Abstract
We examine a methodology using neural language models (LMs) for analyzing the word order of language. This LM-based method has the potential to overcome the difficulties existing methods face, such as the propagation of preprocessor errors in count-based methods. In this study, we explore whether the LM-based method is valid for analyzing the word order. As a case study, this study focuses on Japanese due to its complex and flexible word order. To validate the LM-based method, we test (i) parallels between LMs and human word order preference, and (ii) consistency of the results obtained using the LM-based method with previous linguistic studies. Through our experiments, we tentatively conclude that LMs display sufficient word order knowledge for usage as an analysis tool. Finally, using the LM-based method, we demonstrate the relationship between the canonical word order and topicalization, which had yet to be analyzed by large-scale experiments.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.47
- Original:
- 2020.acl-main.47v1
- Version 2:
- 2020.acl-main.47v2
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 488–504
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2020.acl-main.47/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.47
- Cite (ACL):
- Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Takumi Ito, Jun Suzuki, and Kentaro Inui. 2020. Language Models as an Alternative Evaluator of Word Order Hypotheses: A Case Study in Japanese. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 488–504, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Language Models as an Alternative Evaluator of Word Order Hypotheses: A Case Study in Japanese (Kuribayashi et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2020.acl-main.47.pdf
- Code
- kuribayashi4/LM_as_Word_Order_Evaluator