The being too precise reduces accuracy example makes sense to me based on my crude understanding on how these things work.
If you pass in a whole list of states, you're kind of making the vectors for every state light up. If you just say "state" and the text you passed in has an explicit state, than fewer vectors specific to what you're searching for light up. So when it performs the soft max, the correct state is more likely to be selected.
Along the same lines I think his /n vs comma comparison probably comes down to tokenization differences.
If you pass in a whole list of states, you're kind of making the vectors for every state light up. If you just say "state" and the text you passed in has an explicit state, than fewer vectors specific to what you're searching for light up. So when it performs the soft max, the correct state is more likely to be selected.
Along the same lines I think his /n vs comma comparison probably comes down to tokenization differences.