Article Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "pk": 29716,
    "title": "Can neural networks acquire a structural bias from raw linguistic data?",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "We evaluate whether BERT, a widely used neural network forsentence processing, acquires an inductive bias towards form-ing structural generalizations through pretraining on raw data.We conduct four experiments testing its preference for struc-tural vs. linear generalizations in different structure-dependentphenomena. We find that BERT makes a structural general-ization in 3 out of 4 empirical domains—subject-auxiliary in-version, reflexive binding, and verb tense detection in embed-ded clauses—but makes a linear generalization when tested onNPI licensing. We argue that these results are the strongest ev-idence so far from artificial learners supporting the propositionthat a structural bias can be acquired from raw data. If this con-clusion is correct, it is tentative evidence that some linguisticuniversals can be acquired by learners without innate biases.However, the precise implications for human language acqui-sition are unclear, as humans learn language from significantlyless data than BERT.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "inductive bias; structure dependence; BERT;learnability of grammar; poverty of the stimulus; neural net-work; self-supervised learning"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Poster Session 1",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rx3h34n",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Alex",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Warstadt",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "New York University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Samuel",
            "middle_name": "R.",
            "last_name": "Bowman",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "New York 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/29716/galley/19573/download/"
        }
    ]
}