R. Thomas McCoy

2 paper cards in Mova's library · 2019–2026

R. Thomas McCoy wrote 2 of the papers Mova reads, in 2019–2026; often with Claire Hobbs, Ellie Pavlick, Tal Linzen.

The profile is the library's match of the name; two people with one name are not always told apart.

Papers

Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks (2026)
The paper asks how statistical regularities in linguistic input could help a learner acquire syntax. It proposes "collocational bootstrapping": which words tend to occur together hints at which words are syntactically related. The test case is English subject-verb number agreement. In most natural sentences the…
Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference (2019)
Statistical NLI models can score high on MNLI while relying on three syntactic shortcuts: lexical overlap (a premise entails any hypothesis built from its words), the subsequence heuristic (it entails any contiguous word span), and the constituent heuristic (it entails any complete subtree).