@inproceedings{graichen-etal-2026-grammar,
title = "The Grammar of Transformers: A Systematic Review of Interpretability Research on Syntactic Knowledge in Language Models",
author = "Graichen, Nora and
de-Dios-Flores, Iria and
Boleda, Gemma",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1679/",
pages = "38199--38240",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "We present a systematic review of 337 articles evaluating the syntactic abilities of Transformer-based language models (TLMs), reporting on over 3,000 datapoints spanning a wide range of syntactic phenomena, languages, models, and methods. We take the data to collectively show that TLMs encode a non-trivial amount of syntactic knowledge. Behavioral evidence shows strong performance on formal syntactic phenomena, but weaker and more variable performance on phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface. Performance is also consistently lower for languages with less digital support. Probing and mechanistic studies further support the presence of syntactic knowledge in TLMs. Yet, because most work remains observational and methodologically heterogeneous, insight into the detailed computational mechanisms underlying syntactic processing remains limited. At the same time, the literature remains heavily concentrated on English and BERT-like models. We discuss the implications of our results and provide recommendations for future research."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="graichen-etal-2026-grammar">
<titleInfo>
<title>The Grammar of Transformers: A Systematic Review of Interpretability Research on Syntactic Knowledge in Language Models</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Nora</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Graichen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Iria</namePart>
<namePart type="family">de-Dios-Flores</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Gemma</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Boleda</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hung-Yi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lee</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sunipa</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Dev</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jessy</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Desmond</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Elliott</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-459-0</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>We present a systematic review of 337 articles evaluating the syntactic abilities of Transformer-based language models (TLMs), reporting on over 3,000 datapoints spanning a wide range of syntactic phenomena, languages, models, and methods. We take the data to collectively show that TLMs encode a non-trivial amount of syntactic knowledge. Behavioral evidence shows strong performance on formal syntactic phenomena, but weaker and more variable performance on phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface. Performance is also consistently lower for languages with less digital support. Probing and mechanistic studies further support the presence of syntactic knowledge in TLMs. Yet, because most work remains observational and methodologically heterogeneous, insight into the detailed computational mechanisms underlying syntactic processing remains limited. At the same time, the literature remains heavily concentrated on English and BERT-like models. We discuss the implications of our results and provide recommendations for future research.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">graichen-etal-2026-grammar</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1679/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-10</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>38199</start>
<end>38240</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T The Grammar of Transformers: A Systematic Review of Interpretability Research on Syntactic Knowledge in Language Models
%A Graichen, Nora
%A de-Dios-Flores, Iria
%A Boleda, Gemma
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F graichen-etal-2026-grammar
%X We present a systematic review of 337 articles evaluating the syntactic abilities of Transformer-based language models (TLMs), reporting on over 3,000 datapoints spanning a wide range of syntactic phenomena, languages, models, and methods. We take the data to collectively show that TLMs encode a non-trivial amount of syntactic knowledge. Behavioral evidence shows strong performance on formal syntactic phenomena, but weaker and more variable performance on phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface. Performance is also consistently lower for languages with less digital support. Probing and mechanistic studies further support the presence of syntactic knowledge in TLMs. Yet, because most work remains observational and methodologically heterogeneous, insight into the detailed computational mechanisms underlying syntactic processing remains limited. At the same time, the literature remains heavily concentrated on English and BERT-like models. We discuss the implications of our results and provide recommendations for future research.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1679/
%P 38199-38240
Markdown (Informal)
[The Grammar of Transformers: A Systematic Review of Interpretability Research on Syntactic Knowledge in Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1679/) (Graichen et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL