Learning from Impairment: Leveraging Insights from Clinical Linguistics in Language Modelling Research
It addresses the problem of making NLP models more cognitively plausible and sustainable for researchers and practitioners, but is incremental as it builds on existing linguistic approaches.
This position paper explores how insights from clinical linguistics, particularly aphasia treatment, can inform the development of human-inspired learning strategies and evaluation frameworks for language models, focusing on enhancing their handling of complex syntactic phenomena.
This position paper investigates the potential of integrating insights from language impairment research and its clinical treatment to develop human-inspired learning strategies and evaluation frameworks for language models (LMs). We inspect the theoretical underpinnings underlying some influential linguistically motivated training approaches derived from neurolinguistics and, particularly, aphasiology, aimed at enhancing the recovery and generalization of linguistic skills in aphasia treatment, with a primary focus on those targeting the syntactic domain. We highlight how these insights can inform the design of rigorous assessments for LMs, specifically in their handling of complex syntactic phenomena, as well as their implications for developing human-like learning strategies, aligning with efforts to create more sustainable and cognitively plausible natural language processing (NLP) models.