ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language

The first ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL) will be held in conjunction with ACL 2023 in Toronto, Canada, on July 13th or 14th 2023 (TBD). It will feature invited talks by Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook University) and Amalia Gnanadesikan (University of Maryland, College Park). We welcome submissions of scientific papers to be presented at the conference and archived in the ACL Anthology. Information on submission and format will be posted at https://cawl.wellformedness.com shortly.

Generalized capitalist realism

One of the most memorable books I’ve read over the last decade or so is Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). The book is a slim, 81-page pamphlet describing the feeling that “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” As Fisher explains, a lot of ideological work is done to prevent us from imagining alternatives, including the increasingly capitalist sheen of anti-capitalism, and there are a few areas—the overall non-response to climate change and biosphere-scale threats, for example—where capitalist realism ideology has failed to co-opt dissent, suggesting at least the possibility of an alternative on the horizon, even if Fisher himself does not imagine or present one.

A very clear example of capitalist realism can be found in the ethical altruism (EA) movement, which focuses on getting charity to the less well-off via existing capitalist structures. Singer (2015), the moment’s resident philosopher, justifies this by setting the probability of a viable alternative to capitalism surfacing in any reasonable time frame to be zero. Therefore the most good one can do is to ruthlessly accumulate wealth in the metropole and then give it away where it is most needed. Any synergies between the wealth of the first world and the dire economic conditions in the third world simply have to set aside.

Fisher’s term capitalist realism is a sort of pun on socialist realism, a term for idealized, realistic, literal art from 20th century socialist countries. His use of the term realism is (deliberately, I think) ironic, since both capitalist and socialist realism apply firm ideological filters to the real world. The continental philosophy stuff that this ultimately gets down to is a bit above my pay grade, but I think we can generalize the basic idea: X realism is an ideology that posits and enforces the hypothesis that there is no alternative to X.

If one is willing to go along with this, we can easily talk about, for instance, neural realism, which posits that there is simply no alternative to neural networks for machine learning. You can see this for instance in the debate between “deep learning fundamentalists” like LeCun and the rigor police like Rahimi (see Sproat 2022 for an entertaining discussion): LeCun does seem believe there to be no alternative to employing methods we do not understand with the scientific rigor that Rahimi demands, when it seems obvious that these technologies remain a small part of the overall productive economy. An even clearer example is the term foundation model, which has the fairly obvious connotation that they are crucial to the future of AI. Foundation model realism would also necesarily posit that there is no alternative and discard any disconfirming observation.

References

Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
Singer, P. 2015. The Most Good You Can Do. Yale University Press.
Sproat, R. 2022. Boring problems are sometimes the most interesting. Computational Linguistics 48(2): 483-490.

Codon math

It well-known that there are twenty “proteinogenic” amino acids—those capable of creating proteins—in eukaryotes (i.e., lifeforms with nucleated cells). When biologists first began to realize that DNA synthesizes RNA, which synthesizes amino acids, it was not yet known how many DNA bases (the vocabulary being A, T, C, and G) were required to code an animo acid. It turns out the answer is three: each codon is a base triple, each corresponding to an amino acid. However, one might have deduced that answer ahead of time using some basic algebra, as did Soviet-American polymath George Gamow. Given that one needs at least 20 aminos (and admitting that some redundancy is not impossible), it should be clear that pairs of bases will not suffice to uniquely identify the different animos: 42 = 16, which is less than 20 (+ some epsilon). However, triples will more than suffice: 43 = 64. This holds assuming that the codons are interpreted consistently independently of their context (as Gamow correctly deduced) and whether or not the triplets are interpreted as overlapping or not (Gamow incorrectly guessed that they overlapped, so that a six-base sequence contains four triplet codons; in fact it contains no more than two).

All of this is a long way to link back to the idea of counting entities in phonology.  It seems to me we can ask just how many features might be necessary to mark all the distinctions needed. At the same time, Matamoros & Reiss (2016), for instance, following some broader work by Gallistel & King (2009), take it as desirable that a cognitive theory involve a small number of initial entities that give rise to a combinatoric explosion that, at the etic level, is “essentially infinite”. Surely similar thinking can be applied throughout linguistics.

References

Gallistel, C. R., and King, A. P.. 2009. Memory and the Computational
Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience. Wiley-Blackwell.
Matamoros, C. and Reiss, C. 2016. Symbol taxonomy in biophonology. In A. M. Di Sciullo (ed.), Biolinguistic Investigations on the Language Faculty, pages 41-54. John Benjmanins Publishing Company.

Foundation models

It is widely admitted that the use of language in terms like formal language and language model tend to mislead neophytes, since they suggest the common-sense notion (roughly, e-language) rather than the narrow technical sense referring to a set of strings. Scholars at Stanford have been trying to push foundation model as an alternative to what were previously called large language models. But I don’t really like the implication—which I take to be quite salient—that such models ought to serve as the foundation for NLP, AI, whatever. I use large language models in my research, but not that often, and I actually don’t think they have to be part of every practitioner’s toolkit. I can’t help thinking that Stanford is trying to “make fetch happen”.

