Probing BERT’s general ability to reason about syntax is no simple endeavour, primarily because of the uncertainty surrounding how large language models represent syntactic structure. Many prior accounts of BERT’s agility as a syntactic tool (Clark et al., 2013; Lau et al., 2014; Marvin and Linzen, 2018; Chowdhury and Zamparelli, 2018; Warstadt et al., 2019, 2020; Hu et al., 2020) have therefore confined themselves to studying very specific linguistic phenomena, and there has still been no definitive answer as to whether BERT “knows” syntax. The advent of perturbed masking (Wu et al., 2020) would then seem to be significant, because this is a parameter-free probing method that directly samples syntactic trees from BERT’s embeddings. These sampled trees outperform a right-branching baseline, thus providing preliminary evidence that BERT’s syntactic competence bests a simple baseline. This baseline is underwhelming, however, and our reappraisal below suggests that this result, too, is inconclusive. We propose RH Probe, an encoder-decoder probing architecture that operates on two probing tasks. We find strong empirical evidence confirming the existence of important syntactic information in BERT, but this information alone appears not to be enough to reproduce syntax in its entirety. Our probe makes crucial use of a conjecture made by Roark and Holling-shead (2008) that a particular lexical annotation that we shall call RH distance is a sufficient encoding of unlabelled binary syntactic trees, and we prove this conjecture.

Does BERT store surface knowledge in its bottom layers, syntactic knowledge in its middle layers, and semantic knowledge in its upper layers? In re-examining Jawahar et al. (2019) and Tenney et al.’s (2019a) probes into the structure of BERT, we have found that the pipeline-like separation that they asserted lacks conclusive empirical support. BERT’s structure is, however, linguistically founded, although perhaps in a way that is more nuanced than can be explained by layers alone. We introduce a novel probe, called GridLoc, through which we can also take into account token positions, training rounds, and random seeds. Using GridLoc, we are able to detect other, stronger regularities that suggest that pseudo-cognitive appeals to layer depth may not be the preferable mode of explanation for BERT’s inner workings.

Evaluation discrepancy and overcorrection phenomenon are two common problems in neural machine translation (NMT). NMT models are generally trained with word-level learning objective, but evaluated by sentence-level metrics. Moreover, the cross-entropy loss function discourages model to generate synonymous predictions and overcorrect them to ground truth words. To address these two drawbacks, we adopt multi-task learning and propose a mixed learning objective (MLO) which combines the strength of word-level and sentence-level evaluation without modifying model structure. At word-level, it calculates semantic similarity between predicted and ground truth words. At sentence-level, it computes probabilistic n-gram matching scores of generated translations. We also combine a loss-sensitive scheduled sampling decoding strategy with MLO to explore its extensibility. Experimental results on IWSLT 2016 German-English and WMT 2019 English-Chinese datasets demonstrate that our methodology can significantly promote translation quality. The ablation study shows that both word-level and sentence-level learning objectives can improve BLEU scores. Furthermore, MLO is consistent with state-of-the-art scheduled sampling methods and can achieve further promotion.