BabyLM Challenge: Exploring the Effect of Variation Sets on Language Model Training Efficiency

While current large language models have achieved a remarkable success, their data efficiency remains a challenge to overcome. Recently it has been suggested that child-directed speech (CDS) can improve training data efficiency of modern language models based on Transformer neural networks. However, it is not yet understood which specific properties of CDS are effective for training these models. In the context of the BabyLM Challenge, we focus on Variation Sets (VSs), sets of consecutive utterances expressing a similar intent with slightly different words and structures, which are ubiquitous in CDS. To assess the impact of VSs on training data efficiency, we augment CDS data with different proportions of artificial VSs and use these datasets to train an auto-regressive model, GPT-2. We find that the best proportion of VSs depends on the evaluation benchmark: BLiMP and GLUE scores benefit from the presence of VSs, but EWOK scores do not. Additionally, the results vary depending on multiple factors such as the number of epochs and the order of utterance presentation. Taken together, these findings suggest that VSs can have a beneficial influence on language models, while leaving room for further investigation.

Is Structure Dependence Shaped for Efficient Communication?: A Case Study on Coordination

Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties to domain-general cognitive abilities. This hypothesis has successfully addressed some syntactic universal properties such as compositionality and Greenbergian word order universals. However, more abstract syntactic universals have not been explored from the perspective of efficient communication. Among such universals, the most notable one is structure dependence, that is, the existence of grammar-internal operations that crucially depend on hierarchical representations. This property has traditionally been taken to be central to natural language and to involve domain-specific knowledge irreducible to communicative efficiency. In this paper, we challenge the conventional view by investigating whether structure dependence realizes efficient communication, focusing on coordinate structures. We design three types of artificial languages: (i) one with a structure-dependent reduction operation, which is similar to natural language, (ii) one without any reduction operations, and (iii) one with a linear (rather than structure-dependent) reduction operation. We quantify the communicative efficiency of these languages. The results demonstrate that the language with the structure-dependent reduction operation is significantly more communicatively efficient than the counterfactual languages. This suggests that the existence of structure-dependent properties can be explained from the perspective of efficient communication.

Can Language Models Induce Grammatical Knowledge from Indirect Evidence?

What kinds of and how much data is necessary for language models to induce grammatical knowledge to judge sentence acceptability? Recent language models still have much room for improvement in their data efficiency compared to humans. This paper investigates whether language models efficiently use indirect data (indirect evidence), from which they infer sentence acceptability. In contrast, humans use indirect evidence efficiently, which is considered one of the inductive biases contributing to efficient language acquisition. To explore this question, we introduce the Wug InDirect Evidence Test (WIDET), a dataset consisting of training instances inserted into the pre-training data and evaluation instances. We inject synthetic instances with newly coined wug words into pretraining data and explore the model's behavior on evaluation data that assesses grammatical acceptability regarding those words. We prepare the injected instances by varying their levels of indirectness and quantity. Our experiments surprisingly show that language models do not induce grammatical knowledge even after repeated exposure to instances with the same structure but differing only in lexical items from evaluation instances in certain language phenomena. Our findings suggest a potential direction for future research: developing models that use latent indirect evidence to induce grammatical knowledge.

LLM-jp: A Cross-organizational Project for the Research and Development of Fully Open Japanese LLMs

This paper introduces LLM-jp, a cross-organizational project for the research and development of Japanese large language models (LLMs). LLM-jp aims to develop open-source and strong Japanese LLMs, and as of this writing, more than 1,500 participants from academia and industry are working together for this purpose. This paper presents the background of the establishment of LLM-jp, summaries of its activities, and technical reports on the LLMs developed by LLM-jp. For the latest activities, visit https://llm-jp.nii.ac.jp/en/.