Is NLP stuck?

I can’t help but feel that NLP is once again stuck.

From about 2011 to 2019, I can identify a huge step forward just about every year. But the last thing that truly excited me is BERT, which came out in 2018 and was published in 2019. For those not in the know, the idea of BERT is to pre-train a gigantic language model, with either monolingual or multilingual data. The major pre-training task is masked language model prediction: we pretend some small percentage (usualyl 15%) of the words in a sentence are obscured by noise and try to predict what they were. Ancillary tasks like predicting whether two sentences are adjacent or not (or if they were, what was their order) are also used, but appear to be non-essential. Pre-training (done a single time, at some expense, at BigCo HQ), produces a contextual encoder, a model which can embed words and sentences in ways that are useful for many downstream tasks. But then one can also take this encoder and fine-tune it to some other downstream task (an instance of transfer learning). It turns out that the combination of task-general pre-training using free-to-cheap ordinary text data and a small amount of task-specific fine-tuning using labeled data results in substantial performance gains over what came before. The BERT creators gave away both software and the pre-trained parameters (which would be expensive for an individual or a small academic lab to reproduce on their own), and an entire ecosystem of sharing pre-trained model parameters has emerged. I see this toolkit-development ecosysytem as a sign of successful science.

From my limited perspective, very little has happened since then that is not just more BERTology—that is, exploiting BERT and similar models. The only alternative on the horizon, in the last 4 years now, are pre-trained large language models without the encoder component, of which the best known are the GPT family (now up to GPT-3). These models do one thing well: they take a text prompt and produce more text that seeminly responds to the prompt. However, whereas BERT and family are free to reuse, GPT-3’s parameters and software are both closed source and can only be accessed at scale by paying a licensing fee to Microsoft. That itself is a substantial regression compared to BERT. More importantly, though, the GPT family are far less expressive tools than BERT, since they don’t really support fine-tuning. (More precisely, I don’t see any difficult technical barriers to fine-tuning GPT-style models; it’s just not supported.) Thus they can be only really used for one thing: zero-shot text generation tasks, in which the task is “explained” to the model in the input prompt, and the output is also textual. Were it possible to simply write out, in plain English, what you want, and then get the output in a sensible text format, this of course would be revolutionary, but that’s not the case. Rather, GPT has spawned a cottage industry of prompt engineering. A prompt engineer, roughly, is someone who specializes in crafting prompts. It is of course impressive that this can be done at all, but just because an orangutan can be taught to make an adequate omelette doesn’t mean I am going to pay one to make breakfast. I simply don’t see how any of this represents an improvement over the BERT ecosystem, which at least has an easy-to-use free and open-source ecosystem. And as you might expect, GPT’s zero-shot approach is quite often much worse than what one would obtain using the light supervision of the BERT-style fine-tuning approach.

Phonological nihilism

One might argue that phonology is in something of a crisis period. Phonology seems to be going through early stages of grief for what I see as the failure of teleological, substance-rich, constraint-based, parallel-evaluation approaches to make headway, but the next paradigm shift is yet to become clear to us. I personally think that logical, substance-free, serialist approaches ought to represent our next i-phonology paradigm, with “evolutionary”-historical thinking providing the e-language context, but I may be wrong and altogether different paradigm may be waiting in the wing. The thing that troubles me is that phonologists from these still-dominant constraint-based traditions seem to have less and less faith in the tenets of their theories, and in the worst case this expresses itself as a sort of nihilism. I discern two forms of this nihilism. The first is the phonologist who thinks we’re doing “word sudoku”, playing games of minimal description that produce generalizations without a shred of cognitive support. The second is the phonologist who thinks that everything is memorized, so that the actual domain of phonological generalization are just Psych 101 subject pool nonce word experiments. My pitch to both types of nihilists is the same: if you truly believe this, you ought to spend more time at the beach and less in the classroom, and save some space in the discourse for those of us who believe in something.

On the past tense debate; Part 3: the overestimation of overirregularization

One final, and still unresolved, issue in the past tense debate is the role of so-called overirregularization errors.

It is well-known that children acquiring English tend to overregularize irregular verbs; that is, they apply the regular -d suffix to verbs which in adult English form irregular pasts, producing, e.g., *thinked for thought. Maratsos (2000) estimates that children acquiring English very frequently overregularize irregular verbs; for instance, Abe, recorded roughly 45 minutes a week from ages 2;5 to 5;2, overregularizes rare irregular verbs as much as 58% of the time, and even the most frequent irregular verbs are overregularized 18% of the time. Abe appears to have been exceptional in that he had a very large receptive vocabulary for his age (as measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test), giving him more opportunities (and perhaps more grammatical motivation) for overregularization,1 but Maratsos estimates that less-precocious children have lower but overall similar rates of overregularization.

