Probing for targeted syntactic knowledge through grammatical error detection
File(s)2022.conll-1.25.pdf (3.44 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Davis, Christopher
Bryant, Christopher
Caines, Andrew
Rei, Marek
Buttery, Paula
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Targeted studies testing knowledge of subject-verb agreement (SVA) indicate that pre-trained language models encode syntactic information. We assert that if models robustly encode subject-verb agreement, they should be able to identify when agreement is correct and when it is incorrect. To that end, we propose grammatical error detection as a diagnostic probe to evaluate token-level contextual representations for their knowledge of SVA. We evaluate contextual representations at each layer from five pre-trained English language models: BERT, XLNet, GPT-2, RoBERTa and ELECTRA. We leverage public annotated training data from both English second language learners and Wikipedia edits, and report results on manually crafted stimuli for subject-verb agreement. We find that masked language models linearly encode information relevant to the detection of SVA errors, while the autoregressive models perform on par with our baseline. However, we also observe a divergence in performance when probes are trained on different training sets, and when they are evaluated on different syntactic constructions, suggesting the information pertaining to SVA error detection is not robustly encoded.
Date Issued
2022
Date Acceptance
2022-12-07
Citation
Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), 2022, pp.360-373
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Start Page
360
End Page
373
Journal / Book Title
Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Copyright Statement
ACL materials are Copyright © 1963–2024 ACL; other materials are copyrighted by their respective copyright holders. Materials prior to 2016 here are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Permission is granted to make copies for the purposes of teaching and research. Materials published in or after 2016 are licensed on a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
License URL
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.conll-1.25
Source
The 26th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2022-12-07
Finish Date
2022-12-08
Coverage Spatial
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Date Publish Online
2022