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We investigate the extent to which individual attention heads in pretrained transformer language models, such as BERT and RoBERTa, implicitly capture syntactic dependency relations. We employ two methods---taking the maximum attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Phu Mon Htut , Jason Phang , Shikha Bordia , Samuel R. Bowman

The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

Attention mechanisms have recently boosted performance on a range of NLP tasks. Because attention layers explicitly weight input components' representations, it is also often assumed that attention can be used to identify information that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Sofia Serrano , Noah A. Smith

This work proposes an extensive analysis of the Transformer architecture in the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) setting. Focusing on the encoder-decoder attention mechanism, we prove that attention weights systematically make alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Javier Ferrando , Marta R. Costa-jussà

Transformers are widely used in natural language processing, where they consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. This is mainly due to their attention-based architecture, which allows them to model rich linguistic relations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Nikolaos Mylonas , Ioannis Mollas , Grigorios Tsoumakas

Interpretability is an important aspect of the trustworthiness of a model's predictions. Transformer's predictions are widely explained by the attention weights, i.e., a probability distribution generated at its self-attention unit (head).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Rishabh Bhardwaj , Navonil Majumder , Soujanya Poria , Eduard Hovy

Natural languages are believed to be (mildly) context-sensitive. Despite underpinning remarkably capable large language models, transformers are unable to model many context-free language tasks. In an attempt to address this limitation in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Jiaoda Li , Jennifer C. White , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

Transformer architectures show significant promise for natural language processing. Given that a single pretrained model can be fine-tuned to perform well on many different tasks, these networks appear to extract generally useful linguistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Andy Coenen , Emily Reif , Ann Yuan , Been Kim , Adam Pearce , Fernanda Viégas , Martin Wattenberg

This work describes experiments which probe the hidden representations of several BERT-style models for morphological content. The goal is to examine the extent to which discrete linguistic structure, in the form of morphological features…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-08 Daniel Edmiston

Large language models can produce powerful contextual representations that lead to improvements across many NLP tasks. Since these models are typically guided by a sequence of learned self attention mechanisms and may comprise undesired…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-10-14 Benjamin Hoover , Hendrik Strobelt , Sebastian Gehrmann

Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yury Nahshan , Joseph Kampeas , Emir Haleva

Transformers are increasingly dominating multi-modal reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering, achieving state-of-the-art results thanks to their ability to contextualize information using the self-attention and co-attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Hila Chefer , Shir Gur , Lior Wolf

Attention mechanisms have improved the performance of NLP tasks while allowing models to remain explainable. Self-attention is currently widely used, however interpretability is difficult due to the numerous attention distributions. Recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Khalil Mrini , Franck Dernoncourt , Quan Tran , Trung Bui , Walter Chang , Ndapa Nakashole

The success of Transformer language models is widely credited to their dot-product attention mechanism, which interweaves a set of key design principles: mixing information across positions (enabling multi-token interactions),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Huiyin Xue , Nafise Sadat Moosavi , Nikolaos Aletras

The attention mechanism is a core component of the Transformer architecture. Beyond improving performance, attention has been proposed as a mechanism for explainability via attention weights, which are associated with input features (e.g.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Andrés Carvallo , Denis Parra , Peter Brusilovsky , Hernan Valdivieso , Gabriel Rada , Ivania Donoso , Vladimir Araujo

Code quality is and will be a crucial factor while developing new software code, requiring appropriate tools to ensure functional and reliable code. Machine learning techniques are still rarely used for software engineering tools, missing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Nelson Tavares de Sousa , Wilhelm Hasselbring

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in image classification, yet their attention mechanisms often remain opaque and exhibit dense, non-structured behaviors. In this work, we adapt our previously proposed…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Vasileios Arampatzakis , George Pavlidis , Nikolaos Mitianoudis , Nikos Papamarkos

The attention layer in a neural network model provides insights into the model's reasoning behind its prediction, which are usually criticized for being opaque. Recently, seemingly contradictory viewpoints have emerged about the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-26 Shikhar Vashishth , Shyam Upadhyay , Gaurav Singh Tomar , Manaal Faruqui

Token representation strategies within large-scale neural architectures often rely on contextually refined embeddings, yet conventional approaches seldom encode structured relationships explicitly within token interactions. Self-attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-27 James Blades , Frederick Somerfield , William Langley , Susan Everingham , Maurice Witherington

We take a deep look into the behavior of self-attention heads in the transformer architecture. In light of recent work discouraging the use of attention distributions for explaining a model's behavior, we show that attention distributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-15 Damian Pascual , Gino Brunner , Roger Wattenhofer