Structural Supervision Improves Few-Shot Learning and Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Models
Humans can learn structural properties about a word from minimal experience, and deploy their learned syntactic representations uniformly in different grammatical contexts. We assess the ability of modern neural language models to reproduce this behavior in English and evaluate the effect of structural supervision on learning outcomes. First, we assess few-shot learning capabilities by developing controlled experiments that probe models' syntactic nominal number and verbal argument structure generalizations for tokens seen as few as two times during training. Second, we assess invariance properties of learned representation: the ability of a model to transfer syntactic generalizations from a base context (e.g., a simple declarative active-voice sentence) to a transformed context (e.g., an interrogative sentence). We test four models trained on the same dataset: an n-gram baseline, an LSTM, and two LSTM-variants trained with explicit structural supervision (Dyer et al.,2016; Charniak et al., 2016). We find that in most cases, the neural models are able to induce the proper syntactic generalizations after minimal exposure, often from just two examples during training, and that the two structurally supervised models generalize more accurately than the LSTM model. All neural models are able to leverage information learned in base contexts to drive expectations in transformed contexts, indicating that they have learned some invariance properties of syntax.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Few-Shot LearningSentenceMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Strengthening Structural Inductive Biases by Pre-training to Perform Syntactic Transformations
Models need appropriate inductive biases to effectively learn from small amounts of data and generalize systematically outside of the training distribution. While Transformers are highly versatile and powerful, they can …
ChunkingFew-Shot LearningInductive BiasSemantic ParsingControlled Evaluation of Grammatical Knowledge in Mandarin Chinese Language Models
Prior work has shown that structural supervision helps English language models learn generalizations about syntactic phenomena such as subject-verb agreement. However, it remains unclear if such an inductive bias would a…
Inductive BiasAre Structural Concepts Universal in Transformer Language Models? Towards Interpretable Cross-Lingual Generalization
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited considerable cross-lingual generalization abilities, whereby they implicitly transfer knowledge across languages. However, the transfer is not equally successful for all langua…
DecoderIn-Context LearningMeta-LearningTransfer LearningStructural Supervision for Word Alignment and Machine Translation
Syntactic structure has long been argued to be potentially useful for enforcing accurate word alignment and improving generalization performance of machine translation. Unfortunately, existing wisdom demonstrates its sig…
DecoderMachine TranslationMulti-Task LearningTranslation+1A Self-supervised Representation Learning of Sentence Structure for Authorship Attribution
Syntactic structure of sentences in a document substantially informs about its authorial writing style. Sentence representation learning has been widely explored in recent years and it has been shown that it improves the…
Authorship AttributionRepresentation LearningSentenceWord Embeddings