Author

R. Thomas McCoy

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Open access Sep 2026

The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings Revisited: Large Language Models Display Syntactic Bootstrapping

Syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman, 1990) is the hypothesis that children use the syntactic environments in which a verb occurs to learn its meaning. Existing evidence for this hypothesis generally involves controlled experimental settings (e.g., Jin & Fisher, 2014; Naigles, 1990; Yuan et al., 2012). In this paper, we...

Xiao-Meng Zhu, R. Thomas McCoy, Robert Frank · Open Mind · 0 citations

#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

The Emergent Symbolic Structure of Artificial Neural Networks

It is shown that the vector representations of a variety of neural networks can be closely approximated with symbolic structures, providing a potential way to reconcile longstanding symbolic conceptions of intelligence with the vector-based nature of modern AI.

R. Thomas McCoy, Paul Soulos, Tal Linzen et al. · 1 citation

#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

A Unifying Perspective on Language Model Representations: From Filler-Role Structure to Mechanistic Interpretability

This work proposes using Tensor Product Representations (TPRs) as a unifying hypothesis, and shows that TPRs can unify several prior interpretability methods: additive analogies, linear probing, sparse autoencoders, and activation patching.

Enshang Zhang, R. Thomas McCoy · 0 citations