A Discerning Several Thousand Judgments: GPT-3 Rates the Article + Adjective + Numeral + Noun Construction

Kyle Mahowald


Abstract
Knowledge of syntax includes knowledge of rare, idiosyncratic constructions. LLMs must overcome frequency biases in order to master such constructions. In this study, I prompt GPT-3 to give acceptability judgments on the English-language Article + Adjective + Numeral + Noun construction (e.g., “a lovely five days”). I validate the prompt using the CoLA corpus of acceptability judgments and then zero in on the AANN construction. I compare GPT- 3’s judgments to crowdsourced human judgments on a subset of sentences. GPT-3’s judgments are broadly similar to human judgments and generally align with proposed constraints in the literature but, in some cases, GPT-3’s judgments and human judgments diverge from the literature and from each other.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
265–273
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.20
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.20
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kyle Mahowald. 2023. A Discerning Several Thousand Judgments: GPT-3 Rates the Article + Adjective + Numeral + Noun Construction. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 265–273, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Discerning Several Thousand Judgments: GPT-3 Rates the Article + Adjective + Numeral + Noun Construction (Mahowald, EACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.20.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.20.mp4