Neural reality of argument structure constructions

Bai Li, Zining Zhu, Guillaume Thomas, Frank Rudzicz, Yang Xu


Abstract
In lexicalist linguistic theories, argument structure is assumed to be predictable from the meaning of verbs. As a result, the verb is the primary determinant of the meaning of a clause. In contrast, construction grammarians propose that argument structure is encoded in constructions (or form-meaning pairs) that are distinct from verbs. Two decades of psycholinguistic research have produced substantial empirical evidence in favor of the construction view. Here we adapt several psycholinguistic studies to probe for the existence of argument structure constructions (ASCs) in Transformer-based language models (LMs). First, using a sentence sorting experiment, we find that sentences sharing the same construction are closer in embedding space than sentences sharing the same verb. Furthermore, LMs increasingly prefer grouping by construction with more input data, mirroring the behavior of non-native language learners. Second, in a “Jabberwocky” priming-based experiment, we find that LMs associate ASCs with meaning, even in semantically nonsensical sentences. Our work offers the first evidence for ASCs in LMs and highlights the potential to devise novel probing methods grounded in psycholinguistic research.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.512
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7410–7423
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.512
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.512
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bai Li, Zining Zhu, Guillaume Thomas, Frank Rudzicz, and Yang Xu. 2022. Neural reality of argument structure constructions. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7410–7423, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Neural reality of argument structure constructions (Li et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.512.pdf
Software:
 2022.acl-long.512.software.zip
Code
 spoclab-ca/neural-reality-constructions