“Chère maison” or “maison chère”? Transformer-based prediction of adjective placement in French

Eleni Metheniti, Tim Van de Cruys, Wissam Kerkri, Juliette Thuilier, Nabil Hathout


Abstract
In French, the placement of the adjective within a noun phrase is subject to variation: it can appear either before or after the noun. We conduct experiments to assess whether transformer-based language models are able to learn the adjective position in noun phrases in French –a position which depends on several linguistic factors. Prior findings have shown that transformer models are insensitive to permutated word order, but in this work, we show that finetuned models are successful at learning and selecting the correct position of the adjective. However, this success can be attributed to the process of finetuning rather than the linguistic knowledge acquired during pretraining, as evidenced by the low accuracy of experiments of classification that make use of pretrained embeddings. Comparing the finetuned models to the choices of native speakers (with a questionnaire), we notice that the models favor context and global syntactic roles, and are weaker with complex structures and fixed expressions.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-eacl.124
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1668–1683
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.124
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-eacl.124
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eleni Metheniti, Tim Van de Cruys, Wissam Kerkri, Juliette Thuilier, and Nabil Hathout. 2023. “Chère maison” or “maison chère”? Transformer-based prediction of adjective placement in French. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023, pages 1668–1683, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Chère maison” or “maison chère”? Transformer-based prediction of adjective placement in French (Metheniti et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.124.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.124.mp4