Papers by Jasper Jian
Humans and transformer LMs: Abstraction drives language learning (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | lexical semantic and syntactic categories emerge using novel divergence-based metrics . |
| Approach: | They compare transformer-based language model's linguistic categories learning to exemplar-based accounts of human language acquisition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used as an existence proof for human language acquisition. |
Syntactic Substitutability as Unsupervised Dependency Syntax (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Syntax is a latent hierarchical structure which underpins the robust and compositional nature of human language. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to induce syntactic dependencies theory-agnostically by substituting words from the same category for words at either end of a dependency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 79.5% recall on long-distance subject-verb agreement constructions compared to 8.9% using a previous method. |
Mechanisms vs. Outcomes: Probing for Syntax Fails to Explain Performance on Targeted Syntactic Evaluations (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not evaluated whether probing accuracy predicts syntactic outcomes. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 32 open-weight transformer models and find that probing fails to predict outcomes of targeted syntax evaluations across English linguistic phenomena. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model does not predict syntactic outcomes on English linguistic phenomena. |