Who’s on First?: Probing the Learning and Representation Capabilities of Language Models on Deterministic Closed Domains

David Demeter, Doug Downey


Abstract
The capabilities of today’s natural language processing systems are typically evaluated using large datasets of curated questions and answers. While these are critical benchmarks of progress, they also suffer from weakness due to artificial distributions and incomplete knowledge. Artifacts arising from artificial distributions can overstate language model performance, while incomplete knowledge limits fine-grained analysis. In this work, we introduce a complementary benchmarking approach based on SimPlified Language Activity Traces (SPLAT). SPLATs are corpora of language encodings of activity in some closed domain (we study traces from chess and baseball games in this work). SPLAT datasets use naturally-arising distributions, allow the generation of question-answer pairs at scale, and afford complete knowledge in their closed domains. We show that language models of three different architectures can answer questions about world states using only verb-like encodings of activity. Our approach is extensible to new language models and additional question-answering tasks.
Anthology ID:
2021.conll-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
210–222
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.conll-1.16
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.conll-1.16
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Demeter and Doug Downey. 2021. Who’s on First?: Probing the Learning and Representation Capabilities of Language Models on Deterministic Closed Domains. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 210–222, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Who’s on First?: Probing the Learning and Representation Capabilities of Language Models on Deterministic Closed Domains (Demeter & Downey, CoNLL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.conll-1.16.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.conll-1.16.mp4
Code
 daviddemeter/splatbenchmarks
Data
CoQAGLUEdecaNLP