Probing Word and Sentence Embeddings for Long-distance Dependencies Effects in French and English

Paola Merlo


Abstract
The recent wide-spread and strong interest in RNNs has spurred detailed investigations of the distributed representations they generate and specifically if they exhibit properties similar to those characterising human languages. Results are at present inconclusive. In this paper, we extend previous work on long-distance dependencies in three ways. We manipulate word embeddings to translate them in a space that is attuned to the linguistic properties under study. We extend the work to sentence embeddings and to new languages. We confirm previous negative results: word embeddings and sentence embeddings do not unequivocally encode fine-grained linguistic properties of long-distance dependencies.
Anthology ID:
W19-4817
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 ACL Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Tal Linzen, Grzegorz Chrupała, Yonatan Belinkov, Dieuwke Hupkes
Venue:
BlackboxNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
158–172
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4817
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4817
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paola Merlo. 2019. Probing Word and Sentence Embeddings for Long-distance Dependencies Effects in French and English. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACL Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, pages 158–172, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Probing Word and Sentence Embeddings for Long-distance Dependencies Effects in French and English (Merlo, BlackboxNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4817.pdf