How Distributed are Distributed Representations? An Observation on the Locality of Syntactic Information in Verb Agreement Tasks

Bingzhi Li; Guillaume Wisniewski; Benoit Crabbé

ACL 2022short4 citations

How Distributed are Distributed Representations? An Observation on the Locality of Syntactic Information in Verb Agreement Tasks

Bingzhi Li, Guillaume Wisniewski, Benoit Crabbé

Abstract

This work addresses the question of the localization of syntactic information encoded in the transformers representations. We tackle this question from two perspectives, considering the object-past participle agreement in French, by identifying, first, in which part of the sentence and, second, in which part of the representation the syntactic information is encoded. The results of our experiments, using probing, causal analysis and feature selection method, show that syntactic information is encoded locally in a way consistent with the French grammar.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{li-etal-2022-distributed,
    title = "How Distributed are Distributed Representations? An Observation on the Locality of Syntactic Information in Verb Agreement Tasks",
    author = "Li, Bingzhi  and
      Wisniewski, Guillaume  and
      Crabb{\'e}, Benoit",
    editor = "Muresan, Smaranda  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Villavicencio, Aline",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-short.54/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-short.54",
    pages = "501--507"
}