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Michael Hanna

9 accepted papers

2025

Incremental Sentence Processing Mechanisms in Autoregressive Transformer Language Models

NAACL 2025long

Autoregressive transformer language models (LMs) possess strong syntactic abilities, often successfully handling phenomena from agreement to NPI licensing. However, the features they use to incrementally process their linguistic input are not well understood. In this paper, we fill this gap by study…

2025

LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks

ACL 2025short

There is an increasing trend towards evaluating NLP models with LLMs instead of human judgments, raising questions about the validity of these evaluations, as well as their reproducibility in the case of proprietary models. We provide JUDGE-BENCH, an extensible collection of 20 NLP datasets with hum…

2025

MIB: A Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark

ICML 2025poster

How can we know whether new mechanistic interpretability methods achieve real improvements? In pursuit of lasting evaluation standards, we propose MIB, a Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark, with two tracks spanning four tasks and five models. MIB favors methods that precisely and concisely recov…

2024

Do Pre-Trained Language Models Detect and Understand Semantic Underspecification? Ask the DUST!

ACL 2024findings

In everyday language use, speakers frequently utter and interpret sentences that are semantically underspecified, namely, whose content is insufficient to fully convey their message or interpret them univocally. For example, to interpret the underspecified sentence “Don’t spend too much”, which leav…

2024

LLM Circuit Analyses Are Consistent Across Training and Scale

NeurIPS 2024poster

Most currently deployed LLMs undergo continuous training or additional finetuning. By contrast, most research into LLMs' internal mechanisms focuses on models at one snapshot in time (the end of pre-training), raising the question of whether their results generalize to real-world settings. Existing…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

How does GPT-2 compute greater-than?: Interpreting mathematical abilities in a pre-trained language model

NeurIPS 2023poster

Pre-trained language models can be surprisingly adept at tasks they were not explicitly trained on, but how they implement these capabilities is poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the basic mathematical abilities often acquired by pre-trained language models. Concretely, we use mechani…

2023

When Language Models Fall in Love: Animacy Processing in Transformer Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

Animacy—whether an entity is alive and sentient—is fundamental to cognitive processing, impacting areas such as memory, vision, and language. However, animacy is not always expressed directly in language: in English it often manifests indirectly, in the form of selectional constraints on verbs and a…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

ACT-Thor: A Controlled Benchmark for Embodied Action Understanding in Simulated Environments

COLING 2022main

Artificial agents are nowadays challenged to perform embodied AI tasks. To succeed, agents must understand the meaning of verbs and how their corresponding actions transform the surrounding world. In this work, we propose ACT-Thor, a novel controlled benchmark for embodied action understanding. We u…