{"paper":{"title":"Language Models Learn Rare Phenomena from Less Rare Phenomena: The Case of the Missing AANNs","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Kanishka Misra, Kyle Mahowald","submitted_at":"2024-03-28T20:35:10Z","abstract_excerpt":"Language models learn rare syntactic phenomena, but the extent to which this is attributable to generalization vs. memorization is a major open question. To that end, we iteratively trained transformer language models on systematically manipulated corpora which were human-scale in size, and then evaluated their learning of a rare grammatical phenomenon: the English Article+Adjective+Numeral+Noun (AANN) construction (``a beautiful five days''). We compared how well this construction was learned on the default corpus relative to a counterfactual corpus in which AANN sentences were removed. We fo"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2403.19827","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2403.19827/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}