Jackie CK Cheung


2023

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Systematic Generalization by Finetuning? Analyzing Pretrained Language Models Using Constituency Tests
Aishik Chakraborty | Jackie CK Cheung | Timothy J. O’Donnell
Proceedings of the 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

Constituents are groups of words that behave as a syntactic unit. Many linguistic phenomena (e.g., question formation, diathesis alternations) require the manipulation and rearrangement of constituents in a sentence. In this paper, we investigate how different finetuning setups affect the ability of pretrained sequence-to-sequence language models such as BART and T5 to replicate constituency tests — transformations that involve manipulating constituents in a sentence. We design multiple evaluation settings by varying the combinations of constituency tests and sentence types that a model is exposed to during finetuning. We show that models can replicate a linguistic transformation on a specific type of sentence that they saw during finetuning, but performance degrades substantially in other settings, showing a lack of systematic generalization. These results suggest that models often learn to manipulate sentences at a surface level unrelated to the constituent-level syntactic structure, for example by copying the first word of a sentence. These results may partially explain the brittleness of pretrained language models in downstream tasks.

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McGill BabyLM Shared Task Submission: The Effects of Data Formatting and Structural Biases
Ziling Cheng | Rahul Aralikatte | Ian Porada | Cesare Spinoso-Di Piano | Jackie CK Cheung
Proceedings of the BabyLM Challenge at the 27th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning