Related papers: Subject Verb Agreement Error Patterns in Meaningle…

The pre-trained BERT model achieves a remarkable state of the art across a wide range of tasks in natural language processing. For solving the gender bias in gendered pronoun resolution task, I propose a novel neural network model based on…

Models trained to estimate word probabilities in context have become ubiquitous in natural language processing. How do these models use lexical cues in context to inform their word probabilities? To answer this question, we present a case…

Pronouns are important determinants of a text's meaning but difficult to translate. This is because pronoun choice can depend on entities described in previous sentences, and in some languages pronouns may be dropped when the referent is…

Variants of the BERT architecture specialised for producing full-sentence representations often achieve better performance on downstream tasks than sentence embeddings extracted from vanilla BERT. However, there is still little…

Pre-trained language models have achieved huge success on a wide range of NLP tasks. However, contextual representations from pre-trained models contain entangled semantic and syntactic information, and therefore cannot be directly used to…

Spelling irregularities, known now as spelling mistakes, have been found for several centuries. As humans, we are able to understand most of the misspelled words based on their location in the sentence, perceived pronunciation, and context.…

This study investigates how well computational embeddings align with human semantic judgments in the processing of English compound words. We compare static word vectors (GloVe) and contextualized embeddings (BERT) against human ratings of…

Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…

By introducing a small set of additional parameters, a probe learns to solve specific linguistic tasks (e.g., dependency parsing) in a supervised manner using feature representations (e.g., contextualized embeddings). The effectiveness of…

With the broader use of language models (LMs) comes the need to estimate their ability to respond reliably to prompts (e.g., are generated responses likely to be correct?). Uncertainty quantification tools (notions of confidence and…

A central quest of probing is to uncover how pre-trained models encode a linguistic property within their representations. An encoding, however, might be spurious-i.e., the model might not rely on it when making predictions. In this paper,…

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…

We evaluate whether BERT, a widely used neural network for sentence processing, acquires an inductive bias towards forming structural generalizations through pretraining on raw data. We conduct four experiments testing its preference for…

Recent work has explored the syntactic abilities of RNNs using the subject-verb agreement task, which diagnoses sensitivity to sentence structure. RNNs performed this task well in common cases, but faltered in complex sentences (Linzen et…

How do typological properties such as word order and morphological case marking affect the ability of neural sequence models to acquire the syntax of a language? Cross-linguistic comparisons of RNNs' syntactic performance (e.g., on…

The ability to learn from large unlabeled corpora has allowed neural language models to advance the frontier in natural language understanding. However, existing self-supervision techniques operate at the word form level, which serves as a…

In previous work, it has been shown that BERT can adequately align cross-lingual sentences on the word level. Here we investigate whether BERT can also operate as a char-level aligner. The languages examined are English, Fake-English,…

There is a huge performance gap between formal and informal language understanding tasks. The recent pre-trained models that improved the performance of formal language understanding tasks did not achieve a comparable result on informal…

Natural language processing systems often struggle with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms, which do not appear in training data. Blends, such as "innoventor", are one particularly challenging class of OOV, as they are formed by fusing together…

Do state-of-the-art natural language understanding models care about word order - one of the most important characteristics of a sequence? Not always! We found 75% to 90% of the correct predictions of BERT-based classifiers, trained on many…