@inproceedings{zhao-etal-2025-systematic,
title = "A Systematic Study of Compositional Syntactic Transformer Language Models",
author = "Zhao, Yida and
Xve, Hao and
Hu, Xiang and
Tu, Kewei",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.350/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.350",
pages = "7070--7083",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
abstract = "Syntactic language models (SLMs) enhance Transformers by incorporating syntactic biases through the modeling of linearized syntactic parse trees alongside surface sentences. This paper focuses on compositional SLMs that are based on constituency parse trees and contain explicit bottom-up composition of constituent representations. We identify key aspects of design choices in existing compositional SLMs and propose a unified framework encompassing both existing models and novel variants. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of all the variants in our framework across language modeling, syntactic generalization, summarization, and inference efficiency. Based on the experimental results, we make multiple recommendations on the design of compositional SLMs. Our code is released at https://github.com/zhaoyd1/compositional{\_}SLMs."
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<abstract>Syntactic language models (SLMs) enhance Transformers by incorporating syntactic biases through the modeling of linearized syntactic parse trees alongside surface sentences. This paper focuses on compositional SLMs that are based on constituency parse trees and contain explicit bottom-up composition of constituent representations. We identify key aspects of design choices in existing compositional SLMs and propose a unified framework encompassing both existing models and novel variants. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of all the variants in our framework across language modeling, syntactic generalization, summarization, and inference efficiency. Based on the experimental results, we make multiple recommendations on the design of compositional SLMs. Our code is released at https://github.com/zhaoyd1/compositional_SLMs.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T A Systematic Study of Compositional Syntactic Transformer Language Models
%A Zhao, Yida
%A Xve, Hao
%A Hu, Xiang
%A Tu, Kewei
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-251-0
%F zhao-etal-2025-systematic
%X Syntactic language models (SLMs) enhance Transformers by incorporating syntactic biases through the modeling of linearized syntactic parse trees alongside surface sentences. This paper focuses on compositional SLMs that are based on constituency parse trees and contain explicit bottom-up composition of constituent representations. We identify key aspects of design choices in existing compositional SLMs and propose a unified framework encompassing both existing models and novel variants. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of all the variants in our framework across language modeling, syntactic generalization, summarization, and inference efficiency. Based on the experimental results, we make multiple recommendations on the design of compositional SLMs. Our code is released at https://github.com/zhaoyd1/compositional_SLMs.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.350
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.350/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.350
%P 7070-7083
Markdown (Informal)
[A Systematic Study of Compositional Syntactic Transformer Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.350/) (Zhao et al., ACL 2025)
ACL