{"pk":29588,"title":"Do We Need Neural Models to Explain Human Judgments of Acceptability?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptableinstance of their language. Acceptability provides a means ofevaluating whether computational language models are pro-cessing language in a human-like manner. We test the abilityof language models, simple language features, and word em-beddings to predict native speakers’ judgments of acceptabil-ity on English essays written by non-native speakers. We findthat much sentence acceptability variance can be captured by acombination of misspellings, word order, and word similarity(r = 0.494). While predictive neural models fit acceptabilityjudgments well (r = 0.527), we find that a 4-gram model isjust as good (r = 0.528). Thanks to incorporating misspellings,our 4-gram model surpasses both the previous unsupervisedstate-of-the art (r = 0.472), and the average native speaker(r = 0.46), demonstrating that acceptability is well capturedby n-gram statistics and simple language features.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"acceptability judgments; language models; neuralnetworks; word embeddings; statistical models"}],"section":"Poster Session 1","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/74h1d4kt","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Wang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Jing","name_suffix":"","institution":"Beijing International Studies University","department":""},{"first_name":"M. A.","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kelly","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Pennsylvania State University","department":""},{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"","last_name":"Reitter","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Pennsylvania State University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29588/galley/19447/download/"}]}