Bella Senturia, Michael Wilson, Herbert Zhou and Bob Frank present at SCiL

Yale Linguistics’ CLAY lab was well represented at the recent meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, held on June 15-17 at the University of Massachusetts.  Herbert Zhou presented a talk entitled What affects Priming Strength? Simulating Structural Priming Effect with PIPS (joint with Bob Frank), in which he explored the ability of a neurosymbolic model of language processing (PIPS) to simulate syntactic priming of double object and prepositional dative structures. Bella Senturia presented a poster On the Spectra of Syntactic Structures (joint with Bob Frank), where she reported on her results on the ways in which the distribution of eigenvalues of a tree-structured graph is revealing of its grammatical properties. Michael Wilson presented a poster on Subject-Verb Agreement with Seq2Seq Transformers: Bigger is Better, but Still not Best (joint with Herbert Zhou and Bob Frank), which demonstrated that the linguistic sophistication of Large Language Models does indeed improve as they increase in size and in amount of training data, but they nonetheless fail to exhibit structure-sensitive aspects of agreement processing.