Kevin Zhao


2022

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Life after BERT: What do Other Muppets Understand about Language?
Vladislav Lialin | Kevin Zhao | Namrata Shivagunde | Anna Rumshisky
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Existing pre-trained transformer analysis works usually focus only on one or two model families at a time, overlooking the variability of the architecture and pre-training objectives. In our work, we utilize the oLMpics bench- mark and psycholinguistic probing datasets for a diverse set of 29 models including T5, BART, and ALBERT. Additionally, we adapt the oLMpics zero-shot setup for autoregres- sive models and evaluate GPT networks of different sizes. Our findings show that none of these models can resolve compositional questions in a zero-shot fashion, suggesting that this skill is not learnable using existing pre-training objectives. Furthermore, we find that global model decisions such as architecture, directionality, size of the dataset, and pre-training objective are not predictive of a model’s linguistic capabilities.