Evaluating Transformer Models and Human Behaviors on Chinese Character Naming

Xiaomeng Ma, Lingyu Gao


Abstract
Neural network models have been proposed to explain the grapheme-phoneme mapping process in humans for many alphabet languages. These models not only successfully learned the correspondence of the letter strings and their pronunciation, but also captured human behavior in nonce word naming tasks. How would the neural models perform for a non-alphabet language (e.g., Chinese) unknown character task? How well would the model capture human behavior? In this study, we first collect human speakers’ answers on unknown Character naming tasks and then evaluate a set of transformer models by comparing their performance with human behaviors on an unknown Chinese character naming task. We found that the models and humans behaved very similarly, that they had similar accuracy distribution for each character, and had a substantial overlap in answers. In addition, the models’ answers are highly correlated with humans’ answers. These results suggested that the transformer models can capture humans’ character naming behavior well.1
Anthology ID:
2023.tacl-1.44
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11
Month:
Year:
2023
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
755–770
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.tacl-1.44
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00573
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaomeng Ma and Lingyu Gao. 2023. Evaluating Transformer Models and Human Behaviors on Chinese Character Naming. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 11:755–770.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Transformer Models and Human Behaviors on Chinese Character Naming (Ma & Gao, TACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.tacl-1.44.pdf