Recent Publications

	Modeling rapid language learning by distilling Bayesian priors into artificial neural networks R. Thomas McCoy and Thomas L. Griffiths Nature Communications, 2025 PDF
	A Lie-Algebraic Perspective on Tree-Adjoining Grammars Isabella Senturia, Elizabeth Xiao and Matilde Marcolli Proceedings of Mathematics of Language (MOL), 2025. PDF
	ModeLing: A Novel Dataset for Testing Linguistic Reasoning in Language Models Nathan Chi, Teodor Malchev, Riley Kong, Ryan Chi, Lucas Huang, Ethan Chi, R. McCoy, Dragomir Radev Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT), 2025 PDF
	Meaning Beyond Truth Conditions: Evaluating Discourse Level Understanding via Anaphora Accessibility Xiaomeng Zhu, Zhenghao Zhou, Simon Charlow and Robert Frank Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025. PDF
	Is In-Context Learning a Type of Error-Driven Learning? Evidence from the Inverse Frequency Effect in Structural Priming Zhenghao Zhou, Robert Frank and R. Thomas McCoy Proceedings of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2025. PDF
	Computational Approaches to Syntactic Variation Tim Hunter and Robert Frank The Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Syntax, 2025. PDF
	Embers of autoregression show how large language models are shaped by the problem they are trained to solve R. Thomas McCoy, Shunyu Yao, Dan Friedman, Mathew D. Hardy, and Thomas L. Griffiths Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), 2024 PDF
	Deciphering the Factors Influencing the Efficacy of Chain-of-Thought: Probability, Memorization, and Noisy Reasoning Akshara Prabhakar, Thomas L. Griffiths, and R. Thomas McCoy Findings of EMNLP, 2024 PDF
	Distilling symbolic priors for concept learning into neural networks Ioana Marinescu, R. Thomas McCoy, and Thomas L. Griffiths Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2024 PDF
	LIEDER: Linguistically-Informed Evaluation for Discourse Entity Recognition Xiaomeng Zhu and Robert Frank Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024. PDF
	The antisymmetry of syntactic structure: a view from automorphisms Robert Frank, William Min, Abhisar Mittal and Billy Zhong A Cartesian Dream: A Geometrical Account of Syntax. In honor of Andrea Moro, 2024. PDF
	Brain and grammar: Revealing electrophysiological basic structures with competing statistical models Andrea Cometa, Chiara Battaglini, Fiorenzo Artoni, Matteo Greco, Robert Frank, Claudia Repetto, Franco Bottoni, Stefano F. Cappa, Silvestro Micera, Emiliano Ricciardi and Andrea Moro Cerebral Cortex, 2024. PDF
	Inductive Bias is in the Eye of the Beholder Michael Wilson and Robert Frank Proceedings of the First Workshop on Benchmarking Generalization (GenBench) (EMNLP), 2023. PDF
	NPIs Aren’t Exactly Easy: Variation in Licensing across Large Language Models Deanna DeCarlo, William Palmer, Michael Wilson and Robert Frank Processings of 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP (EMNLP), 2023. PDF
	How Abstract Is Linguistic Generalization in Large Language Models? Experiments with Argument Structure Michael Wilson, Jackson Petty and Robert Frank Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023. PDF
	How poor is the stimulus? Evaluating hierarchical generalization in neural networks trained on child-directed speech Aditya Yedetore, Tal Linzen, Robert Frank and R. Thomas McCoy Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023. PDF
	On the Spectra of Syntactic Structures Isabella Senturia and Robert Frank Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2023. PDF
	Subject-verb Agreement with Seq2Seq Transformers: Bigger Is Better, but Still Not Best Michael A. Wilson, Zhenghao Zhou and Robert Frank Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2023. PDF
	What affects Priming Strength? Simulating Structural Priming Effect with PIPS Zhenghao Zhou and Robert Frank Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2023. PDF
	Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models Aarohi Srivastava et al. Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2023. PDF Code
	False perspectives on human language: Why statistics needs linguistics Matteo Greco, Andrea Cometa, Fiorenzo Artoni, Robert Frank and Andrea Moro Frontiers in Language Sciences 2, 2023. PDF
	Formal Language Recognition by Hard Attention Transformers: Perspectives from Circuit Complexity Yiding Hao, Dana Angluin and Robert Frank Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022. PDF
	Coloring the Blank Slate: Pre-training Imparts a Hierarchical Inductive Bias to Sequence-to-sequence Models Aaron Mueller, Robert Frank, Tal Linzen, Luheng Wang and Sebastian Schuster Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022. PDF Code
	Do Language Models Learn Position-Role Mappings? Jackson Petty, Michael Wilson and Robert Frank Proceedings of BUCLD 46, 2022. PDF
	Variation in mild context-sensitivity: Derivational state and structural monotonicity Robert Frank and Tim Hunter Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 3(2), 2021. PDF
	Structure Here, Bias There: Hierarchical Generalization by Jointly Learning Syntactic Transformations Karl Mulligan, Robert Frank and Tal Linzen Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2021. PDF
