Word Order UID - TACL

This repo contains code accompanying the TACL paper "A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order".

Corresponding author: Thomas Hikaru Clark (thclark at mit dot edu)

Snakemake workflow

The workflow is managed using Snakemake.

Commands to run: LSF:

snakemake {rule} --cores {cores} --cluster "sbatch --time={resources.time} -n {resources.num_cpus} --mem-per-cpu={resources.mem_per_cpu} --gpus={resources.num_gpus} --gres=gpumem:{resources.mem_per_gpu} -o {log}"

Slurm:

snakemake {rule} --cores {cores} --slurm

Data

The data for our experiments come from two sources: Wiki40b and CC100.

Counterfactual Grammars

We use the counterfactual grammar formalism of Hahn et al. (2020). In this formalism, weights are assigned to each dependency relation type in the Universal Dependencies paradigm. These weights are then used to linearize the hierarchical structure of a sentence's dependency parse. An interactive visualizer can be found here.

Training Models

Hyperparameters

Model training hyperparameters are specified in the file data/train_model_transformer.sh:

fairseq-train --task language_modeling \
	$DATA_DIR \
	--save-dir $SAVE_DIR \
	--arch transformer_lm \
    --share-decoder-input-output-embed \
	--dropout 0.1 \
	--optimizer adam \
    --adam-betas '(0.9, 0.98)' \
    --weight-decay 0.01 \
    --clip-norm 0.0 \
	--lr 0.0005 \
    --lr-scheduler inverse_sqrt \
    --warmup-updates 4000 \
    --warmup-init-lr 1e-07 \
	--tokens-per-sample 512 \
    --sample-break-mode none \
	--max-tokens 512 \
    --update-freq 64 \
	--fp16 \
	--max-update 50000 \
    --max-epoch 35 \
    --patience 3  \
	--seed $RANDOM_SEED \
	--keep-last-epochs 5

Evaluation

Plots

Statistical Modeling