{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/generalizations-across-filler-gap","title":"Generalizations across filler-gap dependencies in neural language models","arxiv_id":"2410.18225","date":"2024-10-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Katherine Howitt","Sathvik Nair","Allison Dods","Robert Melvin Hopkins"],"abstract":"Humans develop their grammars by making structural generalizations from finite input. We ask how filler-gap dependencies, which share a structural generalization despite diverse surface forms, might arise from the input. We explicitly control the input to a neural language model (NLM) to uncover whether the model posits a shared representation for filler-gap dependencies. We show that while NLMs do have success differentiating grammatical from ungrammatical filler-gap dependencies, they rely on superficial properties of the input, rather than on a shared generalization. Our work highlights the need for specific linguistic inductive biases to model language acquisition.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18225v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18225v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"generalizations-across-filler-gap","repo_url":"https://github.com/umd-psycholing/lm-syntactic-generalization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-acquisition","task_name":"Language Acquisition"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}