Investigating Bert's knowledge of language: Five analysis methods with NPIs

Alex Warstadt, Yu Cao, Ioana Grosu, Wei Peng, Hagen Blix, Yining Nie, Anna Alsop, Shikha Bordia, Haokun Liu, Alicia Parrish, Sheng Fu Wang, Jason Phang, Anhad Mohananey, Phu Mon Htut, Paloma Jeretič, Samuel R. Bowman

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    Abstract

    Though state-of-the-art sentence representation models can perform tasks requiring significant knowledge of grammar, it is an open question how best to evaluate their grammatical knowledge. We explore five experimental methods inspired by prior work evaluating pretrained sentence representation models. We use a single linguistic phenomenon, negative polarity item (NPI) licensing in English, as a case study for our experiments. NPIs like any are grammatical only if they appear in a licensing environment like negation (Sue doesn't have any cats vs. *Sue has any cats). This phenomenon is challenging because of the variety of NPI licensing environments that exist. We introduce an artificially generated dataset that manipulates key features of NPI licensing for the experiments. We find that BERT has significant knowledge of these features, but its success varies widely across different experimental methods. We conclude that a variety of methods is necessary to reveal all relevant aspects of a model's grammatical knowledge in a given domain.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Title of host publicationEMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 - 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
    PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
    Pages2877-2887
    Number of pages11
    ISBN (Electronic)9781950737901
    StatePublished - 2019
    Event2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 - Hong Kong, China
    Duration: Nov 3 2019Nov 7 2019

    Publication series

    NameEMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 - 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

    Conference

    Conference2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019
    Country/TerritoryChina
    CityHong Kong
    Period11/3/1911/7/19

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Computational Theory and Mathematics
    • Computer Science Applications
    • Information Systems

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