Sidestepping the Combinatorial Explosion: An Explanation of <i>n</i> -gram Frequency Effects Based on Naive Discriminative Learning
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Arnon and Snider ((2010). More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of memory and language, 62, 67-82) documented frequency effects for compositional four-grams independently of the frequencies of lower-order n-grams. They argue that comprehenders apparently store frequency information about multi-word units. We show that n-gram frequency effects can emerge in a parameter-free computational model driven by naive discriminative learning, trained on a sample of 300,000 four-word phrases from the British National Corpus. The discriminative learning model is a full decomposition model, associating orthographic input features straightforwardly with meanings. The model does not make use of separate representations for derived or inflected words, nor for compounds, nor for phrases. Nevertheless, frequency effects are correctly predicted for all these linguistic units. Naive discriminative learning provides the simplest and most economical explanation for frequency effects in language processing, obviating the need to posit counters in the head for, and the existence of, hundreds of millions of n-gram representations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it