Investigating Syntactic Biases in Multilingual Transformers with RC Attachment Ambiguities in Italian and English

Michael Kamerath, Aniello De Santo


Abstract
This paper investigates whether monolingual and multilingual LLMs show human-like preferences when presented with examples of relative clause attachment ambiguities in Italian and English. We also test whether these preferences can be modulated by lexical factors (the type of verb/noun in the matrix clause) which have been shown to be tied to subtle constraints on syntactic and semantic relations. Our results overall showcase how LLM behavior varies inconsistently across models and languages, and highlight the importance of leveraging subtle syntactic contrasts in exploring these models’ ability to correctly align with human-like preferences.
Anthology ID:
2026.scil-main.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, CA
Editors:
Rob Voigt, Alex Warstadt, Naomi Feldman, Tal Linzen
Venues:
SCiL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
191–218
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.scil-main.19/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Kamerath and Aniello De Santo. 2026. Investigating Syntactic Biases in Multilingual Transformers with RC Attachment Ambiguities in Italian and English. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026, pages 191–218, San Diego, CA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating Syntactic Biases in Multilingual Transformers with RC Attachment Ambiguities in Italian and English (Kamerath & De Santo, SCiL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.scil-main.19.pdf