Neural Language Models Learn the Contextual Distributions of Dependency Structures: a statistical learning theory to compositionality

Wang Bojun, Junjie Chen, Holly Jenkins, Elizabeth Wonnacott

It is unclear how Neural Language Models (NLMs) acquire the structural meaning encoded by grammatical structures that is independent of lexical semantics. We propose a statistical learning process in which learned dependency structures themselves become new distributional units for subsequent statistical learning. Under this account, once a dependency structure is acquired, the model tracks its contextual distributions. These contextual features reflect the semantic properties of a composite structure. To test this hypothesis, we design a synthetic grammar in which each grammatical structure has distinct contextual distributions that cannot be recovered from the distributional statistics of their component tokens alone. We train a series of BERT-style masked language models on this grammar and examine their developmental trajectory. The results show that models can successfully learn the contextual distributions of composite dependency structures even though they cannot be inferred from token statistics alone. Developmental analysis further reveals a clear developmental trajectory. The learning of the dependency relations that define a grammatical structure consistently precedes…