Conditional probing: measuring usable information beyond a baseline
John Hewitt, Kawin Ethayarajh, Percy Liang, Christopher Manning
Abstract
Probing experiments investigate the extent to which neural representations make properties—like part-of-speech—predictable. One suggests that a representation encodes a property if probing that representation produces higher accuracy than probing a baseline representation like non-contextual word embeddings. Instead of using baselines as a point of comparison, we’re interested in measuring information that is contained in the representation but not in the baseline. For example, current methods can detect when a representation is more useful than the word identity (a baseline) for predicting part-of-speech; however, they cannot detect when the representation is predictive of just the aspects of part-of-speech not explainable by the word identity. In this work, we extend a theory of usable information called V-information and propose conditional probing, which explicitly conditions on the information in the baseline. In a case study, we find that after conditioning on non-contextual word embeddings, properties like part-of-speech are accessible at deeper layers of a network than previously thought.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.122
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1626–1639
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.122
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.122
- Cite (ACL):
- John Hewitt, Kawin Ethayarajh, Percy Liang, and Christopher Manning. 2021. Conditional probing: measuring usable information beyond a baseline. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1626–1639, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Conditional probing: measuring usable information beyond a baseline (Hewitt et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.emnlp-main.122.pdf
- Code
- john-hewitt/conditional-probing
- Data
- GLUE, SST