Picking BERT’s Brain: Probing for Linguistic Dependencies in Contextualized Embeddings Using Representational Similarity Analysis

Michael Lepori, R. Thomas McCoy


Abstract
As the name implies, contextualized representations of language are typically motivated by their ability to encode context. Which aspects of context are captured by such representations? We introduce an approach to address this question using Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA). As case studies, we investigate the degree to which a verb embedding encodes the verb’s subject, a pronoun embedding encodes the pronoun’s antecedent, and a full-sentence representation encodes the sentence’s head word (as determined by a dependency parse). In all cases, we show that BERT’s contextualized embeddings reflect the linguistic dependency being studied, and that BERT encodes these dependencies to a greater degree than it encodes less linguistically-salient controls. These results demonstrate the ability of our approach to adjudicate between hypotheses about which aspects of context are encoded in representations of language.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.325
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3637–3651
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.325
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.325
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Lepori and R. Thomas McCoy. 2020. Picking BERT’s Brain: Probing for Linguistic Dependencies in Contextualized Embeddings Using Representational Similarity Analysis. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3637–3651, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Picking BERT’s Brain: Probing for Linguistic Dependencies in Contextualized Embeddings Using Representational Similarity Analysis (Lepori & McCoy, COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.325.pdf
Code
 mlepori1/Picking_BERTs_Brain