Learning French Liaison with Gradient Symbolic Representations: Errors, Predictions, Consequences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Smolensky & Goldrick (2016) first made the case for Gradient Symbolic Representations (GSRs) as the inputs to phonological grammar using the phenomena of French liaison. Under this view, many common French words are stored underlyingly with partially-activated word-final consonants, and others with gradient blends of partially-activated word-initial consonants. In this paper, we follow up some of that view's predictions and consequences, focusing on the acquisition of French liaison using GSRs. We compare our simulations of error-driven GSR learning with observed errors made by French-learning children, and find the results to be encouragingly similar. We also compare predictions about the end state of GSR learning with a pilot study reporting adult French speakers' use of liaison in nonce words, where we find a rather less good explanatory fit. The paper emphasizes the role of word and collocation frequency in the development of phonological patterns by a GSR learner, and outlines many future avenues for research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".