In contrast, it is generally agreed that overirregularization, or the application of irregular patterns (e.g., in English, of ablaut, shortening, etc.) are quite a bit rarer. The only serious attempt to count overirregularizations is by Xu & Pinker (1995; henceforth XP). They estimate that children produce such errors no more than 0.2% of the time, which would make overirregularizations roughly two orders of magnitude rarer than overregularizations. This is a substantial difference. If anything, I think that XP overestimate overirregularizations. For instance, XP count brang as an overirregularization, even though this form does exist quite robustly in adult English (though it is somewhat stigmatized). Furthermore, XP count *slep for *slept as an overirregularization, though this is probably just ordinary (td)-deletion, a variable rule that is attested already in early childhood (Payne 1980). But by any account, overirregularization is extremely rare. The same is found in nonce word elicitation experiments such as those conducted by Berko (1958): both children and adults are loath to generate irregular past tenses for nonce verbs.2 

This is a problem for most existing computational models. Nearly all of them—Albright & Hayes’ (2003) rule-based model (see their §4.5.3), O’Donnell’s (2015) rules-plus-storage system, and all analogical models and neural networks I am aware of—not only overregularize, like children do, but also overirregularize at rates far exceeding what children do. I submit that any computational model which produces substantial overirregularization is simply on the wrong track.

Endnotes

  1. It is amusing to note that Abe is now, apparently, a trial lawyer and partner at a white-shoe law firm.
  2. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is somewhat obscured by ratings tasks, but that’s further evidence we should disregard such tasks.

References

Albright, A. and Hayes, B. 2003. Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: a computational/experimental study. Cognition 90(2): 119-161.
Berko, J. 1958. The child’s learning of English morphology. Word 14: 150-177.
Maratsos, M. 2000. More overregularizations after all: new data and discussion on Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu. Journal of Child Language 27: 183-212.
O’Donnell, T. 2015. Productivity and Reuse in Language: a Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage. MIT Press.
Payne, A. 1980. Factors controlling the acquisition of the Philadelphia dialect by out-of-state children. In W. Labov (ed.),  Locating Language in Time and Space, pages 143-178. Academic Press.
Xu, F. and Pinker, S. 1995. Weird past tense forms. Journal of Child Language 22(3): 531-556.

Thought experiment #3

[The semester is finally winding down and I am back to writing again.]

Let us suppose one encounters a language in which the only adjacent consonants are affricates like [tʃ, ts, tɬ].1 One might be tempted to argue that these affricates are in fact singleton contour phonemes2 and that the language does not permit true consonant clusters.3

Let us suppose instead that one finds a language in which word-internal nasal-stop clusters are common, but nasal-glide and nasal-liquid clusters are not found except at transparent morpheme boundaries.4 One then might be tempted to argue that in this language, nasal-stop clusters are in fact sequences of nasal followed by an oral consonant rather than singleton contour phonemes.

In my opinion, neither of these argument “go through”. They follow from nothing, or at least nothing that has been explicitly stated. Allow me to explain, but first, consider the following hypothetical:

The metrical system of Centaurian, the lingua franca of the hominid aliens of the Alpha Centauri system, historically formed weight-insensitive trochees, with final extrametricality for prosodic words with odd syllable count of more than one syllable. However, a small group of Centaurian exiles have been hurtling towards the Sol system at .05 parsecs a year (roughly 1m MPH) for the last century or so. Because of their rapid speed of travel it is impossible for these pioneers to stay in communication with their homeworld, and naturally their language has undergone drift over the past few centuries. In particular, Pioneer Centaurian (as we’ll call it) has slowly but surely lost all the final extrametrical syllables of Classical Centaurian, and as a result there are no longer any 3-, 5-, 7- or 9- (etc.) syllable words in the Pioneer dialect.

As a result of a phonetically well grounded, “plausible”, Neogrammarian sound change, Pioneer Centaurian (PC) lacks long words with an odd number of syllables, though it still has 1-syllable words. What then is the status of this generalization in the grammar of PC speakers? The null hypothesis has to be that it has no status at all. Even though the lexical entries of PC have undergone changes, the metrical grammar of PC could easily be identical to Classical Centaurian: weight-intensitive trochees, with a now-vacuous rule of final extrametricality. Furthermore, it is quite possible that PC speakers have simply not noticed the relevant metrical facts, either consciously or subconsciously. Would PC speakers rate, say, 4-syllable nonce words as ill-formed possible words? No one knows. When PC speakers inevitably come in contact with English, will be they be reluctant to borrow a 6-syllable words like anthropomorphism or detoxification into their language, or will they feel the need to append or delete a syllable to conform to their language’s lexicon? Once again, no one knows.

