This work presents a detailed linguistic analysis into why larger Transformer-based pre-trained language models with more parameters and lower perplexity nonetheless yield surprisal estimates that are less predictive of human reading times. First, regression analyses show a strictly monotonic, positive log-linear relationship between perplexity and fit to reading times for the more recently released five GPT-Neo variants and eight OPT variants on two separate datasets, replicating earlier results limited to just GPT-2 (Oh et al., 2022). Subsequently, analysis of residual errors reveals a systematic deviation of the larger variants, such as underpredicting reading times of named entities and making compensatory overpredictions for reading times of function words such as modals and conjunctions. These results suggest that the propensity of larger Transformer-based models to 'memorize' sequences during training makes their surprisal estimates diverge from humanlike expectations, which warrants caution in using pre-trained language models to study human language processing.

Transformer-based large language models are trained to make predictions about the next word by aggregating representations of previous tokens through their self-attention mechanism. In the field of cognitive modeling, such attention patterns have recently been interpreted as embodying the process of cue-based retrieval, in which attention over multiple targets is taken to generate interference and latency during retrieval. Under this framework, this work first defines an entropy-based predictor that quantifies the diffuseness of self-attention, as well as distance-based predictors that capture the incremental change in attention patterns across timesteps. Moreover, following recent studies that question the informativeness of attention weights, we also experiment with alternative methods for incorporating vector norms into attention weights. Regression experiments using predictors calculated from the GPT-2 language model show that these predictors deliver a substantially better fit to held-out self-paced reading and eye-tracking data over a rigorous baseline including GPT-2 surprisal. Additionally, the distance-based predictors generally demonstrated higher predictive power, with effect sizes of up to 6.59 ms per standard deviation on self-paced reading times (compared to 2.82 ms for surprisal) and 1.05 ms per standard deviation on eye-gaze durations (compared to 3.81 ms for surprisal).

基于变压器的语言模型最近在许多自然语言任务中取得了显着的结果。但是，通常通过利用大量培训数据来实现排行榜的性能，并且很少通过将明确的语言知识编码为神经模型。这使许多人质疑语言学对现代自然语言处理的相关性。在本文中，我介绍了几个案例研究，以说明理论语言学和神经语言模型仍然相互关联。首先，语言模型通过提供一个客观的工具来测量语义距离，这对语言学家很有用，语义距离很难使用传统方法。另一方面，语言理论通过提供框架和数据源来探究我们的语言模型，以了解语言理解的特定方面，从而有助于语言建模研究。本论文贡献了三项研究，探讨了语言模型中语法 - 听觉界面的不同方面。在论文的第一部分中，我将语言模型应用于单词类灵活性的问题。我将Mbert作为语义距离测量的来源，我提供了有利于将单词类灵活性分析为方向过程的证据。在论文的第二部分中，我提出了一种方法来测量语言模型中间层的惊奇方法。我的实验表明，包含形态句法异常的句子触发了语言模型早期的惊喜，而不是语义和常识异常。最后，在论文的第三部分中，我适应了一些心理语言学研究，以表明语言模型包含了论证结构结构的知识。总而言之，我的论文在自然语言处理，语言理论和心理语言学之间建立了新的联系，以为语言模型的解释提供新的观点。

我们研究了现代神经语言模型容易受到结构启动的程度，这种现象使句子的结构在后续句子中更有可能使相同的结构更有可能。我们探索如何使用启动来研究这些模型学习抽象结构信息的潜力，这是需要自然语言理解技能的任务良好表现的先决条件。我们引入了一种新型的度量标准和释放Prime-LM，这是一个大型语料库，我们可以控制与启动强度相互作用的各种语言因素。我们发现，变压器模型确实显示了结构启动的证据，但他们所学到的概括在某种程度上是由语义信息调节的。我们的实验还表明，模型获得的表示不仅可以编码抽象的顺序结构，而且还涉及一定级别的层次句法信息。更普遍的是，我们的研究表明，启动范式是一种有用的，可用于洞悉语言模型能力的有用的，并为未来的基于底漆的调查打开了探测模型内部状态的未来大门。