	Documentation of Shared Decision Making in the Emergency Department David Chartash, Mona Sharifi, Beth Emerson, Robert Frank, Elizabeth M. Schoenfeld, Jason Tanner, Cynthia Brandt and R. Andrew Taylor Annals of Emergency Medicine 78(5), 2021. PDF
	Comparing Methods of Tree-Construction Across Mildly Context-Sensitive Formalisms Tim Hunter and Robert Frank Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2021. PDF
	Sequence-to-Sequence Networks Learn the Meaning of Reﬂexive Anaphora Robert Frank and Jackson Petty Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference (CRAC), 2020. PDF Code
	Evaluating Attribution Methods using White-Box LSTMs Yiding Hao 3rd Workshop on Blackbox NLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP (EMNLP), 2020. PDF
	Probabilistic Predictions of People Perusing: Evaluating Metrics of Language Model Performance for Psycholinguistic Modeling Yiding Hao, Simon Mendelsohn, Rachel Sterneck, Randi Martinez, and Robert Frank Proceedings of the Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) Workshop (EMNLP), 2020 PDF
	Does syntax need to grow on trees? Sources of hierarchical inductive bias in sequence-to-sequence networks R. Thomas McCoy, Robert Frank, and Tal Linzen Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2020. PDF
	Metrical Grids and Generalized Tier Projection Yiding Hao Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2020. PDF
	The Role of Linguistic Features in Domain Adaptation: TAG Parsing of Questions Aarohi Srivastava, Robert Frank, Sarah Widder and David Chartash Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2020. PDF
	Open Sesame: Getting Inside BERT's Linguistic Knowledge Yongjie Lin, Yi Chern Tan and Robert Frank 2nd Workshop on Blackbox NLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP (ACL), 2019. PDF Code
	Finding Syntactic Representations in Neural Stacks William Merrill, Lenny Khazan, Noah Amsel, Yiding Hao, Simon Mendelsohn and Robert Frank 2nd Workshop on Blackbox NLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP (ACL), 2019. PDF Code
	Sequential Neural Networks as Automata William Merrill Workshop on Deep Learning and Formal Languages: Building Bridges (ACL), 2019. PDF
	Unbounded Stress in Subregular Phonology Yiding Hao and Samuel Andersson 16th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology (ACL), 2019. PDF
	Action-Sensitive Phonological Dependencies Yiding Hao and Justin Bowers 16th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology (ACL), 2019. PDF
	Detecting Syntactic Change Using a Neural Part-of-Speech Tagger William Merrill, Gigi Felice Stark and Robert Frank 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (ACL), 2019. PDF Code
	Syntax-aware Neural Semantic Role Labeling with Supertags Jungo Kasai, Dan Friedman, Robert Frank, Dragomir Radev and Owen Rambow Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), 2019. PDF Code
	Jabberwocky Parsing: Dependency Parsing with Lexical Noise Jungo Kasai and Robert Frank Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2019. PDF Code
	Learnability and Overgeneration in Computational Syntax Yiding Hao Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2019. PDF
	Context-Free Transductions with Neural Stacks Yiding Hao, William Merrill, Dana Angluin, Robert Frank, Noah Amsel, Andrew Benz and Simon Mendelsohn 1st Workshop on Blackbox NLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP (EMNLP), 2018. PDF BibTex Code
	Revisiting the Poverty of the Stimulus: Hierarchical Generalization without a Hierarchical Bias in Recurrent Neural Networks R. Thomas McCoy, Robert Frank, and Tal Linzen Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2018. PDF BibTex
	End-to-End Graph-Based TAG Parsing with Neural Networks Jungo Kasai, Robert Frank, Pauli Xu, William Merrill and Owen Rambow Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), 2018. PDF BibTex Code
	Phonologically Informed Edit Distance Algorithms for Word Alignment with Low-Resource Languages R. Thomas McCoy and Robert Frank Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2018. PDF BibTex
	Using Rhetorical Topics for Automatic Summarization Natalie Schrimpf Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2018. PDF BibTex
	TAG Parsing with Neural Networks and Vector Representations of Supertags Jungo Kasai, Robert Frank, R. Thomas McCoy, Owen Rambow, and Alexis Nasr Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2017. PDF BibTex Code
	Linguistically Rich Vector Representations of Supertags for TAG Parsing Dan Friedman, Jungo Kasai, R. Thomas McCoy, Robert Frank, Owen Rambow and Forrest Davis Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+13), 2017. PDF BibTex
	TAG Parsing Evaluation using Textual Entailments Pauli Xu, Robert Frank, Jungo Kasai and Owen Rambow Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+13), 2017. PDF BibTex
	Harmonic Serialism and Finite-State Optimality Theory Yiding Hao Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Finite State Methods and Natural Language Processing, 2017. PDF BibTex
	Node-based Induction of Tree-Substitution Grammars Rose Sloan Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+12), 2016. PDF BibTex
	Parasitic Gaps and the Heterogeneity of Dependency Formation in STAG Robert Frank and Dennis Ryan Storoshenko Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+12), 2016. PDF BibTex