Neural models excel at extracting statistical patterns from large amounts of data, but struggle to learn patterns or reason about language from only a few examples. In this paper, we ask: Can we learn explicit rules that generalize well from only a few examples? We explore this question using program synthesis. We develop a synthesis model to learn phonology rules as programs in a domain-specific language. We test the ability of our models to generalize from few training examples using our new dataset of problems from the Linguistics Olympiad, a challenging set of tasks that require strong linguistic reasoning ability. In addition to being highly sample-efficient, our approach generates human-readable programs, and allows control over the generalizability of the learnt programs.

Learning linguistic generalizations from only a few examples is a challenging task. Recent work has shown that program synthesis – a method to learn rules from data in the form of programs in a domain-specific language – can be used to learn phonological rules in highly data-constrained settings. In this paper, we use the problem of phonological stress placement as a case to study how the design of the domain-specific language influences the generalization ability when using the same learning algorithm. We find that encoding the distinction between consonants and vowels results in much better performance, and providing syllable-level information further improves generalization. Program synthesis, thus, provides a way to investigate how access to explicit linguistic information influences what can be learnt from a small number of examples.