Targeted syntactic evaluations of language models ask whether models show stable preferences for syntactically acceptable content over minimal-pair unacceptable inputs. Most targeted syntactic evaluation datasets ask models to make these judgements with just a single context-free sentence as input. This does not match language models' training regime, in which input sentences are always highly contextualized by the surrounding corpus. This mismatch raises an important question: how robust are models' syntactic judgements in different contexts? In this paper, we investigate the stability of language models' performance on targeted syntactic evaluations as we vary properties of the input context: the length of the context, the types of syntactic phenomena it contains, and whether or not there are violations of grammaticality. We find that model judgements are generally robust when placed in randomly sampled linguistic contexts. However, they are substantially unstable for contexts containing syntactic structures matching those in the critical test content. Among all tested models (GPT-2 and five variants of OPT), we significantly improve models' judgements by providing contexts with matching syntactic structures, and conversely significantly worsen them using unacceptable contexts with matching but violated syntactic structures. This effect is amplified by the length of the context, except for unrelated inputs. We show that these changes in model performance are not explainable by simple features matching the context and the test inputs, such as lexical overlap and dependency overlap. This sensitivity to highly specific syntactic features of the context can only be explained by the models' implicit in-context learning abilities.

当前的语言模型可以产生高质量的文本。他们只是复制他们之前看到的文本，或者他们学习了普遍的语言抽象吗？要取笑这些可能性，我们介绍了乌鸦，这是一套评估生成文本的新颖性，专注于顺序结构（n-gram）和句法结构。我们将这些分析应用于四种神经语言模型（LSTM，变压器，变换器-XL和GPT-2）。对于本地结构 - 例如，单个依赖性 - 模型生成的文本比来自每个模型的测试集的人类生成文本的基线显着不那么新颖。对于大规模结构 - 例如，总句结构 - 模型生成的文本与人生成的基线一样新颖甚至更新颖，但模型仍然有时复制，在某些情况下，在训练集中重复超过1000字超过1,000字的通道。我们还表现了广泛的手动分析，表明GPT-2的新文本通常在形态学和语法中形成良好，但具有合理的语义问题（例如，是自相矛盾）。

People constantly use language to learn about the world. Computational linguists have capitalized on this fact to build large language models (LLMs) that acquire co-occurrence-based knowledge from language corpora. LLMs achieve impressive performance on many tasks, but the robustness of their world knowledge has been questioned. Here, we ask: do LLMs acquire generalized knowledge about real-world events? Using curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (n=1215), we tested whether LLMs are more likely to generate plausible event descriptions compared to their implausible counterparts. We found that LLMs systematically distinguish possible and impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher) but fall short of human performance when distinguishing likely and unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow-up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface-level sentence features, (ii) LLMs generalize well across syntactic sentence variants (active vs passive) but less well across semantic sentence variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some, but not all LLM deviations from ground-truth labels align with crowdsourced human judgments, and (iv) explicit event plausibility information emerges in middle LLM layers and remains high thereafter. Overall, our analyses reveal a gap in LLMs' event knowledge, highlighting their limitations as generalized knowledge bases. We conclude by speculating that the differential performance on impossible vs. unlikely events is not a temporary setback but an inherent property of LLMs, reflecting a fundamental difference between linguistic knowledge and world knowledge in intelligent systems.

Transformer-based language models have shown strong performance on an array of natural language understanding tasks. However, the question of how these models react to implicit meaning has been largely unexplored. We investigate this using the complement coercion phenomenon, which involves sentences like "The student finished the book about sailing" where the action "reading" is implicit. We compare LMs' surprisal estimates at various critical sentence regions in sentences with and without implicit meaning. Effects associated with recovering implicit meaning were found at a critical region other than where sentences minimally differ. We then use follow-up experiments to factor out potential confounds, revealing different perspectives that offer a richer and more accurate picture.

