What kinds of and how much data is necessary for language models to induce grammatical knowledge to judge sentence acceptability? Recent language models still have much room for improvement in their data efficiency compared to humans. This paper investigates whether language models efficiently use indirect data (indirect evidence), from which they infer sentence acceptability. In contrast, humans use indirect evidence efficiently, which is considered one of the inductive biases contributing to efficient language acquisition. To explore this question, we introduce the Wug InDirect Evidence Test (WIDET), a dataset consisting of training instances inserted into the pre-training data and evaluation instances. We inject synthetic instances with newly coined wug words into pretraining data and explore the model's behavior on evaluation data that assesses grammatical acceptability regarding those words. We prepare the injected instances by varying their levels of indirectness and quantity. Our experiments surprisingly show that language models do not induce grammatical knowledge even after repeated exposure to instances with the same structure but differing only in lexical items from evaluation instances in certain language phenomena. Our findings suggest a potential direction for future research: developing models that use latent indirect evidence to induce grammatical knowledge.

Can Language Models Induce Grammatical Knowledge from Indirect Evidence?

Syntactic Language Models (SLMs) can be trained efficiently to reach relatively high performance; however, they have trouble with inference efficiency due to the explicit generation of syntactic structures. In this paper, we propose a new method dubbed tree-planting: instead of explicitly generating syntactic structures, we "plant" trees into attention weights of unidirectional Transformer LMs to implicitly reflect syntactic structures of natural language. Specifically, unidirectional Transformer LMs trained with tree-planting will be called Tree-Planted Transformers (TPT), which inherit the training efficiency from SLMs without changing the inference efficiency of their underlying Transformer LMs. Targeted syntactic evaluations on the SyntaxGym benchmark demonstrated that TPTs, despite the lack of explicit generation of syntactic structures, significantly outperformed not only vanilla Transformer LMs but also various SLMs that generate hundreds of syntactic structures in parallel. This result suggests that TPTs can learn human-like syntactic knowledge as data-efficiently as SLMs while maintaining the modeling space of Transformer LMs unchanged.

Tree-Planted Transformers: Unidirectional Transformer Language Models with Implicit Syntactic Supervision

The imitation of the children's language acquisition process has been explored to make language models (LMs) more efficient.
In particular, errors caused by children's regularization (so-called overregularization, e.g., using wroted for the past tense of write) have been widely studied to reveal the mechanisms of language acquisition. Existing research has analyzed regularization in language acquisition only by modeling word inflection directly, which is unnatural in light of human language acquisition. In this paper, we hypothesize that language models that imitate the errors children make during language acquisition have a learning process more similar to humans. To verify this hypothesis, we analyzed the learning curve and error preferences of verb inflections in small-scale LMs using acceptability judgments. We analyze the differences in results by model architecture, data, and tokenization. Our model shows child-like U-shaped learning curves clearly for certain verbs, but the preferences for types of overgeneralization did not fully match the observations in children.

Modeling Overregularization in Children with Small Language Models

The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics.
We study word-order universals through a computational simulation with language models (LMs).
Our experiments show that typologically-typical word orders tend to have lower perplexity estimated by LMs with cognitively plausible biases: syntactic biases, specific parsing strategies, and memory limitations. 
This suggests that the interplay of cognitive biases and predictability (perplexity) can explain many aspects of word-order universals.
It also showcases the advantage of cognitively-motivated LMs, typically employed in cognitive modeling, in the simulation of language universals.

Emergent Word Order Universals from Cognitively-Motivated Language Models

Instruction tuning aligns the response of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite such efforts in human--LLM alignment, we find that instruction tuning does not always make LLMs human-like from a cognitive modeling perspective. More specifically, next-word probabilities estimated by instruction-tuned LLMs are often worse at simulating human reading behavior than those estimated by base LLMs. In addition, we explore prompting methodologies for simulating human reading behavior with LLMs. Our results show that prompts reflecting a particular linguistic hypothesis improve psychometric predictive power, but are still inferior to small base models. These findings highlight that recent advancements in LLMs, i.e., instruction tuning and prompting, do not offer better estimates than direct probability measurements from base LLMs in cognitive modeling. In other words, pure next-word probability remains a strong predictor for human reading behavior, even in the age of LLMs.

Psychometric Predictive Power of Large Language Models

In this paper, we introduce JBLiMP (Japanese Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs), a novel dataset for targeted syntactic evaluations of language models in Japanese. JBLiMP consists of 331 minimal pairs, which are created based on acceptability judgments extracted from journal articles in theoretical linguistics. These minimal pairs are grouped into 11 categories, each covering a different linguistic phenomenon. JBLiMP is unique in that it successfully combines two important features independently observed in existing datasets: (i) coverage of complex linguistic phenomena (cf. CoLA) and (ii) presentation of sentences as minimal pairs (cf. BLiMP). In addition, JBLiMP is the first dataset for targeted syntactic evaluations of language models in Japanese, thus allowing the comparison of syntactic knowledge of language models across different languages. We then evaluate the syntactic knowledge of several language models on JBLiMP: GPT-2, LSTM, and n-gram language models. The results demonstrated that all the architectures achieved comparable overall accuracies around 75%. Error analyses by linguistic phenomenon further revealed that these language models successfully captured local dependencies like nominal structures, but not long-distance dependencies such as verbal agreement and binding.

