Abstract
We investigate what kind of structural knowledge learned in neural network encoders is transferable to processing natural language. We design artificial languages with structural properties that mimic natural language, pretrain encoders on the data, and see how much performance the encoder exhibits on downstream tasks in natural language.Our experimental results show that pretraining with an artificial language with a nesting dependency structure provides some knowledge transferable to natural language.A follow-up probing analysis indicates that its success in the transfer is related to the amount of encoded contextual information and what is transferred is the knowledge of position-aware context dependence of language.Our results provide insights into how neural network encoders process human languages and the source of cross-lingual transferability of recent multilingual language models.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.acl-long.504
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Editors:
- Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 7302–7315
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.504
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.504
- Cite (ACL):
- Ryokan Ri and Yoshimasa Tsuruoka. 2022. Pretraining with Artificial Language: Studying Transferable Knowledge in Language Models. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7302–7315, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Pretraining with Artificial Language: Studying Transferable Knowledge in Language Models (Ri & Tsuruoka, ACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2022.acl-long.504.pdf
- Data
- Penn Treebank