Dependency Transformer Grammars: Integrating Dependency Structures into Transformer Language Models

Yida Zhao, Chao Lou, Kewei Tu


Abstract
Syntactic Transformer language models aim to achieve better generalization through simultaneously modeling syntax trees and sentences. While prior work has been focusing on adding constituency-based structures to Transformers, we introduce Dependency Transformer Grammars (DTGs), a new class of Transformer language model with explicit dependency-based inductive bias. DTGs simulate dependency transition systems with constrained attention patterns by modifying attention masks, incorporate the stack information through relative positional encoding, and augment dependency arc representation with a combination of token embeddings and operation embeddings. When trained on a dataset of sentences annotated with dependency trees, DTGs achieve better generalization while maintaining comparable perplexity with Transformer language model baselines. DTGs also outperform recent constituency-based models, showing that dependency can better guide Transformer language models. Our code is released at https://github.com/zhaoyd1/Dep_Transformer_Grammars.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.84
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1543–1556
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.84
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yida Zhao, Chao Lou, and Kewei Tu. 2024. Dependency Transformer Grammars: Integrating Dependency Structures into Transformer Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1543–1556, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dependency Transformer Grammars: Integrating Dependency Structures into Transformer Language Models (Zhao et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.84.pdf