Both Direct and Indirect Evidence Contribute to Dative Alternation Preferences in Language Models

Qing Yao, Kanishka Misra, Leonie Weissweiler, Kyle Mahowald

Keywords: linguistics, dative alternation, indirect evidence, language learning, cognitive science, linguistic constructions

TL;DR: Through manipulating word-order preferences in datives and non-datives in the training sets of language models, we find that they acquire dative alternation preferences from both direct and indirect evidence.

Abstract: Language models (LMs) tend to show human-like preferences on a number of syntactic phenomena, but the extent to which these are attributable to direct exposure to the phenomena or more general properties of language is unclear. We explore this with the English dative alternation (DO: "gave Y the X" vs. PO: "gave the X to Y"), using a controlled rearing paradigm wherein we iteratively train small LMs on systematically manipulated input. We focus on two properties that affect the choice of alternant: length and animacy. Both properties are directly present in datives but also reflect more global tendencies for shorter elements to precede longer ones and animates to precede inanimates. First, by manipulating and ablating datives for these biases in the input, we show that direct evidence of length and animacy matters, but easy-first preferences persist even without such evidence. Then, using LMs trained on systematically perturbed datasets to manipulate global length effects (re-linearizing sentences globally while preserving dependency structure), we find that dative preferences can emerge from indirect evidence. We conclude that LMs' emergent syntactic preferences come from a mix of direct and indirect sources.

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Submission Number: 115