Cited by 63Natural Language Processing TechniquesNeurobiology of Language and BilingualismSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

SyntaxGym: An Online Platform for Targeted Evaluation of Language Models

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Gauthier, Jon, Hu, Jennifer, Wilcox, Ethan, Qian, Peng, Levy, Roger·2020·Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Abstract

Targeted syntactic evaluations have yielded insights into the generalizations learned by neural network language models.However, this line of research requires an uncommon confluence of skills: both the theoretical knowledge needed to design controlled psycholinguistic experiments, and the technical proficiency needed to train and deploy large-scale language models.We present SyntaxGym, an online platform designed to make targeted evaluations accessible to both experts in NLP and linguistics, reproducible across computing environments, and standardized following the norms of psycholinguistic experimental design.This paper releases two tools of independent value for the computational linguistics community:1.A website, syntaxgym.org,which centralizes the process of targeted syntactic evaluation and provides easy tools for analysis and visualization; 2. Two command-line tools, syntaxgym and lm-zoo, which allow any user to reproduce targeted syntactic evaluations and general language model inference on their own machine.

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  • BLiMP and other related syntactic benchmarks such as those presented in Marvin and Linzen (2018) and Gauthier et al. (2020) were specifically designed to mimic the types of tests invented by linguists and cognitive scientists to reveal syntactic competence, i.e., they are all based on minimal pair sentences.

    “BLiMP, and other related syntactic benchmarks such as those presented in Marvin and Linzen (2018) and Gauthier et al. (2020), were specifically designed to mimic the types of tests invented by linguists and cognitive scientists to reveal syntactic competence-i.e., they are all based on minimal pair sentences.”

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Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever. 2019. Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI Blog, 1(8):9.

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Authors
Gauthier, J., Hu, J., Wilcox, E., Qian, P., & Levy, R.
Affiliations
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
  • Harvard University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Published
2020
Pages
70-76
OpenAlex
W3037115370
Cited by
61
References
17
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 20 · 2020: 2
FWCI
4.58
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations (ACL Demo) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation
  • Open Philanthropy Project
  • National Institutes of Health
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Keywords
language models, psycholinguistic experiment, digital platforms, reproducibility, large language models

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