Related papers: Emergent Semantic Role Understanding in Language M…
The ability of algorithms to evolve or learn (compositional) communication protocols has traditionally been studied in the language evolution literature through the use of emergent communication tasks. Here we scale up this research by…
The Natural Language Processing task of determining "Who did what to whom" is called Semantic Role Labeling. For English, recent methods based on Transformer models have allowed for major improvements in this task over the previous state of…
Distributed representations of words have been shown to capture lexical semantics, as demonstrated by their effectiveness in word similarity and analogical relation tasks. But, these tasks only evaluate lexical semantics indirectly. In this…
Large language models (LLMs) can perform remarkably complex tasks, yet the fine-grained details of how these capabilities emerge during pretraining remain poorly understood. Scaling laws on validation loss tell us how much a model improves…
Pretrained language models have achieved a new state of the art on many NLP tasks, but there are still many open questions about how and why they work so well. We investigate the contextualization of words in BERT. We quantify the amount of…
Deep pre-trained contextualized encoders like BERT (Delvin et al., 2019) demonstrate remarkable performance on a range of downstream tasks. A recent line of research in probing investigates the linguistic knowledge implicitly learned by…
Fine-tuning pre-trained contextualized embedding models has become an integral part of the NLP pipeline. At the same time, probing has emerged as a way to investigate the linguistic knowledge captured by pre-trained models. Very little is,…
While large language models like BERT demonstrate strong empirical performance on semantic tasks, whether this reflects true conceptual competence or surface-level statistical association remains unclear. I investigate whether BERT encodes…
How is knowledge of position-role mappings in natural language learned? We explore this question in a computational setting, testing whether a variety of well-performing pertained language models (BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT) exhibit…
Understanding the decision-making processes of neural networks is a central goal of mechanistic interpretability. In the context of Large Language Models (LLMs), this involves uncovering the underlying mechanisms and identifying the roles…
Although neural models have achieved impressive results on several NLP benchmarks, little is understood about the mechanisms they use to perform language tasks. Thus, much recent attention has been devoted to analyzing the sentence…
Understanding the semantic relationships between terms is a fundamental task in natural language processing applications. While structured resources that can express those relationships in a formal way, such as ontologies, are still scarce,…
We investigate whether large language models encode latent knowledge of frame semantics, focusing on frame identification, a core challenge in frame semantic parsing that involves selecting the appropriate semantic frame for a target word…
The success of pretrained contextual encoders, such as ELMo and BERT, has brought a great deal of interest in what these models learn: do they, without explicit supervision, learn to encode meaningful notions of linguistic structure? If so,…
Recent work has demonstrated that semantics specified by pretraining data influence how representations of different concepts are organized in a large language model (LLM). However, given the open-ended nature of LLMs, e.g., their ability…
Humans' experience of the world is profoundly multimodal from the beginning, so why do existing state-of-the-art language models only use text as a modality to learn and represent semantic meaning? In this paper we review the literature on…
The emergence of communication systems between agents which learn to play referential signalling games with realistic images has attracted a lot of attention recently. The majority of work has focused on using fixed, pretrained image…
Language models retain a significant amount of world knowledge from their pre-training stage. This allows knowledgeable models to be applied to knowledge-intensive tasks prevalent in information retrieval, such as ranking or question…
We study a fundamental problem in the evaluation of large language models that we call training on the test task. Unlike wrongful practices like training on the test data, leakage, or data contamination, training on the test task is not a…
Despite the recent successes of large, pretrained neural language models (LLMs), comparatively little is known about the representations of linguistic structure they learn during pretraining, which can lead to unexpected behaviors in…