English

minicons: Enabling Flexible Behavioral and Representational Analyses of Transformer Language Models

Computation and Language 2022-03-25 v1

Abstract

We present minicons, an open source library that provides a standard API for researchers interested in conducting behavioral and representational analyses of transformer-based language models (LMs). Specifically, minicons enables researchers to apply analysis methods at two levels: (1) at the prediction level -- by providing functions to efficiently extract word/sentence level probabilities; and (2) at the representational level -- by also facilitating efficient extraction of word/phrase level vectors from one or more layers. In this paper, we describe the library and apply it to two motivating case studies: One focusing on the learning dynamics of the BERT architecture on relative grammatical judgments, and the other on benchmarking 23 different LMs on zero-shot abductive reasoning. minicons is available at https://github.com/kanishkamisra/minicons

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.13112,
  title  = {minicons: Enabling Flexible Behavioral and Representational Analyses of Transformer Language Models},
  author = {Kanishka Misra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.13112},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

To be submitted; Code to reproduce experiments can be found on https://github.com/kanishkamisra/minicons-experiments