Marcell Fekete


2025

pdf bib
Linguistically Grounded Analysis of Language Models using Shapley Head Values
Marcell Fekete | Johannes Bjerva
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025

Understanding how linguistic knowledge is encoded in language models is crucial for improving their generalisation capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the processing of morphosyntactic phenomena, by leveraging a recently proposed method for probing language models via Shapley Head Values (SHVs). Using the English language BLiMP dataset, we test our approach on two widely used models, BERT and RoBERTa, and compare how linguistic constructions such as anaphor agreement and filler-gap dependencies are handled. Through quantitative pruning and qualitative clustering analysis, we demonstrate that attention heads responsible for processing related linguistic phenomena cluster together. Our results show that SHV-based attributions reveal distinct patterns across both models, providing insights into how language models organize and process linguistic information. These findings support the hypothesis that language models learn subnetworks corresponding to linguistic theory, with potential implications for cross-linguistic model analysis and interpretability in Natural Language Processing (NLP).

2024

pdf bib
CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles
Heather Lent | Kushal Tatariya | Raj Dabre | Yiyi Chen | Marcell Fekete | Esther Ploeger | Li Zhou | Ruth-Ann Armstrong | Abee Eijansantos | Catriona Malau | Hans Erik Heje | Ernests Lavrinovics | Diptesh Kanojia | Paul Belony | Marcel Bollmann | Loïc Grobol | Miryam de Lhoneux | Daniel Hershcovich | Michel DeGraff | Anders Søgaard | Johannes Bjerva
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 12

Creoles represent an under-explored and marginalized group of languages, with few available resources for NLP research. While the genealogical ties between Creoles and a number of highly resourced languages imply a significant potential for transfer learning, this potential is hampered due to this lack of annotated data. In this work we present CreoleVal, a collection of benchmark datasets spanning 8 different NLP tasks, covering up to 28 Creole languages; it is an aggregate of novel development datasets for reading comprehension relation classification, and machine translation for Creoles, in addition to a practical gateway to a handful of preexisting benchmarks. For each benchmark, we conduct baseline experiments in a zero-shot setting in order to further ascertain the capabilities and limitations of transfer learning for Creoles. Ultimately, we see CreoleVal as an opportunity to empower research on Creoles in NLP and computational linguistics, and in general, a step towards more equitable language technology around the globe.