@inproceedings{mysiak-cyranka-2023-german,
    title = "Is {G}erman secretly a {S}lavic language? What {BERT} probing can tell us about language groups",
    author = "Mysiak, Aleksandra  and
      Cyranka, Jacek",
    editor = "Piskorski, Jakub  and
      Marci{\'n}czuk, Micha{\l}  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Ogrodniczuk, Maciej  and
      Pollak, Senja  and
      P{\v{r}}ib{\'a}{\v{n}}, Pavel  and
      Rybak, Piotr  and
      Steinberger, Josef  and
      Yangarber, Roman",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing 2023 (SlavicNLP 2023)",
    month = may,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Dubrovnik, Croatia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2023.bsnlp-1.11/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.bsnlp-1.11",
    pages = "86--93",
    abstract = "In the light of recent developments in NLP, the problem of understanding and interpreting large language models has gained a lot of urgency. Methods developed to study this area are subject to considerable scrutiny. In this work, we take a closer look at one such method, the structural probe introduced by Hewitt and Manning (2019). We run a series of experiments involving multiple languages, focusing principally on the group of Slavic languages. We show that probing results can be seen as a reflection of linguistic classification, and conclude that multilingual BERT learns facts about languages and their groups."
}