Can Large Language Models Code Like a Linguist?: A Case Study in Low Resource Sound Law Induction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Naik, Atharva, Zhang, Kexun, Robinson, Nathaniel, Mysore, Aravind, Marr, Clayton, Sng, Hong, Byrnes, Rebecca, Cai, Anna, Chang, Kalvin, Mortensen, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Naik, Atharva
Zhang, Kexun
Robinson, Nathaniel
Mysore, Aravind
Marr, Clayton
Sng, Hong
Byrnes, Rebecca
Cai, Anna
Chang, Kalvin
Mortensen, David
author_facet Naik, Atharva
Zhang, Kexun
Robinson, Nathaniel
Mysore, Aravind
Marr, Clayton
Sng, Hong
Byrnes, Rebecca
Cai, Anna
Chang, Kalvin
Mortensen, David
contents Historical linguists have long written a kind of incompletely formalized ''program'' that converts reconstructed words in an ancestor language into words in one of its attested descendants that consist of a series of ordered string rewrite functions (called sound laws). They do this by observing pairs of words in the reconstructed language (protoforms) and the descendent language (reflexes) and constructing a program that transforms protoforms into reflexes. However, writing these programs is error-prone and time-consuming. Prior work has successfully scaffolded this process computationally, but fewer researchers have tackled Sound Law Induction (SLI), which we approach in this paper by casting it as Programming by Examples. We propose a language-agnostic solution that utilizes the programming ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by generating Python sound law programs from sound change examples. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach for various LLMs, propose effective methods to generate additional language-agnostic synthetic data to fine-tune LLMs for SLI, and compare our method with existing automated SLI methods showing that while LLMs lag behind them they can complement some of their weaknesses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_12725
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Large Language Models Code Like a Linguist?: A Case Study in Low Resource Sound Law Induction
Naik, Atharva
Zhang, Kexun
Robinson, Nathaniel
Mysore, Aravind
Marr, Clayton
Sng, Hong
Byrnes, Rebecca
Cai, Anna
Chang, Kalvin
Mortensen, David
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Historical linguists have long written a kind of incompletely formalized ''program'' that converts reconstructed words in an ancestor language into words in one of its attested descendants that consist of a series of ordered string rewrite functions (called sound laws). They do this by observing pairs of words in the reconstructed language (protoforms) and the descendent language (reflexes) and constructing a program that transforms protoforms into reflexes. However, writing these programs is error-prone and time-consuming. Prior work has successfully scaffolded this process computationally, but fewer researchers have tackled Sound Law Induction (SLI), which we approach in this paper by casting it as Programming by Examples. We propose a language-agnostic solution that utilizes the programming ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by generating Python sound law programs from sound change examples. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach for various LLMs, propose effective methods to generate additional language-agnostic synthetic data to fine-tune LLMs for SLI, and compare our method with existing automated SLI methods showing that while LLMs lag behind them they can complement some of their weaknesses.
title Can Large Language Models Code Like a Linguist?: A Case Study in Low Resource Sound Law Induction
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12725