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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35580 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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However, Zhang et al. 2020 show that actually most of this learning is not about syntax. Models that are trained on 10 − 100 million words “reliably encode most syntactic and semantic features” of language, and the remainder of training seems to target other skills (like knowledge of the world).

Interesting. If it holds up, I'm updating significantly against universal grammar. (I still see some grounds to be skeptical: in my experience at least the LLaMas often make conspicuous grammatical mistakes in languages such as German which were represented in excess of that in their training set, and in my limited experience looking at the grammatical evaluation sets in that battery they tend to suffer from a certain American laconicity that may make them insufficient for evaluating understanding of recursive structure)

new paper: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language:

I'll probably come back with more commentary once I had time to read the whole of it, but I do have an issue that might turn out to be a nitpick or a portent of a more general methodological criticism right on the second page:

The answer is outside of the training set. In fact, after “Once upon a time, in a far-off land, there lived a colony of ants,” a Google search returns no matching strings on the entire internet.

This line of argumentation seems wrong in a way that suggests sloppiness about something that should be a core concern of such a paper. LLMs, among being many other things, are lossy compression algorithms with respect to their training set. An output not being an exact reproduction therefore does not imply that it is not a reproduction at all, any more than "I searched the internet for images with the same first 20 pixels and found no matches" implies that a given JPEG is an original creation.

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