@inproceedings{papadimitriou-etal-2021-deep,
title = "Deep Subjecthood: Higher-Order Grammatical Features in Multilingual {BERT}",
author = "Papadimitriou, Isabel and
Chi, Ethan A. and
Futrell, Richard and
Mahowald, Kyle",
editor = "Merlo, Paola and
Tiedemann, Jorg and
Tsarfaty, Reut",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume",
month = apr,
year = "2021",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.215",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.215",
pages = "2522--2532",
abstract = "We investigate how Multilingual BERT (mBERT) encodes grammar by examining how the high-order grammatical feature of morphosyntactic alignment (how different languages define what counts as a {``}subject{''}) is manifested across the embedding spaces of different languages. To understand if and how morphosyntactic alignment affects contextual embedding spaces, we train classifiers to recover the subjecthood of mBERT embeddings in transitive sentences (which do not contain overt information about morphosyntactic alignment) and then evaluate them zero-shot on intransitive sentences (where subjecthood classification depends on alignment), within and across languages. We find that the resulting classifier distributions reflect the morphosyntactic alignment of their training languages. Our results demonstrate that mBERT representations are influenced by high-level grammatical features that are not manifested in any one input sentence, and that this is robust across languages. Further examining the characteristics that our classifiers rely on, we find that features such as passive voice, animacy and case strongly correlate with classification decisions, suggesting that mBERT does not encode subjecthood purely syntactically, but that subjecthood embedding is continuous and dependent on semantic and discourse factors, as is proposed in much of the functional linguistics literature. Together, these results provide insight into how grammatical features manifest in contextual embedding spaces, at a level of abstraction not covered by previous work.",
}
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<abstract>We investigate how Multilingual BERT (mBERT) encodes grammar by examining how the high-order grammatical feature of morphosyntactic alignment (how different languages define what counts as a “subject”) is manifested across the embedding spaces of different languages. To understand if and how morphosyntactic alignment affects contextual embedding spaces, we train classifiers to recover the subjecthood of mBERT embeddings in transitive sentences (which do not contain overt information about morphosyntactic alignment) and then evaluate them zero-shot on intransitive sentences (where subjecthood classification depends on alignment), within and across languages. We find that the resulting classifier distributions reflect the morphosyntactic alignment of their training languages. Our results demonstrate that mBERT representations are influenced by high-level grammatical features that are not manifested in any one input sentence, and that this is robust across languages. Further examining the characteristics that our classifiers rely on, we find that features such as passive voice, animacy and case strongly correlate with classification decisions, suggesting that mBERT does not encode subjecthood purely syntactically, but that subjecthood embedding is continuous and dependent on semantic and discourse factors, as is proposed in much of the functional linguistics literature. Together, these results provide insight into how grammatical features manifest in contextual embedding spaces, at a level of abstraction not covered by previous work.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Deep Subjecthood: Higher-Order Grammatical Features in Multilingual BERT
%A Papadimitriou, Isabel
%A Chi, Ethan A.
%A Futrell, Richard
%A Mahowald, Kyle
%Y Merlo, Paola
%Y Tiedemann, Jorg
%Y Tsarfaty, Reut
%S Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
%D 2021
%8 April
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Online
%F papadimitriou-etal-2021-deep
%X We investigate how Multilingual BERT (mBERT) encodes grammar by examining how the high-order grammatical feature of morphosyntactic alignment (how different languages define what counts as a “subject”) is manifested across the embedding spaces of different languages. To understand if and how morphosyntactic alignment affects contextual embedding spaces, we train classifiers to recover the subjecthood of mBERT embeddings in transitive sentences (which do not contain overt information about morphosyntactic alignment) and then evaluate them zero-shot on intransitive sentences (where subjecthood classification depends on alignment), within and across languages. We find that the resulting classifier distributions reflect the morphosyntactic alignment of their training languages. Our results demonstrate that mBERT representations are influenced by high-level grammatical features that are not manifested in any one input sentence, and that this is robust across languages. Further examining the characteristics that our classifiers rely on, we find that features such as passive voice, animacy and case strongly correlate with classification decisions, suggesting that mBERT does not encode subjecthood purely syntactically, but that subjecthood embedding is continuous and dependent on semantic and discourse factors, as is proposed in much of the functional linguistics literature. Together, these results provide insight into how grammatical features manifest in contextual embedding spaces, at a level of abstraction not covered by previous work.
%R 10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.215
%U https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.215
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.215
%P 2522-2532
Markdown (Informal)
[Deep Subjecthood: Higher-Order Grammatical Features in Multilingual BERT](https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.215) (Papadimitriou et al., EACL 2021)
ACL