Grammar and meaning are usually treated as separate layers of language. One is a system of formal rules; the other is a network of concepts and referents. In transformer language models, that separation gets harder to hold onto. A model that predicts the next token has to learn something about agreement, word order, and argument …
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Why Narrative Coherence in Language Models Is Not Story Understanding
Ask a language model to write a short story. You will get something that reads like one. A protagonist, a conflict, a turning point, a resolution. Grammatical prose. Emotional shifts at the moments you would expect. Skim it and you might not notice anything wrong. That is exactly the problem. What looks like storytelling is, …
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Why Alignment Research Needs Philosophical Rigor
Alignment research is the study of how to make the goals of an artificial system match the goals of its designers and users. It sits at the intersection of technical specification, behavioral testing, and normative judgment. Adjacent concepts include value specification, reward modeling, interpretability, and robustness. For a blog that examines where language models fail …
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How Pre-Training Data Determines Model Behavior
Pre-training data is the initial, large-scale text corpus used to shape a model’s statistical expectations before any task-specific adjustment. In morphosyntax research, this corpus is not a neutral substrate. It encodes frequency distributions, register biases, orthographic conventions, and cross-linguistic asymmetries that later surface as model behavior. Adjacent concepts include data mixture ratios, tokenization artifacts, corpus …
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When Training Data Shapes Syntax: A Cross-Linguistic Look at Model Behavior
Every language model carries a linguistic fingerprint from its pre-training corpus. Not a design choice—a statistical residue. Patterns of word order, morphological complexity, and agreement seep in without anyone explicitly programming them. For those of us who study morphosyntax across languages, the real question isn’t whether pre-training data matters. It’s how tightly it constrains the …
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