JBLiMP: Japanese Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs

In this paper, we explore how much syntactic supervision is "good enough" to make language models (LMs) more human-like. Specifically, we propose the new method called syntactic ablation, where syntactic LMs, namely Recurrent Neural Network Grammars (RNNGs), are gradually ablated from full syntactic supervision to zero syntactic supervision (≈ unidirectional LSTM) by preserving NP, VP, PP, SBAR nonterminal symbols and the combinations thereof. The 17 ablated grammars are then evaluated via targeted syntactic evaluation on the SyntaxGym benchmark. The results of our syntactic ablation demonstrated that (i) the RNNG with zero syntactic supervision underperformed the RNNGs with some syntactic supervision, (ii) the RNNG with full syntactic supervision underperformed the RNNGs with less syntactic supervision, and (iii) the RNNG with mild syntactic supervision achieved the best performance comparable to the state-of-the-art GPT-2-XL. Those results may suggest that the "good enough" approach to language processing seems to make LMs more human-like.

How Much Syntactic Supervision is "Good Enough"?

Language models (LMs) have been used in cognitive modeling as well as engineering studies---they compute information-theoretic complexity metrics that simulate humans' cognitive load during reading.
This study highlights a limitation of modern neural LMs as the model of choice for this purpose: there is a discrepancy between their context access capacities and that of humans.
Our results showed that constraining the LMs' context access improved their simulation of human reading behavior.
We also showed that LM-human gaps in context access were associated with specific syntactic constructions; incorporating syntactic biases into LMs' context access might enhance their cognitive plausibility.

Context Limitations Make Neural Language Models More Human-Like

As a language model that integrates traditional symbolic operations and flexible neural representations, recurrent neural network grammars (RNNGs) have attracted great attention from both scientific and engineering perspectives. However, RNNGs are known to be harder to scale due to the difficulty of batched training. In this paper, we propose effective batching for RNNGs, where every operation is computed in parallel with tensors across multiple sentences. Our PyTorch implementation effectively employs a GPU and achieves x6 speedup compared to the existing C++ DyNet implementation with model-independent auto-batching. Moreover, our batched RNNG also accelerates inference and achieves x20-150 speedup for beam search depending on beam sizes. Finally, we evaluate syntactic generalization performance of the scaled RNNG against the LSTM baseline, based on the large training data of 100M tokens from English Wikipedia and the broad-coverage targeted syntactic evaluation benchmark.\footnote{Our RNNG implementation is available at https://github.com/aistairc/rnng-pytorch/.}

Effective Batching for Recurrent Neural Network Grammars

In computational psycholinguistics, various language models have been evaluated against human reading behavior (e.g., eye movement) to build human-like computational models. However, most previous efforts have focused almost exclusively on English, despite the recent trend towards linguistic universal within the general community. In order to fill the gap, this paper investigates whether the established results in computational psycholinguistics can be generalized across languages. Specifically, we re-examine an established generalization ---\textit{the lower perplexity a language model has, the more human-like the language model is}--- in Japanese with typologically different structures from English. Our experiments demonstrate that this established generalization exhibits a surprising lack of universality; namely, lower perplexity is not always human-like. Moreover, this discrepancy between English and Japanese is further explored from the perspective of (non-)uniform information density. Overall, our results suggest that a cross-lingual evaluation will be necessary to construct human-like computational models.

Lower Perplexity is Not Always Human-Like

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 grammatical phenomena implied that the composition function allowed syntactic features, but not semantic features, to percolate into subtree representations.

Composition, Attention, or Both?

Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

technical paper

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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Findings In-Person Poster Session 4

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

This poster session includes Main Conference posters, TACL and Demos.

In-Person Poster Session 4

This poster session includes Findings posters and Demos from the following areas: 
Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics • Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP • Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics • Machine Learning for NLP • Machine Translation • Multilinguality and Language Diversity • Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation • Question Answering • Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining • Summarization

In-Person Poster Session 7

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Please feel free to view the Findings papers at your convenience. You are welcome to leave your comment or a question in the Chat box.

Findings

findings / work in progress

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

**Topics:** Commonsense Reasoning 
Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics 
Dialogue and Interactive Systems 
Discourse and Pragmatics 
Efficient Methods for NLP 
Information Extraction 
Information Retrieval and Text Mining 
Interpretability, Interactivity and Analysis of Models for NLP 
Language Modeling and Analysis of Language Models 
Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics 
Machine Translation 
Multilinguality 
NLP Applications 
NLP Applications (CL) 
NLP Applications / Other (CL)

Poster Session 7

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/a3db7a768409f05192210d98601edb25.png)](https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/)

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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Findings Papers - Syntax: Tagging, Chunking, and Parsing

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

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**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

Registration is now open

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Yohei Oseki

11

18

Presentations

Can Language Models Induce Grammatical Knowledge from Indirect Evidence?

Tree-Planted Transformers: Unidirectional Transformer Language Models with Implicit Syntactic Supervision

Modeling Overregularization in Children with Small Language Models

Emergent Word Order Universals from Cognitively-Motivated Language Models

Psychometric Predictive Power of Large Language Models

JBLiMP: Japanese Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs

How Much Syntactic Supervision is "Good Enough"?

Context Limitations Make Neural Language Models More Human-Like

Effective Batching for Recurrent Neural Network Grammars

Lower Perplexity is Not Always Human-Like

Composition, Attention, or Both?

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