🦙 llm-x-cxg: Language Models and Construction Grammar 📖

🏭 Text Generation and Construction Detection 👀

This repository contains code and output data from probing and experimenting with construction grammar (CxG) and large language models (LLMs). This project is based on a master's thesis at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (University of Munich; LMU) with the title Sprachmodelle und Konstruktionsgrammatiken zur Textgenerierung und Konstruktionserkennung (English: Language Models and Construction Grammar: Text Generation and Construction Detection). Thanks to Leonie Weissweiler for supervising this work!

Each sub-directory contains a readme.md file outlining each file's content. For citation of this work, please see the BibLaTeX snippet below.

💡 Abstract from the Thesis

Construction Grammar aims to combine linguistic features such as syntax, semantics, and lexis, thereby analysing language holistically. Large language models (also known as LLMs) pursue a similar approach. They claim to grasp language features by using massive amounts of data and computational processing power. This thesis investigates joint approaches, targeting an optimization regarding the quality of natural language understanding (NLU). Hence, two main tasks are postulated: (a) the detection of language phenomena by means of finding instances for predefined constructions in corpora and (b) generating novel examples based on construction definition. In order to do so, LLMs like Llama 2, BERT, and mBART are compared and extended. To these models, concepts of few-shot learning and pseudoword embeddings are applied. The proposed ideas are analysed, then implemented, and finally evaluated both automatically and manually.

🤔 Usage

In case you want to run any of the code provided, feel free to install the necessary dependencies using conda.

conda create --name llm-cxg --file llm-cxg.txt
conda activate llm-cxg

🙏 Acknowledgements

Both src/pseudowords/get_bsb_bert_kee_pseudowords_avg.py and src/pseudowords/get_kee_pseudowords_avg.py are based on the BERT-based pseudoword tool by Karidi et al. (2021). All other files are built by the creator of llm-x-cxg (this repository).

📑 Citation

If you want to use the content of this repository, feel free to use the following template:

@thesis{sockel_llm_x_cxg_2024,
 author = {Sockel, Tim},
 year = {2024},
 title = {{Sprachmodelle und Konstruktionsgrammatiken zur Textgenerierung und Konstruktionserkennung}},
 keywords = {Computer;FOS: Computer;FOS: Languages;General language studies;information sciences;Linguistics;literature;Natural language processing},
 type = {{Master's Thesis}},
 institution = {{Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München}},
 location = {Munich},
 language = {German},
 titleaddon = {Centrum für Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.10957259}
}