{"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/language-models-learn-rare-phenomena-from","title":"Language Models Learn Rare Phenomena from Less Rare Phenomena: The Case of the Missing AANNs","arxiv_id":"2403.19827","date":"2024-03-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kanishka Misra","Kyle Mahowald"],"abstract":"Language models learn rare syntactic phenomena, but the extent to which this is attributable to generalization vs. memorization is a major open question. To that end, we iteratively trained transformer language models on systematically manipulated corpora which were human-scale in size, and then evaluated their learning of a rare grammatical phenomenon: the English Article+Adjective+Numeral+Noun (AANN) construction (``a beautiful five days''). We compared how well this construction was learned on the default corpus relative to a counterfactual corpus in which AANN sentences were removed. We found that AANNs were still learned better than systematically perturbed variants of the construction. Using additional counterfactual corpora, we suggest that this learning occurs through generalization from related constructions (e.g., ``a few days''). An additional experiment showed that this learning is enhanced when there is more variability in the input. Taken together, our results provide an existence proof that LMs can learn rare grammatical phenomena by generalization from less rare phenomena. Data and code: https://github.com/kanishkamisra/aannalysis.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19827v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.19827v2.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":[],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"memorization","task_name":"Memorization"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"counterfactual"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2403.19827","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2403.19827"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/kanishkamisra/aannalysis","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"ran":2},"by_repo_kind":{"found_in_text":{"samples":2,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"a3a3f6ce577d2d24","entry":"count_tokens","repo":"kanishkamisra/aannalysis","repo_kind":"found_in_text","path":"src/counterfactual_constructions.py","file_url":"https://github.com/kanishkamisra/aannalysis/blob/HEAD/src/counterfactual_constructions.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"a3a3f6ce577d2d24"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"a099d64196f3f6c9","entry":"get_children_flatten","repo":"kanishkamisra/aannalysis","repo_kind":"found_in_text","path":"src/afewdays.py","file_url":"https://github.com/kanishkamisra/aannalysis/blob/HEAD/src/afewdays.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"a099d64196f3f6c9"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}