Kate McCurdy, Jacob Hoover Vigly, Thomas Hikaru Clark, Karolina Stańczak, Yahya Emara, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Alexander K. Lew, Ryan Cotterell 等 9 位作者
Second language learners benefit from exposure to level-appropriate grammar in interactive language use. While prompted frontier language models can usually produce target grammar structures, less resource-intensive models that can be run on device often fail in this task. We use sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) to steer dialogue turn generation in small lan- language models toward target grammar constructions from an expert-developed pedagogical resource. With a minimal set of hand-coded potential functions, SMC achieves near-perfect coverage of target grammar, enabling small models to outperform state-of-the-art results from models 140 times larger. We also use code synthesis with frontier models to generate new potentials, showing that our method scales to hundreds of target grammar skills with no need for additional training or supervised data.
Samuel Kiegeland ETHZ - ETH Zurich, Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson University of Copenhagen, Tim Vieira Department of Computer Science, ETHZ - ETH Zurich, Ryan Cotterell
Surprisal theory links human processing effort to the predictability of an upcoming linguistic unit, but empirical work often leaves the notion of a unit underspecified. In practice, experimental stimuli are segmented into linguistically motivated units (e.g., words), while pretrained language models assign probability mass to a fixed token alphabet that typically does not align with those units. As a result, surprisal-based predictors depend implicitly on ad hoc procedures that conflate two distinct modeling choices: the definition of the unit of analysis and the choice of regions of interest over which predictions are evaluated. In this paper, we disentangle these choices and give a unified framework for reasoning about surprisal over arbitrary unit inventories. We argue that surprisal-based analyses should make these choices explicit and treat tokenization as an implementation detail rather than a scientific primitive.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the next token. One common variant of attention is called local attention, which restricts each token to aggregating information from a bounded window of predecessors, reducing the quadratic cost of global attention to linear. Although this restriction is usually motivated by efficiency, it has also been found to improve model quality, a phenomenon that has so far lacked a satisfactory explanation. We provide a formal account of this phenomenon in terms of recognizer expressivity. It has been shown that fixed-precision transformers with global attention correspond to a fragment of linear temporal logic containing a single past operator. We additionally prove that adding local attention introduces a second temporal operator, strictly enlarging the class of recognizable regular languages. Moreover, global and local attention are expressively complementary: neither subsumes the other, and combining them yields the richest fragment. Experiments on formal language recognition and natural language modeling corroborate the theory, showing that hybrid global–local transformers outperform their global-only counterparts.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Eleftheria Tsipidi ETHZ - ETH Zurich, Samuel Kiegeland ETHZ - ETH Zurich, Francesco Ignazio Re Department of Computer Science, ETHZ - ETH Zurich, Tianyang Xu Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, Mario Giulianelli University College London, University of London, Karolina Stanczak ETHZ - ETH Zurich and McGill University, McGill University, Ryan Cotterell
Probing has shown that language model representations encode rich linguistic information, but it remains unclear whether they also capture cognitive signals about human processing. In this work, we probe language model representations for human reading times. Using regularized linear regression on two eye-tracking corpora spanning five languages (English, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and Turkish), we compare the representations from every model layer against scalar predictors—surprisal, information value, and logit-lens surprisal. We find that the representations from early layers outperform surprisal in predicting early-pass measures such as first fixation and gaze duration. The concentration of predictive power in the early layers suggests that human-like processing signatures are captured by low-level structural or lexical representations, pointing to a functional alignment between model depth and the temporal stages of human reading. In contrast, for late-pass measures such as total reading time, scalar surprisal remains superior, despite its being a much more compressed representation. We also observe performance gains when using both surprisal and early-layer representations. Overall, we find that the best-performing predictor varies strongly depending on the language and eye-tracking measure.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Clemente Pasti ETHZ - ETH Zurich, Andreas Opedal Department of Computer Science, ETHZ - ETH Zurich, Timothy J. O’Donnell McGill University, Mila and McGill University, Ryan Cotterell, Tim Vieira Department of Computer Science, ETHZ - ETH Zurich
Prefix parsing asks whether an input prefix can be extended to a complete string generated by a given grammar. In the weighted setting, it also provides prefix probabilities, which are central to context-free language modeling, psycholinguistic analysis, and syntactically constrained generation from large language models. We introduce the prefix grammar transformation, an efficient reduction of prefix parsing to ordinary parsing. Given a grammar, our method constructs another grammar that generates exactly the prefixes of its original strings. Prefix parsing is then solved by applying any ordinary parsing algorithm on the transformed grammar without modification. The reduction is both elegant and practical: the transformed grammar is only a small factor larger than the input, and any optimized implementation can be used directly, eliminating the need for bespoke prefix-parsing algorithms. We also present a strategy—based on algorithmic differentiation—for computing the next-token weight vector, i.e., the prefix weights of all one-token extensions, enabling efficient prediction of the next token. Together, these contributions yield a simple, general, and efficient framework for prefix parsing.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表