural Language Processing!

Please join us in person (snacks provided!) or on Zoom next Monday.

• Time: Oct. 27, Monday, 3:30 — 5:30 PM (Mountain Time, Denver)
• Location: SynSem Lab (LBB 151) or Zoom
• Title: Do Small-Scale Language Models understand the ‘Let-Alone’ Construction
• Abstract: Humans have a remarkable ability to acquire and understand grammatical phenomena that are seen rarely, if ever, during childhood. Recent evidence suggests that language models with human-scale pretraining data may possess a similar ability by generalizing from frequent to rare constructions. However, it remains an open question how widespread this generalization ability is, and to what extent this knowledge extends to meanings of rare constructions, as opposed to just their forms. In this talk, I will discuss recent work we did to fill this gap, by testing human-scale transformer language models on their knowledge of both the form and meaning of the (rare and quirky) English Let-Alone construction. Using a new evaluation dataset, we find that small language models are sensitive to LetAlone’s form, but do not make correct generalizations about its meaning. These results point to a larger asymmetry in the current architectures' learning trajectories of syntax and semantics of rare constructions, something that should be the target of further research.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Best,

Allen

[Min-Chun Hsiao]

Sorry, there was a typo! The meeting is from 3:30 to 5:00 PM (Mountain Time)! We look forward to see you over zoom!