Concise One-Layer Transformers Can Perform Dictionary Lookup
Anton Hampe, Lena Strobl, Dana Angluin and Robert Frank
PProceedings of the International Conference on Grammatical Inference (ICGI) 2026, TU Delft.
Recent Publications
What Exactly do Children Receive in Language Acquisition? A Case Study on CHILDES with Automated Detection of Filler-Gap Dependencies
Zhenghao Zhou, William Dai, Maya Viswanathan, Simon Charlow, R. Thomas McCoy and Robert Frank
Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), 2026. San Diego.
Compliments to the Complementizer: Indirect Routing of Syntactic Structure in a Transformer Language Model
Lasse van den Berg and Robert Frank
Proceedings of the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2026. San Francisco.
Modeling rapid language learning by distilling Bayesian priors into artificial neural networks
R. Thomas McCoy and Thomas L. Griffiths
Nature Communications, 2025
A Lie-Algebraic Perspective on Tree-Adjoining Grammars
Isabella Senturia, Elizabeth Xiao and Matilde Marcolli
Proceedings of Mathematics of Language (MOL), 2025.
ModeLing: A Novel Dataset for Testing Linguistic Reasoning in Language Models
Nathan Chi, Teodor Malchev, Riley Kong, Ryan Chi, Lucas Huang, Ethan Chi, R. Thomas McCoy, Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT), 2025
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.
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.
Computational Approaches to Syntactic Variation
Tim Hunter and Robert Frank
The Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Syntax, 2025.
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
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
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
LIEDER: Linguistically-Informed Evaluation for Discourse Entity Recognition
Xiaomeng Zhu and Robert Frank
Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the Spectra of Syntactic Structures
Isabella Senturia and Robert Frank
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2023.
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.
What affects Priming Strength? Simulating Structural Priming Effect with PIPS
Zhenghao Zhou and Robert Frank
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2023.
Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models
Aarohi Srivastava et al.
Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2023.
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.
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.
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.
Do Language Models Learn Position-Role Mappings?
Jackson Petty, Michael Wilson and Robert Frank
Proceedings of BUCLD 46, 2022.
Variation in mild context-sensitivity: Derivational state and structural monotonicity
Robert Frank and Tim Hunter
Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 3(2), 2021.
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.
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.
Comparing Methods of Tree-Construction Across Mildly Context-Sensitive Formalisms
Tim Hunter and Robert Frank
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2021.
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.
Evaluating Attribution Methods using White-Box LSTMs
Yiding Hao
3rd Workshop on Blackbox NLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP (EMNLP), 2020.
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
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.
Metrical Grids and Generalized Tier Projection
Yiding Hao
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2020.
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.
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.
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.
Sequential Neural Networks as Automata
William Merrill
Workshop on Deep Learning and Formal Languages: Building Bridges (ACL), 2019.
Unbounded Stress in Subregular Phonology
Yiding Hao and Samuel Andersson
16th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology (ACL), 2019.
Action-Sensitive Phonological Dependencies
Yiding Hao and Justin Bowers
16th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology (ACL), 2019.
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.
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.
Jabberwocky Parsing: Dependency Parsing with Lexical Noise
Jungo Kasai and Robert Frank
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2019.
Learnability and Overgeneration in Computational Syntax
Yiding Hao
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2019.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Using Rhetorical Topics for Automatic Summarization
Natalie Schrimpf
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2018.
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.
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.
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.
Harmonic Serialism and Finite-State Optimality Theory
Yiding Hao
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Finite State Methods and Natural Language Processing, 2017.
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.
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.