# Emergence of Syntax Needs Minimal Supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01119 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01119/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Improving BERT Pretraining with Syntactic Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10516/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper is a theoretical contribution to the debate on the learnability of syntax from a corpus without explicit syntax-specific guidance. Our approach originates in the observable structure of a corpus, which we use to define and isolate grammaticality (syntactic information) and meaning/pragmatics information. We describe the formal characteristics of an autonomous syntax and show that it becomes possible to search for syntax-based lexical categories with a simple optimization process, without any prior hypothesis on the form of the model.