Tree-Planted Transformers: Large Language Models with Implicit Syntactic Supervision

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success thanks to scalability on large text corpora, but have some drawback in training efficiency. In contrast, Syntactic Language Models (SLMs) can be trained efficiently to reach relatively high performance thanks to syntactic supervision, but have trouble with scalability. Thus, given these complementary advantages of LLMs and SLMs, it is necessary to develop an architecture that integrates the scalability of LLMs with the training efficiency of SLMs, namely Syntactic Large Language Models (SLLM). In this paper, we propose a novel method dubbed tree-planting: implicitly "plant" trees into attention weights of Transformer LMs to reflect syntactic structures of natural language. Specifically, Transformer LMs trained with tree-planting will be called Tree-Planted Transformers (TPT), which learn syntax on small treebanks via tree-planting and then scale on large text corpora via continual learning with syntactic scaffolding. Targeted syntactic evaluations on the SyntaxGym benchmark demonstrated that TPTs, despite the lack of explicit syntactic supervision, significantly outperformed various SLMs with explicit syntactic supervision that generate hundreds of syntactic structures in parallel, suggesting that tree-planting and TPTs are the promising foundation for SLLMs.

Emergent Word Order Universals from Cognitively-Motivated Language Models

The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order typically employs postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal in linguistics. We study the word-order universals through a computational simulation with language models (LMs). Our experiments show that typologically typical word orders tend to have lower perplexity estimated by LMs with cognitively plausible biases: syntactic biases, specific parsing strategies, and memory limitations. This suggests that the interplay of these cognitive biases and predictability (perplexity) can explain many aspects of word-order universals. This also showcases the advantage of cognitively-motivated LMs, which are typically employed in cognitive modeling, in the computational simulation of language universals.

Psychometric Predictive Power of Large Language Models

Next-word probabilities from language models have been shown to successfully simulate human reading behavior. Building on this, we show that, interestingly, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) yield worse psychometric predictive power (PPP) for human reading behavior than base LLMs with equivalent perplexities. In other words, instruction tuning, which helps LLMs provide human-preferred responses, does not always make them human-like from the computational psycholinguistics perspective. In addition, we explore prompting methodologies in simulating human reading behavior with LLMs, showing that prompts reflecting a particular linguistic hypothesis lead LLMs to exhibit better PPP but are still worse than base LLMs. These highlight that recent instruction tuning and prompting do not offer better estimates than direct probability measurements from base LLMs in cognitive modeling.

JCoLA: Japanese Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability

Neural language models have exhibited outstanding performance in a range of downstream tasks. However, there is limited understanding regarding the extent to which these models internalize syntactic knowledge, so that various datasets have recently been constructed to facilitate syntactic evaluation of language models across languages. In this paper, we introduce JCoLA (Japanese Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability), which consists of 10,020 sentences annotated with binary acceptability judgments. Specifically, those sentences are manually extracted from linguistics textbooks, handbooks and journal articles, and split into in-domain data (86 %; relatively simple acceptability judgments extracted from textbooks and handbooks) and out-of-domain data (14 %; theoretically significant acceptability judgments extracted from journal articles), the latter of which is categorized by 12 linguistic phenomena. We then evaluate the syntactic knowledge of 9 different types of Japanese language models on JCoLA. The results demonstrated that several models could surpass human performance for the in-domain data, while no models were able to exceed human performance for the out-of-domain data. Error analyses by linguistic phenomena further revealed that although neural language models are adept at handling local syntactic dependencies like argument structure, their performance wanes when confronted with long-distance syntactic dependencies like verbal agreement and NPI licensing.

Composition, Attention, or Both?

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called Composition Attention Grammars (CAGs) that recursively compose subtrees into a single vector representation with a composition function, and selectively attend to previous structural information with a self-attention mechanism. We investigate whether these components -- the composition function and the self-attention mechanism -- can both induce human-like syntactic generalization. Specifically, we train language models (LMs) with and without these two components with the model sizes carefully controlled, and evaluate their syntactic generalization performance against six test circuits on the SyntaxGym benchmark. The results demonstrated that the composition function and the self-attention mechanism both play an important role to make LMs more human-like, and closer inspection of linguistic phenomenon implied that the composition function allowed syntactic features, but not semantic features, to percolate into subtree representations.

Context Limitations Make Neural Language Models More Human-Like

Do modern natural language processing (NLP) models exhibit human-like language processing? How can they be made more human-like? These questions are motivated by psycholinguistic studies for understanding human language processing as well as engineering efforts. In this study, we demonstrate the discrepancies in context access between modern neural language models (LMs) and humans in incremental sentence processing. Additional context limitation was needed to make LMs better simulate human reading behavior. Our analyses also showed that human-LM gaps in memory access are associated with specific syntactic constructions; incorporating additional syntactic factors into LMs' context access could enhance their cognitive plausibility.