Hebbian learning the local structure of language

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Eugenio, P. Myles
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Eugenio, P. Myles
author_facet Eugenio, P. Myles
contents Learning in the brain is local and unsupervised (Hebbian). We derive the foundations of an effective human language model inspired by these microscopic constraints. It has two parts: (1) a hierarchy of neurons which learns to tokenize words from text (whichiswhatyoudowhenyoureadthis); and (2) additional neurons which bind the learned symanticless patterns of the tokenizer into a symanticful token (an embedding). The model permits continuous parallel learning without forgetting; and is a powerful tokenizer which performs renormalization group. This allows it to exploit redundancy, such that it generates tokens which are always decomposable into a basis set (e.g an alphabet), and can mix features learned from multiple languages. We find that the structure of this model allows it to learn a natural language morphology WITHOUT data. The language data generated by this model predicts the correct distribution of word-forming patterns observed in real languages, and further demonstrates why microscopically human speech is broken up into words. This model provides the basis for understanding the microscopic origins of language and human creativity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_02057
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hebbian learning the local structure of language
Eugenio, P. Myles
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Neurons and Cognition
Learning in the brain is local and unsupervised (Hebbian). We derive the foundations of an effective human language model inspired by these microscopic constraints. It has two parts: (1) a hierarchy of neurons which learns to tokenize words from text (whichiswhatyoudowhenyoureadthis); and (2) additional neurons which bind the learned symanticless patterns of the tokenizer into a symanticful token (an embedding). The model permits continuous parallel learning without forgetting; and is a powerful tokenizer which performs renormalization group. This allows it to exploit redundancy, such that it generates tokens which are always decomposable into a basis set (e.g an alphabet), and can mix features learned from multiple languages. We find that the structure of this model allows it to learn a natural language morphology WITHOUT data. The language data generated by this model predicts the correct distribution of word-forming patterns observed in real languages, and further demonstrates why microscopically human speech is broken up into words. This model provides the basis for understanding the microscopic origins of language and human creativity.
title Hebbian learning the local structure of language
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Neurons and Cognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02057