Related papers: Are Transformers a Modern Version of ELIZA? Observ…
The long-distance agreement, evidence for syntactic structure, is increasingly used to assess the syntactic generalization of Neural Language Models. Much work has shown that transformers are capable of high accuracy in varied agreement…
Language is typically modelled with discrete sequences. However, the most successful approaches to language modelling, namely neural networks, are continuous and smooth function approximators. In this work, we show that Transformer-based…
Transformers have supplanted recurrent models in a large number of NLP tasks. However, the differences in their abilities to model different syntactic properties remain largely unknown. Past works suggest that LSTMs generalize very well on…
Transformers underlie almost all state-of-the-art language models in computational linguistics, yet their cognitive adequacy as models of human sentence processing remains disputed. In this work, we use a surprisal-based linking mechanism…
Neural language models learn word representations, or embeddings, that capture rich linguistic and conceptual information. Here we investigate the embeddings learned by neural machine translation models, a recently-developed class of neural…
Neural language models trained with a predictive or masked objective have proven successful at capturing short and long distance syntactic dependencies. Here, we focus on verb argument structure in German, which has the interesting property…
LSTMs trained on next-word prediction can accurately perform linguistic tasks that require tracking long-distance syntactic dependencies. Notably, model accuracy approaches human performance on number agreement tasks (Gulordava et al.,…
Verbs occur in different syntactic environments, or frames. We investigate whether artificial neural networks encode grammatical distinctions necessary for inferring the idiosyncratic frame-selectional properties of verbs. We introduce five…
Some Transformer-based models can perform cross-lingual transfer learning: those models can be trained on a specific task in one language and give relatively good results on the same task in another language, despite having been pre-trained…
Sequential neural networks models are powerful tools in a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The sequential nature of these models raises the questions: to what extent can these models implicitly learn hierarchical…
Transformers have revolutionized Computer Vision (CV) through self-attention mechanisms. However, their complexity makes latent token representations difficult to interpret. We introduce ULTra, a framework for interpreting Transformer…
We present a systematic review of 337 articles evaluating the syntactic abilities of Transformer-based language models (TLMs), reporting on over 3,000 datapoints spanning a wide range of syntactic phenomena, languages, models, and methods.…
There is an ongoing debate on whether neural networks can grasp the quasi-regularities in languages like humans. In a typical quasi-regularity task, English past tense inflections, the neural network model has long been criticized that it…
The Transformer architecture is shown to provide a powerful machine transduction framework for online handwritten gestures corresponding to glyph strokes of natural language sentences. The attention mechanism is successfully used to create…
This paper proposes a transformer over transformer framework, called Transformer$^2$, to perform neural text segmentation. It consists of two components: bottom-level sentence encoders using pre-trained transformers, and an upper-level…
Despite their original goal to jointly learn to align and translate, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, especially Transformer, are often perceived as not learning interpretable word alignments. In this paper, we show that NMT models…
Targeted studies testing knowledge of subject-verb agreement (SVA) indicate that pre-trained language models encode syntactic information. We assert that if models robustly encode subject-verb agreement, they should be able to identify when…
Despite the fact that Transformers perform well in NLP tasks, recent studies suggest that self-attention is theoretically limited in learning even some regular and context-free languages. These findings motivated us to think about their…
We present a methodology that explores how sentence structure is reflected in neural representations of machine translation systems. We demonstrate our model-agnostic approach with the Transformer English-German translation model. We…
Sentence embeddings induced with various transformer architectures encode much semantic and syntactic information in a distributed manner in a one-dimensional array. We investigate whether specific grammatical information can be accessed in…