BERT Shows Garden Path Effects

Tovah Irwin, Kyra Wilson, Alec Marantz


Abstract
Garden path sentences (i.e. “the horse raced past the barn fell”) are sentences that readers initially incorrectly parse, requiring partial or total re-analysis of the sentence structure. Given human difficulty in parsing garden paths, we aim to compare transformer language models’ performance on these sentences. We assess a selection of models from the BERT family which have been fine-tuned on the question-answering task, and evaluate each model’s performance on comprehension questions based on garden path and control sentences. We then further investigate the semantic roles assigned to arguments of verbs in garden path and control sentences by utilizing a probe task to directly assess which semantic role(s) the model assigns. We find that the models have relatively low performance in certain instances of question answering based on garden path contexts, and the model incorrectly assigns semantic roles, aligning for the most part with human performance.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.235
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3220–3232
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.235
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.235
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tovah Irwin, Kyra Wilson, and Alec Marantz. 2023. BERT Shows Garden Path Effects. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3220–3232, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BERT Shows Garden Path Effects (Irwin et al., EACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.235.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.235.mp4