SLING: Sino Linguistic Evaluation of Large Language Models

Yixiao Song, Kalpesh Krishna, Rajesh Bhatt, Mohit Iyyer


Abstract
To understand what kinds of linguistic knowledge are encoded by pretrained Chinese language models (LMs), we introduce the benchmark of Sino LINGuistics (SLING), which consists of 38K minimal sentence pairs in Mandarin Chinese grouped into 9 high-level linguistic phenomena. Each pair demonstrates the acceptability contrast of a specific syntactic or semantic phenomenon (e.g., The keys are lost vs. The keys is lost), and an LM should assign lower perplexity to the acceptable sentence. In contrast to the CLiMP dataset (Xiang et al., 2021), which also contains Chinese minimal pairs and was created by translating the vocabulary of the English BLiMP dataset, the minimal pairs in SLING are derived primarily by applying syntactic and lexical transformations to naturally-occurring, linguist-annotated sentences from the Chinese Treebank 9.0, thus addressing severe issues in CLiMP’s data generation process. We test 18 publicly available pretrained monolingual (e.g., BERT-base-zh, CPM) and multi-lingual (e.g., mT5, XLM) language models on SLING. Our experiments show that the average accuracy for LMs is far below human performance (69.7% vs. 97.1%), while BERT-base-zh achieves the highest accuracy (84.8%) of all tested LMs, even much larger ones. Additionally, we find that most LMs have a strong gender and number (singular/plural) bias, and they perform better on local phenomena than hierarchical ones.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.305
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4606–4634
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.305
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.305
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yixiao Song, Kalpesh Krishna, Rajesh Bhatt, and Mohit Iyyer. 2022. SLING: Sino Linguistic Evaluation of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4606–4634, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SLING: Sino Linguistic Evaluation of Large Language Models (Song et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.305.pdf