Language Models Learn Rare Phenomena from Less Rare Phenomena: The Case of the Missing AANNs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Language models learn rare syntactic phenomena by generalization vs. memorization, a study finds . aannalysis experiments show that humans learn rare grammatical structures by generalizing from less rare phenomena. |
| Approach: | They iteratively trained transformer language models on a systematically manipulated corpus and evaluated their learning of a rare grammatical phenomenon. |
| Outcome: | The results show that language models learn rare grammatical phenomena by generalization vs. memorization . human-scale corpora are used to train the models and compare their learning to counterfactual corpors . |
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