Topicalization in Language Models: A Case Study on Japanese
Riki Fujihara, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Kaori Abe, Ryoko Tokuhisa, Kentaro Inui
Abstract
Humans use different wordings depending on the context to facilitate efficient communication. For example, instead of completely new information, information related to the preceding context is typically placed at the sentence-initial position. In this study, we analyze whether neural language models (LMs) can capture such discourse-level preferences in text generation. Specifically, we focus on a particular aspect of discourse, namely the topic-comment structure. To analyze the linguistic knowledge of LMs separately, we chose the Japanese language, a topic-prominent language, for designing probing tasks, and we created human topicalization judgment data by crowdsourcing. Our experimental results suggest that LMs have different generalizations from humans; LMs exhibited less context-dependent behaviors toward topicalization judgment. These results highlight the need for the additional inductive biases to guide LMs to achieve successful discourse-level generalization.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{fujihara-etal-2022-topicalization,
title = "Topicalization in Language Models: A Case Study on {J}apanese",
author = "Fujihara, Riki and
Kuribayashi, Tatsuki and
Abe, Kaori and
Tokuhisa, Ryoko and
Inui, Kentaro",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Huang, Chu-Ren and
Kim, Hansaem and
Pustejovsky, James and
Wanner, Leo and
Choi, Key-Sun and
Ryu, Pum-Mo and
Chen, Hsin-Hsi and
Donatelli, Lucia and
Ji, Heng and
Kurohashi, Sadao and
Paggio, Patrizia and
Xue, Nianwen and
Kim, Seokhwan and
Hahm, Younggyun and
He, Zhong and
Lee, Tony Kyungil and
Santus, Enrico and
Bond, Francis and
Na, Seung-Hoon",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = oct,
year = "2022",
address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.71/",
pages = "851--862"
}