ALL Dolphins Are Intelligent and SOME Are Friendly: Probing BERT for Nouns’ Semantic Properties and their Prototypicality

Marianna Apidianaki, Aina Garí Soler


Abstract
Large scale language models encode rich commonsense knowledge acquired through exposure to massive data during pre-training, but their understanding of entities and their semantic properties is unclear. We probe BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) for the properties of English nouns as expressed by adjectives that do not restrict the reference scope of the noun they modify (as in “red car”), but instead emphasise some inherent aspect (“red strawberry”). We base our study on psycholinguistics datasets that capture the association strength between nouns and their semantic features. We probe BERT using cloze tasks and in a classification setting, and show that the model has marginal knowledge of these features and their prevalence as expressed in these datasets. We discuss factors that make evaluation challenging and impede drawing general conclusions about the models’ knowledge of noun properties. Finally, we show that when tested in a fine-tuning setting addressing entailment, BERT successfully leverages the information needed for reasoning about the meaning of adjective-noun constructions outperforming previous methods.
Anthology ID:
2021.blackboxnlp-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Jasmijn Bastings, Yonatan Belinkov, Emmanuel Dupoux, Mario Giulianelli, Dieuwke Hupkes, Yuval Pinter, Hassan Sajjad
Venue:
BlackboxNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
79–94
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.blackboxnlp-1.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.blackboxnlp-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marianna Apidianaki and Aina Garí Soler. 2021. ALL Dolphins Are Intelligent and SOME Are Friendly: Probing BERT for Nouns’ Semantic Properties and their Prototypicality. In Proceedings of the Fourth BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, pages 79–94, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ALL Dolphins Are Intelligent and SOME Are Friendly: Probing BERT for Nouns’ Semantic Properties and their Prototypicality (Apidianaki & Garí Soler, BlackboxNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.blackboxnlp-1.7.pdf
Code
 ainagari/prototypicality
Data
LAMA