关于人类阅读的研究长期以来一直记录在阅读行为表明特定于任务的效果，但是建立一个通用模型来预测人类在给定任务中将显示什么的通用模型。我们介绍了Neat，这是人类阅读中注意力分配的计算模型，基于人类阅读优化了一项任务中关注经济和成功之间的权衡。我们的模型是使用当代神经网络建模技术实施的，并对注意力分配的分配方式在不同任务中如何变化做出明确的测试预测。我们在一项针对阅读理解任务的两个版本的眼影研究中对此进行了测试，发现我们的模型成功说明了整个任务的阅读行为。因此，我们的工作提供了证据表明，任务效果可以建模为对任务需求的最佳适应。

科学家经常使用观察时间序列数据来研究从气候变化到民间冲突再到大脑活动的复杂自然过程。但是对这些数据的回归分析通常假定简单的动态。深度学习的最新进展使从语音理解到核物理学再到竞争性游戏的复杂过程模型的表现实现了令人震惊的改进。但是深度学习通常不用于科学分析。在这里，我们通过证明可以使用深度学习，不仅可以模仿，而且可以分析复杂的过程，在保留可解释性的同时提供灵活的功能近似。我们的方法 - 连续时间反向逆转回归神经网络（CDRNN） - 放宽标准简化的假设（例如，线性，平稳性和同质性）对于许多自然系统来说是不可信的，并且可能会严重影响数据的解释。我们评估CDRNNS对人类语言处理，这是一个具有复杂连续动态的领域。我们证明了行为和神经影像数据中预测可能性的显着改善，我们表明CDRNN可以在探索性分析中灵活发现新型模式，在确认分析中对可能的混杂性提供强有力的控制，并打开否则就可以使用这些问题来进行研究，这些问题否则就可以使用这些问题来进行研究，而这些问题否则就可以使用这些问题进行研究，而这些问题否则就可以使用这些问题进行研究。观察数据。

我们研究了原则上的程度，原则上，语言图表表示可以补充和改进神经语言建模。通过一个由7种不同的形式主义之一的预磨削变压器和地面真相图组成的集合设置，我们发现，总体而言，语义构成结构对语言建模性能最有用 - 超越句法选区结构以及句法和语义依赖结构。此外，效果取决于语音级别的级别大大变化。总而言之，我们的调查结果指出了神经象征性语言建模的有希望的趋势，并邀请未来的研究量化不同形式主义所制作的设计选择。

The long-distance agreement, evidence for syntactic structure, is increasingly used to assess the syntactic generalization of Neural Language Models. Much work has shown that transformers are capable of high accuracy in varied agreement tasks, but the mechanisms by which the models accomplish this behavior are still not well understood. To better understand transformers' internal working, this work contrasts how they handle two superficially similar but theoretically distinct agreement phenomena: subject-verb and object-past participle agreement in French. Using probing and counterfactual analysis methods, our experiments show that i) the agreement task suffers from several confounders which partially question the conclusions drawn so far and ii) transformers handle subject-verb and object-past participle agreements in a way that is consistent with their modeling in theoretical linguistics.

自然语言处理的机器学习快速进步有可能改变有关人类学习语言的辩论。但是，当前人工学习者和人类的学习环境和偏见以削弱从学习模拟获得的证据的影响的方式分歧。例如，当今最有效的神经语言模型接受了典型儿童可用的语言数据量的大约一千倍。为了增加计算模型的可学习性结果的相关性，我们需要培训模型学习者，而没有比人类具有显着优势的学习者。如果合适的模型成功地获得了一些目标语言知识，则可以提供一个概念证明，即在假设的人类学习方案中可以学习目标。合理的模型学习者将使我们能够进行实验操作，以对学习环境中的变量进行因果推断，并严格测试史密斯风格的贫困声明，主张根据人类对人类的先天语言知识，基于有关可学习性的猜测。由于实用和道德的考虑因素，人类受试者将永远无法实现可比的实验，从而使模型学习者成为必不可少的资源。到目前为止，试图剥夺当前模型的不公平优势，为关键语法行为（例如可接受性判断）获得亚人类结果。但是，在我们可以合理地得出结论，语言学习需要比当前模型拥有更多的特定领域知识，我们必须首先以多模式刺激和多代理互动的形式探索非语言意见，以使学习者更有效地学习学习者来自有限的语言输入。

This paper investigates the ability of artificial neural networks to judge the grammatical acceptability of a sentence, with the goal of testing their linguistic competence. We introduce the Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (CoLA), a set of 10,657 English sentences labeled as grammatical or ungrammatical from published linguistics literature. As baselines, we train several recurrent neural network models on acceptability classification, and find that our models outperform unsupervised models by Lau et al. (2016) on CoLA. Error-analysis on specific grammatical phenomena reveals that both Lau et al.'s models and ours learn systematic generalizations like subject-verb-object order. However, all models we test perform far below human level on a wide range of grammatical constructions.

