Michael Hahn


2024

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Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP
Michael Hahn | Alexey Sorokin | Ritesh Kumar | Andreas Shcherbakov | Yulia Otmakhova | Jinrui Yang | Oleg Serikov | Priya Rani | Edoardo M. Ponti | Saliha Muradoğlu | Rena Gao | Ryan Cotterell | Ekaterina Vylomova
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

2023

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A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order
Thomas Hikaru Clark | Clara Meister | Tiago Pimentel | Michael Hahn | Ryan Cotterell | Richard Futrell | Roger Levy
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11

While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility, their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort to identify these pressures, prior work has compared real and counterfactual word orders. Yet one functional pressure has been overlooked in such investigations: The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that information should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask whether a pressure for UID may have influenced word order patterns cross-linguistically. To this end, we use computational models to test whether real orders lead to greater information uniformity than counterfactual orders. In our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, we find that: (i) among SVO languages, real word orders consistently have greater uniformity than reverse word orders, and (ii) only linguistically implausible counterfactual orders consistently exceed the uniformity of real orders. These findings are compatible with a pressure for information uniformity in the development and usage of natural languages.1

2021

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An Information-Theoretic Characterization of Morphological Fusion
Neil Rathi | Michael Hahn | Richard Futrell
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Linguistic typology generally divides synthetic languages into groups based on their morphological fusion. However, this measure has long been thought to be best considered a matter of degree. We present an information-theoretic measure, called informational fusion, to quantify the degree of fusion of a given set of morphological features in a surface form, which naturally provides such a graded scale. Informational fusion is able to encapsulate not only concatenative, but also nonconcatenative morphological systems (e.g. Arabic), abstracting away from any notions of morpheme segmentation. We then show, on a sample of twenty-one languages, that our measure recapitulates the usual linguistic classifications for concatenative systems, and provides new measures for nonconcatenative ones. We also evaluate the long-standing hypotheses that more frequent forms are more fusional, and that paradigm size anticorrelates with degree of fusion. We do not find evidence for the idea that languages have characteristic levels of fusion; rather, the degree of fusion varies across part-of-speech within languages.

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Sensitivity as a Complexity Measure for Sequence Classification Tasks
Michael Hahn | Dan Jurafsky | Richard Futrell
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

We introduce a theoretical framework for understanding and predicting the complexity of sequence classification tasks, using a novel extension of the theory of Boolean function sensitivity. The sensitivity of a function, given a distribution over input sequences, quantifies the number of disjoint subsets of the input sequence that can each be individually changed to change the output. We argue that standard sequence classification methods are biased towards learning low-sensitivity functions, so that tasks requiring high sensitivity are more difficult. To that end, we show analytically that simple lexical classifiers can only express functions of bounded sensitivity, and we show empirically that low-sensitivity functions are easier to learn for LSTMs. We then estimate sensitivity on 15 NLP tasks, finding that sensitivity is higher on challenging tasks collected in GLUE than on simple text classification tasks, and that sensitivity predicts the performance both of simple lexical classifiers and of vanilla BiLSTMs without pretrained contextualized embeddings. Within a task, sensitivity predicts which inputs are hard for such simple models. Our results suggest that the success of massively pretrained contextual representations stems in part because they provide representations from which information can be extracted by low-sensitivity decoders.

2020

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Crosslinguistic Word Orders Enable an Efficient Tradeoff of Memory and Surprisal
Michael Hahn | Richard Futrell
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2020

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RNNs can generate bounded hierarchical languages with optimal memory
John Hewitt | Michael Hahn | Surya Ganguli | Percy Liang | Christopher D. Manning
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Recurrent neural networks empirically generate natural language with high syntactic fidelity. However, their success is not well-understood theoretically. We provide theoretical insight into this success, proving in a finite-precision setting that RNNs can efficiently generate bounded hierarchical languages that reflect the scaffolding of natural language syntax. We introduce Dyck-(k,m), the language of well-nested brackets (of k types) and m-bounded nesting depth, reflecting the bounded memory needs and long-distance dependencies of natural language syntax. The best known results use O(km2) memory (hidden units) to generate these languages. We prove that an RNN with O(m log k) hidden units suffices, an exponential reduction in memory, by an explicit construction. Finally, we show that no algorithm, even with unbounded computation, can suffice with o(m log k) hidden units.

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Theoretical Limitations of Self-Attention in Neural Sequence Models
Michael Hahn
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 8

Transformers are emerging as the new workhorse of NLP, showing great success across tasks. Unlike LSTMs, transformers process input sequences entirely through self-attention. Previous work has suggested that the computational capabilities of self-attention to process hierarchical structures are limited. In this work, we mathematically investigate the computational power of self-attention to model formal languages. Across both soft and hard attention, we show strong theoretical limitations of the computational abilities of self-attention, finding that it cannot model periodic finite-state languages, nor hierarchical structure, unless the number of layers or heads increases with input length. These limitations seem surprising given the practical success of self-attention and the prominent role assigned to hierarchical structure in linguistics, suggesting that natural language can be approximated well with models that are too weak for the formal languages typically assumed in theoretical linguistics.

2019

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Tabula Nearly Rasa: Probing the Linguistic Knowledge of Character-level Neural Language Models Trained on Unsegmented Text
Michael Hahn | Marco Baroni
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have reached striking performance in many natural language processing tasks. This has renewed interest in whether these generic sequence processing devices are inducing genuine linguistic knowledge. Nearly all current analytical studies, however, initialize the RNNs with a vocabulary of known words, and feed them tokenized input during training. We present a multi-lingual study of the linguistic knowledge encoded in RNNs trained as character-level language models, on input data with word boundaries removed. These networks face a tougher and more cognitively realistic task, having to discover any useful linguistic unit from scratch based on input statistics. The results show that our “near tabula rasa” RNNs are mostly able to solve morphological, syntactic and semantic tasks that intuitively presuppose word-level knowledge, and indeed they learned, to some extent, to track word boundaries. Our study opens the door to speculations about the necessity of an explicit, rigid word lexicon in language learning and usage.

2016

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Modeling Human Reading with Neural Attention
Michael Hahn | Frank Keller
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2013

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CoMeT: Integrating different levels of linguistic modeling for meaning assessment
Niels Ott | Ramon Ziai | Michael Hahn | Detmar Meurers
Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), Volume 2: Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2013)

2012

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Evaluating the Meaning of Answers to Reading Comprehension Questions: A Semantics-Based Approach
Michael Hahn | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP