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# R. Thomas McCoy

2 paper cards in Mova's library · 2019–2026

R. Thomas McCoy wrote 2 of the papers Mova reads, in 2019–2026; often with Claire Hobbs, [Ellie Pavlick](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/ellie-pavlick/), [Tal Linzen](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/tal-linzen/).

[OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/A5003082850) · [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9383-4079) · [**h-index 15**](https://openalex.org/authors/A5003082850) · [1468 citations](https://openalex.org/authors/A5003082850) · [83 works](https://openalex.org/works?filter=author.id:A5003082850) — openalex, 2026-10-18

The profile is the library's match of the name; two people with one name are not always told apart.

Elsewhere: [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=search_authors&mauthors=R.+Thomas+McCoy) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=R.+Thomas+McCoy) · [dblp](https://dblp.org/search?q=R.+Thomas+McCoy) · [ACL Anthology](https://aclanthology.org/search/?q=R.+Thomas+McCoy) · [ORCID](https://orcid.org/orcid-search/search?searchQuery=R.+Thomas+McCoy)

## Papers

1. **[Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hobbs-2026-collocational-bootstrapping-hypothesis-about-learning/)** *(2026)* The paper asks how statistical regularities in linguistic input could help a learner acquire syntax. It proposes "collocational bootstrapping": which words tend to occur together hints at which words are syntactically related. The test case is English subject-verb number agreement. In most natural sentences the…
2. **[Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/mccoy-2019-right-wrong-reasons-diagnosing-syntactic/)** *(2019)* Statistical NLI models can score high on MNLI while relying on three syntactic shortcuts: lexical overlap (a premise entails any hypothesis built from its words), the subsequence heuristic (it entails any contiguous word span), and the constituent heuristic (it entails any complete subtree).

## Co-authors (3)

- Claire Hobbs
- [Ellie Pavlick](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/ellie-pavlick/)
- [Tal Linzen](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/tal-linzen/)
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