arXiv Computation and Language

Compositional Generalization via Structural Identification in a Category-Theoretic Framework

The paper proposes a new way to evaluate compositional generalization by examining which structural or lexical identifications allow held‑out COGS examples to be considered admissible based on training data. Sentences are modeled as functors from syntactic addresses to lexical tokens, and selective collapses induce Kan extensions that propagate observed associations. Across 21 COGS generalization types, admissibility follows distinct identification profiles, while residual failures highlight unsupported structural templates, providing data‑side diagnoses of what the training corpus licenses without training a predictive model.

arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Type Diversity Enables Transformers to Generalise Compositionally

The paper investigates why Transformers struggle more with structural than lexical compositional generalisation. It argues that this disparity stems from low structural type diversity rather than an inherent limitation of Transformers. By creating linguistically diverse variants of the COGS and SLOG datasets, the authors show that type diversity correlates equally with generalisation in both lexical and structural cases, challenging previous explanations of the difficulty.

By Anssi Moisio, Mathias Creutz, Mikko Kurimo
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

Exposure is Optional: Learning Unlike Coordination in Language Models

Coordination, a fundamental linguistic structure, remains a subject of intense debate, and its exact nature continues to elude theoretical linguistics. A common view holds that only same-category constituents can be conjoined, which has been challenged by the many grammatical unlike coordinations found in natural language.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

The Impact of Synthetic Data Augmentation on Discourse-Pragmatic Function Classification

The study examines how the geometric placement of synthetic data affects discourse-pragmatic function classification. Using 410 annotated instances of the word "look" and synthetic examples generated by Llama 3.1, the authors partitioned the synthetic data by cosine distance in RoBERTa space and compared six training conditions. While all augmentation conditions improved macro‑F and accuracy over a real‑only baseline, the nearest synthetic examples (NEAR) yielded the largest macro‑F gain (0.113) and a distance‑balanced mix achieved the highest accuracy (0.748), though none improved AUC.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

The Impact of Synthetic Data Augmentation on Discourse-Pragmatic Function Classification

The study examines how the geometric placement of synthetic data affects discourse‑pragmatic function classification. Using 410 annotated instances of the word "look" from the British National Corpus, synthetic examples were generated with Llama 3.1 and grouped by cosine distance from real data in RoBERTa space. Six training conditions were compared, showing that examples close to real data (NEAR) yield the largest macro‑F gain, while a distance‑balanced mix gives the highest accuracy, yet none improve AUC.

By Sara Sorahi, Kevin Tang, Reza Kazemian