Of Models and Men: Probing Neural Networks for Agreement Attraction with Psycholinguistic Data

Maxim Bazhukov, Ekaterina Voloshina, Sergey Pletenev, Arseny Anisimov, Oleg Serikov, Svetlana Toldova


Abstract
Interpretability studies have played an important role in the field of NLP. They focus on the problems of how models encode information or, for instance, whether linguistic capabilities allow them to prefer grammatical sentences to ungrammatical. Recently, several studies examined whether the models demonstrate patterns similar to humans and whether they are sensitive to the phenomena of interference like humans’ grammaticality judgements, including the phenomenon of agreement attraction.In this paper, we probe BERT and GPT models on the syntactic phenomenon of agreement attraction in Russian using the psycholinguistic data with syncretism. Working on the language with syncretism between some plural and singular forms allows us to differentiate between the effects of the surface form and of the underlying grammatical feature. Thus we can further investigate models’ sensitivity to this phenomenon and examine if the patterns of their behaviour are similar to human patterns. Moreover, we suggest a new way of comparing models’ and humans’ responses via statistical testing. We show that there are some similarities between models’ and humans’ results, while GPT is somewhat more aligned with human responses than BERT. Finally, preliminary results suggest that surface form syncretism influences attraction, perhaps more so than grammatical form syncretism.
Anthology ID:
2024.conll-1.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, FL, USA
Editors:
Libby Barak, Malihe Alikhani
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
280–290
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.conll-1.22
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maxim Bazhukov, Ekaterina Voloshina, Sergey Pletenev, Arseny Anisimov, Oleg Serikov, and Svetlana Toldova. 2024. Of Models and Men: Probing Neural Networks for Agreement Attraction with Psycholinguistic Data. In Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 280–290, Miami, FL, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Of Models and Men: Probing Neural Networks for Agreement Attraction with Psycholinguistic Data (Bazhukov et al., CoNLL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.conll-1.22.pdf