Papers by Taiga Someya
Language Acquisition Device in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are less data-efficient than humans, and pre-pretraining on synthetic languages has been proposed to close this gap. |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-pretrain on MP-STRUCT, a formal language whose strings encode hierarchical composition, feature-based dependencies, and long-distance displacement via MERGE, AGREE, and MOVE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms k-Shuffle Dyck despite not being definable in C-RASP despite being hierarchically expressive and circuit-theoretically learnable . |
Targeted Syntactic Evaluation on the Chomsky Hierarchy (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel evaluation paradigm for targeted syntactic evaluations is proposed . we create formal languages that abstract four syntaktic phenomena in natural languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation paradigm for Targeted Syntactic Evaluations . they create formal languages that abstract syntactical phenomena in natural languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation paradigm evaluates language models on language modeling tasks . it shows that they can capture the structural patterns of the (Adj)n NP type formal language . |
An Existence Proof for Neural Language Models That Can Explain Garden-Path Effects via Surprisal (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Surprisal theory claims that difficulty of sentences increases linearly with surprise . a neural LM that can explain garden-path effects cannot be built, says a new study . |
| Approach: | They propose to fine-tune neural LMs to better align surprisal-based reading-time estimates with actual reading times. |
| Outcome: | a new study shows that fine-tuned neural LMs do not overfit on held-out items . the results show that they improve predictive power for human reading times . |
Information Locality as an Inductive Bias for Neural Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Inductive biases are inherent in every machine learning system, argues a new study . m-local entropy measures how well symbols disambiguate the next symbol . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures local uncertainty of a language by quantifying how effectively preceding symbols disambiguate the next symbol. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the local uncertainty of a language by quantifying how effectively symbols disambiguate the next symbol. |
Tree-Planted Transformers: Unidirectional Transformer Language Models with Implicit Syntactic Supervision (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Syntactic Language Models (SLMs) have difficulty with inference efficiency due to explicit generation of syntactical structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to "plant" trees into attention weights of unidirectional Transformer LMs to implicitly reflect syntactic structures of natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms SLMs on the SyntaxGym benchmark. |
If Attention Serves as a Cognitive Model of Human Memory Retrieval, What is the Plausible Memory Representation? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work in computational psycholinguistics has revealed intriguing parallels between attention mechanisms and human memory retrieval, focusing primarily on vanilla Transformers that operate on token-level representations. |
| Approach: | They propose that the attention mechanism of Transformer Grammar (TG) can serve as a cognitive model of human memory retrieval using Normalized Attention Entropy (NAE) they propose that TG's attention can implement a human memory-retrieval theory known as cue-based retrieval . |
| Outcome: | The attention mechanism of Transformer Grammar (TG) achieves superior predictive power for self-paced reading times compared to vanilla Transformer’s, with further analyses revealing independent contributions from both models. |
JCoLA: Japanese Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural language models have exhibited outstanding performance in downstream tasks, yet there is limited understanding regarding the extent of their internalization of syntactic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They introduce a dataset that analyzes sentences annotated with binary acceptability judgments from linguistic textbooks and handbooks and splits them into in-domain and out-of-domain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets show that models can surpass human performance for in-domain data while no models can exceed human performance on out-of-domain datasets. |
JBLiMP: Japanese Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we compare syntactic knowledge of language models across different languages. |
| Approach: | They introduce a dataset for targeted syntactic evaluations of language models in Japanese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset compares the syntactic knowledge of language models across languages. |