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Joshua Rozner

4 accepted papers

2025

BabyLM’s First Constructions: Causal interventions provide a signal of learning

EMNLP 2025

Construction grammar posits that language learners acquire constructions (form-meaning pairings) from the statistics of their environment. Recent work supports this hypothesis by showing sensitivity to constructions in pretrained language models (PLMs), including one recent study (Rozner et al., 202

2022

Causal Distillation for Language Models

NAACL 2022long

Distillation efforts have led to language models that are more compact and efficient without serious drops in performance. The standard approach to distillation trains a student model against two objectives: a task-specific objective (e.g., language modeling) and an imitation objective that encourag…

2021

Decrypting Cryptic Crosswords: Semantically Complex Wordplay Puzzles as a Target for NLP

NeurIPS 2021poster

Cryptic crosswords, the dominant crossword variety in the UK, are a promising target for advancing NLP systems that seek to process semantically complex, highly compositional language. Cryptic clues read like fluent natural language but are adversarially composed of two parts: a definition and a wor…