July 08, 2023
During language acquisition, children follow a typical sequence of learning stages, whereby they first learn to categorize phonemes before they develop their lexicon and eventually master increasingly complex syntactic structures. However, the computational principles that lead to this learning trajectory remain largely unknown. To investigate this, we here compare the learning trajectories of deep language models to those of children. Specifically, we test whether, during its training, GPT-2 exhibits stages of language acquisition comparable to those observed in children aged between 18 months and 6 years. For this, we train 48 GPT2 models from scratch and evaluate their syntactic and semantic abilities at each training step, using 96 probes curated from the BLiMP, Zorro and BIG-Bench benchmarks. We then compare these evaluations with the behavior of 54 children during language production. Our analyses reveal three main findings. First, similarly to children, the language models tend to learn linguistic skills in a systematic order. Second, this learning scheme is parallel: the language tasks that are learned last improve from the very first training steps. Third, some – but not all – learning stages are shared between children and these language models. Overall, these results shed new light on the principles of language acquisition, and highlight important divergences in how humans and modern algorithms learn to process natural language.
Written by
Linnea Evanson
Yair Lakretz
Jean Remi King
Publisher
ACL
September 05, 2024
Chunting Zhou, Lili Yu, Arun Babu, Kushal Tirumala, Michihiro Yasunaga, Leonid Shamis, Jacob Kahn, Luke Zettlemoyer, Omer Levy, Xuezhe Ma
September 05, 2024
August 20, 2024
Ashish Shenoy, Yichao Lu, Srihari Jayakumar, Debojeet Chatterjee, Mohsen Moslehpour, Pierce Chuang, Abhay Harpale, Vikas Bhardwaj, Di Xu (SWE), Shicong Zhao, Ankit Ramchandani, Luna Dong, Anuj Kumar
August 20, 2024
August 11, 2024
Igor Tufanov, Karen Hambardzumyan, Javier Ferrando, Lena Voita
August 11, 2024
August 11, 2024
Marta R. Costa-jussa, Mariano Coria Meglioli, Pierre Andrews, David Dale, Kae Hansanti, Elahe Kalbassi, Christophe Ropers, Carleigh Wood
August 11, 2024
Foundational models
Latest news
Foundational models