The same is essentially true of the aforementioned language in which the only consonant clusters are affricates, or the aforementioned language in which nasal-consonant clusters are highly restricted. It might be the case that the grammar treats the former as single segments and the grammar treats the latter as clusters, but absolutely nothing presented thus far suggests it has to be true.

Let us refer to the idea that the grammar needs to encode phonotactic generalizations (somehow) as the phonotactic hypothesis. I have argued—though more for the sake of argument than out of genuine commitment—for a constrained version of this hypothesis; I note that any surface-true rule will rule out certain surface forms. Thus, if desired, one can derive—or perhaps more accurately, project—certain phonotactic generalizations by taking a free-ride on surface-true rules.5 But note: I have not argued that the phonotactic hypothesis is correct. Rather, I have simply provided a way to derive some phonotactic generalizations using entrenched grammatical machinery (i.e., phonological alternations). And this can only account for a subset of possible phonotactic generalizations.

Let us consider the language with word-initial affricates again. Linguists are often heard to say that one needs to posit phonotactic generalizations to “rule out” consonant clusters in this language. I disagree. Imagine that we have two grammars, G and G’. G has a set of URs, which includes contour phoneme affricates (/t͡ɬakaʔ-/ ‘people’, /t͡sopelik-/ ‘sweet’, etc., where the IPA tie bar symbolizes contour phonemes) but no consonant clusters. G also has a surface constraint on consonant clusters other than the affricates (which can be assumed to be contour phonemes, for sake of simplicity). G’ has the same set of URs, but lacks the surface constraint. Is there any reason to prefer G over G’? With the evidence given so far, I submit that there is not. Of course, there might be some grammatical patterns which, if otherwise unconstrained, would produce consonant clusters, in which case the phonotactic constraint of G may have some work to do. And, there may additional facts (perhaps the adaptation of loanwords, or wordlikeness judgments, though these data are not applied to this problem without making additional strong assumptions) may also militate in favor of G. But rarely if ever are these additional facts presented when positing G’. Now let us consider a third grammar, G”. This grammar is the same as G’, except that the affricates are now represented as consonant clusters (/tɬakaʔ-/ ‘people’, /tsopelik-/ ‘sweet’, etc.) rather than contour phonemes. Is there any reason to prefer either G’ or G” given the facts available to us thus far? It seems to me there is not.

This is a minor scandal for phonemic analysis. But it is not a purely philosophical issue: it is the same issue that children acquiring Nahuatl face. “Phonotacticians” have largely sidestepped these issues by making a completely implicit assumption that grammars (or perhaps, language learners) abhor a vacuum, in the sense that phonotactic constraints need to be posited to rule out that which does not occur. The problem is that there is often no reason to think these things would occur in the first place. If we assume that grammars do not abhor a vacuum—allowing us to rid ourselves of the increasingly complex machinery used to encode phonotactic generalizations not derived from alternations—we obtain exactly the same results in the vast majority of cases.

Endnotes

  1. One language with this property is Classical Nahuatl.
  2. Whatever that means! It’s not immediately clear, since there does not seem to be a fully-articulated theory that explains what it means to be a single segment in underlying representation to correspond to multiple articulatory targets on the surface. Without such a theory this feels like mere phenomenological description.
  3. Recently, Gouskova & Stanton (2021) express this heuristic, which has antecedents going back to at least Trubetzkoy, as a simple computational model.
  4. One language which supposedly has this property is Gurindji (McConvell 1988), though I only have only seen the relevant data reprinted in secondary sources. Thanks to Andrew Lamont (p.c.) for drawing my attention to this data. Note that in this language, the nasal-obstruent clusters undergo dissimilation when preceded by another nasal-obstruent cluster, which might—under certain assumptions—be a further argument that nasal-obstruent sequences are really clusters.
  5. See also Gorman 2013, particularly chapters 3-4.

References

Gorman, K. 2013. Generative phonotactics. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Gouskova, M. and Stanton, J. 2021. Learning complex segments. Language 97(1): 151-193.
McConvell, P. 1988. Nasal cluster dissimilation and constraints on phonological variables in Gurundji and related languages. Aboriginal Linguistics 1: 135-165.

New-jack Elon haters

It’s on trend to hate on Elon Musk. This bugs me slightly, because I was doing it before it was cool. The thing any new-jack Elon hater should read is the 2015 (authorized!) biography by Ashlee Vance, entitled Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, which your local library almost certainly has. (There’s even an abridged YA edition.) Basically all the worst things you can imagine about Musk were already firmly documented by 2015. Repeated there is the suggestion that he abused his first wife and more or less purchased his second one. Occasionally, Vance allows Musk to interject things, particularly about who deserves credit for which rocket nozzle, but apparently Musk had “no notes” about these salacious personal life details.