{"pk":28078,"title":"Revisiting the poverty of the stimulus: hierarchical generalization without a hierarchical bias in recurrent neural networks","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Syntactic rules in natural language typically need to make ref-erence to hierarchical sentence structure. However, the simpleexamples that language learners receive are often equally com-patible with linear rules. Children consistently ignore theselinear explanations and settle instead on the correct hierarchi-cal one. This fact has motivated the proposal that the learner’shypothesis space is constrained to include only hierarchicalrules. We examine this proposal using recurrent neural net-works (RNNs), which are not constrained in such a way. Wesimulate the acquisition of question formation, a hierarchicaltransformation, in a fragment of English. We find that someRNN architectures tend to learn the hierarchical rule, suggest-ing that hierarchical cues within the language, combined withthe implicit architectural biases inherent in certain RNNs, maybe sufficient to induce hierarchical generalizations. The like-lihood of acquiring the hierarchical generalization increasedwhen the language included an additional cue to hierarchy inthe form of subject-verb agreement, underscoring the role ofcues to hierarchy in the learner’s input.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"learning bias; poverty of the stimulus; recurrentneural networks"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/12w6n3xn","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Thomas","middle_name":"R","last_name":"McCoy","name_suffix":"","institution":"John Hopkins","department":""},{"first_name":"Robert","middle_name":"","last_name":"Frank","name_suffix":"","institution":"Yale","department":""},{"first_name":"Tal","middle_name":"","last_name":"Linzen","name_suffix":"","institution":"John Hopkins","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28078/galley/17717/download/"}]}