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        <title>Understanding or Memorizing? A Case Study of German Definite Articles in Language Models</title>
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    <abstract>Language models perform well on grammatical agreement, but it is unclear whether this reflects rule-based generalization or memorization. We study this question for German definite singular articles, whose forms depend on gender and case. Using GRADIEND, a gradient-based interpretability method, we learn parameter update directions for gender-case specific article transitions. We find that updates learned for a specific gender-case article transition frequently affect unrelated gender-case settings, with substantial overlap among the most affected neurons across settings. These results argue against a strictly rule-based encoding of German definite articles, indicating that models at least partly rely on memorized associations rather than abstract grammatical rules.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Understanding or Memorizing? A Case Study of German Definite Articles in Language Models
%A Drechsel, Jonathan
%A Bytyqi, Erisa
%A Herbold, Steffen
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F drechsel-etal-2026-understanding
%X Language models perform well on grammatical agreement, but it is unclear whether this reflects rule-based generalization or memorization. We study this question for German definite singular articles, whose forms depend on gender and case. Using GRADIEND, a gradient-based interpretability method, we learn parameter update directions for gender-case specific article transitions. We find that updates learned for a specific gender-case article transition frequently affect unrelated gender-case settings, with substantial overlap among the most affected neurons across settings. These results argue against a strictly rule-based encoding of German definite articles, indicating that models at least partly rely on memorized associations rather than abstract grammatical rules.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.436/
%P 9626-9652

Markdown (Informal)

[Understanding or Memorizing? A Case Study of German Definite Articles in Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.436/) (Drechsel et al., ACL 2026)

• Understanding or Memorizing? A Case Study of German Definite Articles in Language Models (Drechsel et al., ACL 2026)

ACL

• Jonathan Drechsel, Erisa Bytyqi, and Steffen Herbold. 2026. Understanding or Memorizing? A Case Study of German Definite Articles in Language Models. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9626–9652, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.