@inproceedings{carslaw-etal-2026-llm,
    title = "An {LLM} Investigation into Inherent and Structural Case Representation: a {G}erman Case Study",
    author = "Carslaw, Iona  and
      B{\'a}r{\'a}ny, Andr{\'a}s  and
      Kastner, Itamar  and
      Steedman, Mark",
    editor = "Voigt, Rob  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Feldman, Naomi  and
      Linzen, Tal",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, CA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.scil-main.8/",
    pages = "72--89",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-412-5",
    abstract = "A question for computational linguistics has been to what degree do language models encode case information. However, the majority of the work has focused on structural cases (cases which change when the syntactic configuration changes). On the other hand, inherent cases (which are assigned by specific lexical items and do not change if the syntactic configuration changes) have been overlooked. This paper sets out to investigate if German language models distinctly encode inherent dative from structural accusative and nominative. We conducted a linguistic probing investigation where probes are trained on contextual word embeddings of active nominative, accusative, and dative arguments to predict if passivised datives are analysed as a structural nominative. We provide a cased and caseless version of the experiment. Our results suggest that when case information is removed language models can distinguish between inherent dative and structural accusative, regardless of argument position, due to verb information. However, language models cannot distinguish between structural nominative and inherent dative when the dative appears in a position where there is an expected nominative, due to over-relying on surface patterns."
}