Directly learning from complex examples is generally problematic for humans and machines. Indeed, a better strategy is exposing learners to examples in a reasonable, pedagogically-motivated order. Curriculum Learning (CL) has been proposed to import this strategy when training machine learning models. In this paper, building on Curriculum Learning, we propose a novel, linguistically motivated measure to determine example complexity for organizing examples during learning. Our complexity measure - LRC- is based on length, rarity, and comprehensibility. Our resulting learning model is CL-LRC, that is, CL with LRC. Experiments on downstream tasks show that CL-LRC outperforms existing CL and non-CL methods for training BERT and RoBERTa from scratch. Furthermore, we analyzed different measures, including perplexity, loss, and learning curve of different models pre-trained from scratch, showing that CL-LRC performs better than the state-of-the-art.

Pre-trained Transformers are challenging human performances in many Natural Language Processing tasks. The massive datasets used for pre-training seem to be the key to their success on existing tasks. In this paper, we explore how a range of pre-trained natural language understanding models performs on definitely unseen sentences provided by classification tasks over a DarkNet corpus. Surprisingly, results show that syntactic and lexical neural networks perform on par with pre-trained Transformers even after fine-tuning. Only after what we call extreme domain adaptation, that is, retraining with the masked language model task on all the novel corpus, pre-trained Transformers reach their standard high results. This suggests that huge pre-training corpora may give Transformers unexpected help since they are exposed to many of the possible sentences.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are impressive machines with the ability to memorize, possibly generalized learning examples. We present here a small, focused contribution to the analysis of the interplay between memorization and performance of BERT in downstream tasks. We propose PreCog, a measure for evaluating memorization from pre-training, and we analyze its correlation with the BERT’s performance. Our experiments show that highly memorized examples are better classified, suggesting memorization is an essential key to success for BERT.

Instruction-Following Language Models (IFLMs) are promising and versatile tools for solving many downstream, information-seeking tasks. Given their success, there is an urgent need to have a shared resource to determine whether existing and new IFLMs are prone to produce biased language interactions. In this paper, we propose Prompt Association Test (P-AT): a new resource for testing the presence of social biases in IFLMs. P-AT stems from WEAT (Caliskan et al., 2017) and generalizes the notion of measuring social biases to IFLMs. Basically, we cast WEAT word tests in promptized classification tasks, and we associate a metric - the bias score. Our resource consists of 2310 prompts. We then experimented with several families of IFLMs discovering gender and race biases in all the analyzed models. We expect P-AT to be an important tool for quantifying bias across different dimensions and, therefore, for encouraging the creation of fairer IFLMs before their distortions have consequences in the real world.

The impressive achievements of transformers force NLP researchers to delve into how these models represent the underlying structure of natural language. In this paper, we propose a novel standpoint to investigate the above issue: using typological similarities among languages to observe how their respective monolingual models encode structural information. We aim to layer-wise compare transformers for typologically similar languages to observe whether these similarities emerge for particular layers. For this investigation, we propose to use Centered Kernel Alignment to measure similarity among weight matrices. We found that syntactic typological similarity is consistent with the similarity between the weights in the middle layers, which are the pretrained BERT layers to which syntax encoding is generally attributed. Moreover, we observe that a domain adaptation on semantically equivalent texts enhances this similarity among weight matrices.

Word embeddings are powerful dictionaries, which may easily capture language variations. However, these dictionaries fail to give sense to rare words, which are surprisingly often covered by traditional dictionaries. In this paper, we propose to use definitions retrieved in traditional dictionaries to produce word embeddings for rare words. For this purpose, we introduce two methods: Definition Neural Network (DefiNNet) and Define BERT (DefBERT). In our experiments, DefiNNet and DefBERT significantly outperform state-of-the-art as well as baseline methods devised for producing embeddings of unknown words. In fact, DefiNNet significantly outperforms FastText, which implements a method for the same task-based on n-grams, and DefBERT significantly outperforms the BERT method for OOV words. Then, definitions in traditional dictionaries are useful to build word embeddings for rare words.

Syntactic parsers have dominated natural language understanding for decades. Yet, their syntactic interpretations are losing centrality in downstream tasks due to the success of large-scale textual representation learners. In this paper, we propose KERMIT (Kernel-inspired Encoder with Recursive Mechanism for Interpretable Trees) to embed symbolic syntactic parse trees into artificial neural networks and to visualize how syntax is used in inference. We experimented with KERMIT paired with two state-of-the-art transformer-based universal sentence encoders (BERT and XLNet) and we showed that KERMIT can indeed boost their performance by effectively embedding human-coded universal syntactic representations in neural networks