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Cited by 137Natural Language Processing TechniquesTopic ModelingSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 61 of the 66 references it cites were found in a registry or an index, and 1 are not checked yet.

A Systematic Assessment of Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Models

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Hu, Jennifer, Gauthier, Jon, Qian, Peng, Wilcox, Ethan, Levy, Roger·2020·Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
DOI 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.158
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Abstract

While state-of-the-art neural network models continue to achieve lower perplexity scores on language modeling benchmarks, it remains unknown whether optimizing for broad-coverage predictive performance leads to human-like syntactic knowledge.Furthermore, existing work has not provided a clear picture about the model properties required to produce proper syntactic generalizations.We present a systematic evaluation of the syntactic knowledge of neural language models, testing 20 combinations of model types and data sizes on a set of 34 English-language syntactic test suites.We find substantial differences in syntactic generalization performance by model architecture, with sequential models underperforming other architectures.Factorially manipulating model architecture and training dataset size (1M-40M words), we find that variability in syntactic generalization performance is substantially greater by architecture than by dataset size for the corpora tested in our experiments.Our results also reveal a dissociation between perplexity and syntactic generalization performance.

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Image 1
CC-BY · From the PDF
Figure 1 Average SG score by model class. Asterisks denote off-the-shelf models. Error bars denote bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals of the mean.
Figure 1 Average SG score by model class. Asterisks denote off-the-shelf models. Error bars denote bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals of the mean.CC-BY · From the PDF
Figure 2 Relationship between SG score and perplexity on our held-out BLLIP test set for each model.
Figure 2 Relationship between SG score and perplexity on our held-out BLLIP test set for each model.CC-BY · From the PDF
Figure 3 Main results of our controlled evaluation of model class and dataset size. SG score varies more by model class (left) than by training dataset size (right).
Figure 3 Main results of our controlled evaluation of model class and dataset size. SG score varies more by model class (left) than by training dataset size (right).CC-BY · From the PDF
Figure 4 Controlled evaluation results, split across test suite circuits. Circuit-level differences in SG score vary more by model class (left) than by training dataset size (right).
Figure 4 Controlled evaluation results, split across test suite circuits. Circuit-level differences in SG score vary more by model class (left) than by training dataset size (right).CC-BY · From the PDF
Figure 5 Evaluation results on all models, split across test suite circuits.
Figure 5 Evaluation results on all models, split across test suite circuits.CC-BY · From the PDF
Figure 6 SG score on the pairs of test suites with and without intervening modifiers: Center Embedding, Cleft, MVRR, NPZ-Ambiguous, and NPZ-Object.
Figure 6 SG score on the pairs of test suites with and without intervening modifiers: Center Embedding, Cleft, MVRR, NPZ-Ambiguous, and NPZ-Object.CC-BY · From the PDF

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Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 6

  1. Andrew Carnie. 2012. Syntax: A generative introduc- tion, volume 18. John Wiley & Sons.
  2. Anastasia Giannakidou. 2011. Negative and positive polarity items: Variation, licensing, and composi- tionality. In Semantics: An international hand- book of natural language meaning, volume 3, pages 1660-1712. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  3. Mario Giulianelli, Jack Harding, Florian Mohnert, Dieuwke Hupkes, and Willem Zuidema. 2018. Un- der the hood: Using diagnostic classifiers to in- vestigate and improve how language models track agreement information. In Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and In- terpreting Neural Networks for NLP, pages 240- 248.
  4. Tanya Reinhart. 1981. Definite NP anaphora and c- command domains. Linguistic Inquiry, 12(4):605- 635.
  5. Ethan Wilcox, Jon Gauthier, Jennifer Hu, Peng Qian, and Roger P. Levy. 2020. Evaluating neural net- works as models of human online language process- ing. In Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the Cog- nitive Science Society (CogSci 2020). To appear.
  6. Ethan Wilcox, Peng Qian, Richard Futrell, Miguel Ballestros, and Roger P. Levy. 2019b. Structural su- pervision improves learning of non-local grammati- cal dependencies. In Proceedings of the 2019 Con- ference of the North American Chapter of the Asso- ciation for Computational Linguistics: Human Lan- guage Technologies, pages 3302-3312, Minneapo- lis, Minnesota.

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Metadata

Authors
Hu, J., Gauthier, J., Qian, P., Wilcox, E., & Levy, R.
Affiliations
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
  • Harvard University (US)
ORCID
Venue
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Published
2020
Pages
1725-1744
ISSN
0736-587X (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.158
OpenAlex
W3034510440
Cited by
134
References
66
Citations by year
2026: 11 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 40 · 2022: 26 · 2021: 25 · 2020: 5
FWCI
9.17
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation
  • Open Philanthropy Project
  • National Institutes of Health
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Keywords
syntactic generalization, neural language models, syntactic knowledge, model architecture, training data size, perplexity, English syntax, sequential model, language model evaluation

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