语言在句法结构上有很大差异。世界上约40％的语言具有主语对象顺序，约40％的语言具有对象 - 对象 - 动词顺序。广泛的工作试图解释跨语言的单词顺序变化。但是，现有的方法无法用单个语言的单词顺序解释频率分布和演变。我们建议，单词顺序的变化反映了平衡依赖性区域和信息局部性的竞争压力的不同方式，当元素在语法上相关或彼此之间有上下文信息时，语言偏爱将它们放在一起。使用来自17个语言家族的80种语言的数据和系统发育建模，我们证明了语言的发展以平衡这些压力，因此单词顺序变化伴随着句法结构的频率分布的变化，这些句法结构的频率分布会说话，以维持整体效率。因此，单词顺序的可变性反映了语言解决这些进化压力的不同方式。我们确定了该关节优化产生的相关特征，尤其是对同一动词共同表达对象和对象的频率。我们的发现表明，跨语言的句法结构和用法共同适应有限的认知资源，以支持有效的沟通。

Transformer-based models have pushed state of the art in many areas of NLP, but our understanding of what is behind their success is still limited. This paper is the first survey of over 150 studies of the popular BERT model. We review the current state of knowledge about how BERT works, what kind of information it learns and how it is represented, common modifications to its training objectives and architecture, the overparameterization issue and approaches to compression. We then outline directions for future research.

We introduce Transformer Grammars (TGs), a novel class of Transformer language models that combine (i) the expressive power, scalability, and strong performance of Transformers and (ii) recursive syntactic compositions, which here are implemented through a special attention mask and deterministic transformation of the linearized tree. We find that TGs outperform various strong baselines on sentence-level language modeling perplexity, as well as on multiple syntax-sensitive language modeling evaluation metrics. Additionally, we find that the recursive syntactic composition bottleneck which represents each sentence as a single vector harms perplexity on document-level language modeling, providing evidence that a different kind of memory mechanism -- one that is independent of composed syntactic representations -- plays an important role in current successful models of long text.

The computational complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer models significantly limits their ability to generalize over long temporal durations. Memory-augmentation, or the explicit storing of past information in external memory for subsequent predictions, has become a constructive avenue for mitigating this limitation. We argue that memory-augmented Transformers can benefit substantially from considering insights from the memory literature in humans. We detail an approach for integrating evidence from the human memory system through the specification of cross-domain linking hypotheses. We then provide an empirical demonstration to evaluate the use of surprisal as a linking hypothesis, and further identify the limitations of this approach to inform future research.

尽管蒙版语言模型具有高度性能，并且被NLP从业人员广泛采用，但它们不能轻易用于自回归语言建模（下一个单词预测和序列概率估计）。我们提出了一种基于LSTM的自回归语言模型，该模型使用融合（例如串联）使用前缀嵌入（来自验证的蒙版语言模型），以获得语言建模的更丰富的上下文表示。我们发现Fusion有助于可靠地降低困惑（16.74 $ \ rightarrow $ 15.80），甚至在从与培训数据的不同领域传输到数据集后，它甚至可以保留。我们还通过将其下一个单词的惊人估计与人类阅读时间相关联，评估了表现最佳的融合模型。与我们的期望相矛盾，尽管整体上的困惑程度有所改善，但相关性仍然与基线模型相同。最后，尽管我们专注于在文本上预先训练的语言模型作为融合的来源，但我们的方法可能会扩展到将表示为固定尺寸矢量表示的任何信息融合到自动回归语言模型中。这些包括例如句子外部信息是为知识库或多模式编码器的表示形式检索的。

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.